New User Tutorial - A site designed to teach new users basic computer skills such as using the mouse and the scrollbar, typing commands into dialog boxes, double clicking, and using the File menu and other basic Windows functions. Navigation from page to page is easy for people just learning computer skills.
Videos - 24/7 Library Help (UCF Library) watch these brief videos and get step-by-step instructions on how to find books, journal articles, and other resources for Business/ Cornerstone/ Capstone, Criminal Justice, General Research, Nursing, and Psychology
Library Instruction Tutorials (LIRT) includes general tutorials on how to do research and search the Internet, subject-specific guides, and some sites that give advice on how to design a tutorial.
Ideas for Research Topics - If you're having difficulty coming up with a topic for your research paper, the resources listed here may spark some ideas.
Five Criteria for Evaluating Web Pages provides a table describing how to assess accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency and coverage. (College & Research Libraries News, July/August 1998)
Evaluating the Quality of Information on the Internet offers a checklist for discovering quality in Web-based information, commentary on technical trickery, examples of bogus Web sites, and resources for learning more.
Evaluating Sources briefly describes what is meant by relevance, credibility, reliability, objectivity, and currency. The Composition Program at George Mason University also provides webpages about earlier steps in the research process, starting with Research in Action.
Evaluate Web Pages includes checklists for evaluating the following types of web sites: advocacy, business/marketing, news, informational, and personal.
RDN Virtual Training Suite is "a set of free online tutorials designed to help students, lecturers and researchers improve their Internet information literacy and IT skills."
T is for Thinking - The ICYouSee Guide to Critical Thinking About What You See on the Web
Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria & Tools provides a list of resources, including some of the above web sites.
Evaluation of Resources provides a list of resources, including some of the above web sites.
Validity Wizard is
an experimental resource designed to aid you in assessing the validity of
information you will find on the World Wide Web.
Samples of web pages some librarians have used to teach critical evaluation of information:
Classics from the Annals of Improbable Research includes Taxonomy of Barney, Feline Reactions to Bearded Men, Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake, etc.
Internet Evaluation: Hoax Sites? - not updated; some broken links
Questionable Web Sites - not updated; some broken links
Google is usually not the best tool for academic-level research, but it does have many features that make it a useful part of a researcher's toolbox. Principal concerns about using Google for academic research are: Quality Control, Results Access, and Search Control. It can be difficult to evaluate the quality of the information retrieved in a Google search (even when using Google Scholar) because on the Internet anyone can pretend to be an expert. Although many articles can be identified using Google, access to the full text of those articles almost always requires payment; faculty and students often are not aware that their library may already have paid to provide full text access for them through a database. Some academic databases provide many more features for fine-tuning a search to retrieve more relevant results. The UCF Library subscribes to several hundred databases to support the research needs of faculty, staff, and students.
Google provides features for searching images, discussion groups, news headlines, shopping, mail-order catalogs, local searches, etc.
Google Scholar "enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. You should be able to see the full text of articles from open access journals and preprint repositories, as well as preprints on the web. For others, you should be able to get access to the full text if you or an institution you belong to has a subscription for the content." NOTE: Users should save their Scholar Preferences to include their affiliation with UCF, which activates the SFX@UCF link in Google for remote access to UCF's subscription databases and the library catalog.
Google Uncle Sam restricts the search to government and military web resources.
Google Books searches the full text of books. If this book is a library book, you can find a local library that has it by clicking "Find it in a Library" and entering your zip code.
Basics
of Google Search and
Advanced Search
explain such things as
retrieving synonyms by prefacing a term with a tilde ~
excluding results by prefacing a term with a
minus sign
numrange search by specifying two numbers,
separated by two periods, with no spaces. Be sure to specify a unit of measure
or some other indicator of what the number range represents. Examples: DVD
player $250..300 or 3..5 megapixel digital camera. Numrange can be used to set
a range for everything from dates (Willie Mays 1950..1960) to weights
(5000..10000 kg truck)
Special aspects of Google can be found in More, Help Center, Search Features, and Google Labs
Calculator - To use Google's built-in calculator function, simply enter the calculation you'd like done into the search box and hit the Enter key or click on the Google Search button. The calculator can solve math problems involving basic arithmetic, more complicated math, units of measure and conversions, and physical constants.
Translation of web pages or text is available. To test how reliable machine translation is, try having Google translate a sentence into a language and then paste the results into the translation box to translate back into English. Sometimes the results are surprisingly good and sometimes quite funny.
Special Operators include "define:" to retrieve definitions; "site:" to restrict results to a specific domain; "inurl:" to restrict the results to documents containing that word in the url
Useful phrases to limit search results: "how to", "find in a library"
Guides to Google created by CFLC (Thanks to Suzi Holler for pointing out some of the above tips.)
Librarians' Index to the Internet is a searchable, annotated subject directory of more than 6,500 Internet resources selected and evaluated by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries. It's meant to be used by both librarians and non-librarians as a reliable and efficient guide to described and evaluated Internet resources. For example, see the list of Internet Guides & Search Tools.
INFOMINE is intended for the introduction and use of Internet/Web resources of relevance to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It is being offered as a comprehensive showcase, virtual library and reference tool containing highly useful Internet/Web resources including databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, listservs, online library card catalogs, articles and directories of researchers, among many other types of information.
Scout Report is a weekly publication offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators.
WWW Virtual Library is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web.
SearchAbility - The complete list of guides (with descriptions) to thousands of search engines covering hundreds of subjects. Listed in approximate order of size and specificity of subject categories.
Search Engine Colossus is an international directory of search engines.
Wikipedia - this free online encyclopedia can be a good starting point for research, but since it has no quality control other than self-policing by contributors, and apparently has nothing to guard against copyrighted or plagiarized material being posted, I would be extremely reluctant to cite entries from Wikipedia as a source of information. Actually, I also wouldn't recommend using World Book, Britannica, or any other general encyclopedia as a cited source in a college-level research paper. Encyclopedias provide a digested or abridged version of the topics. Use encyclopedias at the beginning of your research to help you understand and frame the concepts, track down the sources cited in the bibliographies of the encyclopedia entries, seek additional resources, analyze what you find, and demonstrate in your writing that you have critical thinking skills - - not just the ability to regurgitate someone else's words.
Other Resources of Interest provides information about miscellaneous resources, including study guides for literature, scripts of plays, sheet music, and grammar.
rgause@mail.ucf.edu
(407) 823-2563
Last modified: August 18, 2006
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~rgause/classes/general.htm