Searching for Science!

In research and development, either at universities or other research institutes, a number of trends can be distinguished that have changed the information needs of researchers considerably over the past few years. Certainly not a complete list, but a few important trends are:

• Increased multidisciplinarity
• Need for primary data
• Wealth of  free  available  information  on the Web
• (International) cooperations
• Importance of Open Access/Source Information and Software

In this course we will chart some of the web resources outside the scope of the classical library resources as catalogues, bibliographies or portals. The library spends millions of dollars on these valuable quality resources each year, so use them wisely, frquently and appropriately.

However, with the expanding information needs of scientists, the library is no longer the only place to satisfy these quests for information. Web resources are becoming increasingly important. Sufficient web search skills will help scientist to conquer this vast information space. Apart from good (re)search skills, some basic knowledge of scientific resources available on the Web is a prerequisite for good information collection. So a number of Web resources should be discussed as well.   

In this course we cover the following issues (assuming some basic knowledge on internet and WWW):

Internet Search Engines

What are the most important general all purpose Internet search engines, what are the latest trends.  How can we search  these search engines effectively.

Web Directories

What are the most important general directories and what are the latest trends.

Deep Web

What is the Deep, Hidden or Invisble Web and how does it affect my searches?  

We focus the remainder of this morning on a selection of the following topics.

Scientific Search engines

Scientific Directories

Books Search

Open Access Journals

Repositories

Course materials

Bibliographies

Theses

Databases

Science News

Tags or Bookmarks

Wiki's

Blogs

Social Networks

Digg for science

More information

Gerritsma, W. (2005-) WoW!: Wouter on the Web http://www.wowter.nl/blog

Gerritsma, W. (2005-) WoW!ter http://wowter.pbwiki.com/ (in Dutch)

Jensen, R. (2007-) Scholars Guide to the WWW http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Erjensen/

Zillman M.P. (2004) Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources http://whitepapers.VirtualPrivateLibrary.net/Scholar.pdf

WG 20071008