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Here we give a few examples of different information sources, how they are built up and what you can expect of them. The types of information sources that we will bring up are: No matter what type of material you are looking for it is good to have a thorough understanding of how some services of every type work, so that you can use all the search possibilities available. Read the information of how a search works and can be varied, try the different ways of searching and compare with other similar services. In library catalogues there is information about the collections the library owns. Apart from helping us find books, articles and other materials, it also informs us of when and where the material was published. In a library catalogue you can often see if the material you are looking for is out or kept in storage and in that case it can be reserved.
A library catalogue often gives information about: Example LIBRIS http://www.libris.kb.se/ including a help page http://www.libris.kb.se/help/allman.hjalp.html Libris is the collected library catalogue primarily for the Swedish Research and Special Library Collection. There are more than four million references to their material. Out of the Swedish materials, there is practically everything that has been published since 1866 and onwards but there are also references to Swedish 1600 and 1700 publications. Example LOVISA http://lovisa.lub.lu.se/ offers integrated help pages. The Lund University Library Catalogue is the local library catalogue and contains only information about the library’s collections. The electronic catalogue contains only information about materials from 1958 onwards, with certain gaps. If you are looking for older material, then use the card catalogue in the individual libraries. The search engines contain automatically indexed material that is added to a database in which the user then searches. This database can contain hundreds of millions of pages, which means that a search must be as precise as possible to avoid the search results becoming too big. Example Google http://www.google.com/ with the help pages http://www.google.com/intl/sv/help.html Google’s database contains around 2.5 million webpages. A system is used to rank the pages according to relevance, so that a page with many hits ends up higher up on the hit list. A page where the words you are looking for are close to each other in the text is also ranked higher than a page where the words are included but are further apart. If a page is not available after it has been stored in the database because it has been removed, changed address or similar, you can look at the stored cached version. A fun function is the “I’m feeling lucky” button, which will get you directly to the page that is first on the hit list. Example AltaVista http://www.altavista.com/ with a help page http://www.altavista.com/sites/help/search/help_adv Alta Vista was the first to build databases with full text versions of web pages and offers many possibilities for precise searches. Example Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com/ with a help page http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch Yahoo! is a partly structured catalogue where you can scroll up and down the subject sections. The webpages you can reach from here contain subjects that are decided upon by humans. Yahoo! is not an entirely machine indexed search service, but is also built on intellectual work, however, it lacks quality and good selection criteria. Free text search is carried out partly by the Yahoo! database but also by Google’s database. Subject portals are sometimes called Subject Based Information Gateways and are built using a traditional library method of describing the resources on the internet with explanations that often look like simplified posts on library catalogues or a card in a card catalogue. In such a post there is information on the web page author, title, subject and often a description about the authors thoughts on the targeted group the portal is aimed towards. Often, this kind of service describes web pages within a few subjects and often for a specific audience. Subject specialists carry out selection quality control and description manually.. Example SOSIG http://www.sosig.ac.uk/ with a help page http://www.sosig.ac.uk/help/ The Social Science Information Gateway, (SOSIG), consists of subject divided descriptions of quality Internet resources on the subjects of social science, economics and law and are especially useful at university/technical college level. SOSIG contains a network of similar services with other subject groups, UK Resource Discovery Network (RDN). Example Länkskafferiet http://lankskafferiet.skolutveckling.se/ with a help page http://lankskafferiet.skolutveckling.se/information/sa_har_soker_du.html Länkskafferiet consists of subject divided descriptions of websites on the Internet. All websites that are described in the databases are edited and selected to be of help to Swedish students, especially those between the ages of ten and fifteen, in their schoolwork but can also be useful to others. The Swedish School Data Network offers this service. Example Renardus http://www.renardus.org/ with the help page http://www.renardus.org/cgi-bin/egwcgi/11171/screen.tcl/name=Help&lang=eng&service=ren Renardus consists of several subject portals you can search simultaneously that contain academic information from different European countries. In this way, it is easier for you to find relevant quality material that has been assessed by Internet resources around Europe. There are a number of databases within specific subject areas. Those that are available to Lund University are collected in ELIN@Lund htttp://elin.lub.lu.se/, which also provides instructions on how to search many of them. Example ELIN@Lund http://elin.lub.lu.se/ Electronic Library Information Navigation (ELIN@Lund) is the Lund University library’s collection of information about electronic documents that the University subscribes to. In the database, you can search for journal articles and find many immediately available in full text and others that are contained in databases and journals. Example Scripta Academica Lundensis http://www.lub.lu.se/dissdb/ Scripta Academica Lundensis contains information about doctors’ theses from 1996 and onwards at Lund University. Some of these are available in full text. |
- Examples
