Analyse and present research information Jan 2007Presentation Transcript
Central Queensland Institute of TAFE Analyse and Present Research Information February 2007
What the Library Can Do For You
The Library is available for your research needs, a free service provided for your studies . We can assist you by teaching you how to find and analyse information.
We have books, journals/magazines, videos, and online databases available for your use. These can be accessed through our website: www.cqtafe.com/library
What the Library Can Do For You
We can be contacted by:
Phone (07) 4940 3219,
Fax (07) 4940 3218,
The Library’s opening hours:
Monday – Thursday 8:15am – 5pm
Friday 8:15 am – 3:00pm
The Library Catalogue
The “Haystack Problem” (Henninger 2003):
A known needle in a known haystack
A known needle in an unknown haystack
An unknown needle in an unknown haystack
Any needle in a haystack
The sharpest needle in a haystack
Most of the sharpest needles in a haystack
All the needles in a haystack
Affirmation of no needles in a haystack
Things like needles in a haystack
Let me know when a new needle shows up
Where are the haystacks?
Needles, haystacks – whatever
To get the best out of a search engine or online database, you need to be able to describe to the machine exactly what you want.
Remember, computers are DUMB!!!
They can search only the ‘string’ of characters you give them – they cannot interpret or decipher your meaning or intentions.
To assist the search engine or database, you can use boolean operators. If you want to search a variety of similar words you can use truncation.
Boolean Operators allow you to give the computer more precise instructions on how to search:
AND – narrows the search by ensuring both terms are included – Cat and Dog means the web page/article must have both cat and dog to meet the search criteria
So, for the search ‘people management’ and ‘change’:
OR – expands the search by including either term – it will retrieve all the pages with cat and all the pages with dog.
So, for the search ‘people management’ or ‘change’:
NOT – narrows the search by excluding a particular term – Cat not Dog will retrieve all the pages with cat, except the ones which have dog on them as well.
To search for ‘people management and change, not factories’:
Truncation allows you to conduct multiple searches at once, when the words all come from the same root. In most cases you will find the truncation symbol to be * (ie Shift 8)
For example, Aborigin* will retrieve:
Truncation is also useful when you don’t know how to spell a word, or when you know there are multiple spellings (ie differences between American English and British or Australian English:
Authorisation or Authorization? Or…
Authori*ation will retrieve both spellings
Infotrac is a database created in the USA, and as such is a product we purchase. It contains newspaper/magazine citations and full text articles. It is protected by a password. The password for the current Term is ‘ nuyear07 ’. You may not share this password with anyone. If another student asks for it, refer them to the Library. Do not share it with anyone outside of CQIT.
In Infotrac, (and most other databases) you have the ability to select other limits to narrow your search:
Eg full text (ie ignore citations)
refereed/peer reviewed publications
Searching the Internet
Things to remember about the Net…
The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing… and…
To realise that it is no better than television, in regard to quality of what you see, and possibly worse.
So – you have to be able to make some kind of judgement about the web page you’re looking at…
How to make your judgement?
URL – the uniform resource locator also called the “address” or Domain Name. They have a number of parts which tell you something about them:
Another Example: http://www.cqit.qld.edu.au
.cqit = Central Queensland Institute of TAFE
.qld = Queensland (Duh!)
.edu = a certified educational institution (you have to have permission to use edu in your website; = .ac ie academic)
.au = Australia
bbc = British Broadcasting Corporation
.co = a corporate website (= .com and .biz)
.uk = the United Kingdom
What is the difference between:
What about this one?
www. lg e.de/
(an equivalent site is www.lge.com.au)
De – Deutchland
Remember… not all of the Internet is in English!
Try this search in Google:
Le Tour de France
When you search in English, English language results score better as they match better. Search in other languages (as in French, above) and the best matches will always be in that language.
Purpose of the Page
Why does the page exist? Can you determine this from the content? Does its reason for being match your needs?
Can you establish the identity of the author and their level of qualifications/ expertise? Does this person have the expertise to make the statement or claims they have? If you can’t determine/authenticate the author or qualifications, why not?
Remember – ISPs do not have the same legal responsibilities as book publishers…
The Tilda Symbol ~
The Tilda symbol ~ it means that this is a person’s private page inside a large organization (eg a university) and that the content is not controlled by the organisation’s protocols.
What effect might this have on your judgement of the page?
Using a similar URL to a respectable site to suck you in
More Nasty Tricks
Hiding words in the “wall paper” to suck in search engines
Giving no exit point from the page and disabling the back button so you are stuck there - you have to close the window entirely and start again .
Lots of them, and different types. They find information not by scanning the web, but by scanning their own databases and returning what they find – for this reason, different search engines may turn up different pages.
Eg Google www.google.com
Ask Jeeves www.ask.com
In addition, there are MetaSearch Engines…
That is, an interface that searches with more than one search engine at a time, eg Dogpile:
Search engines find pages using software called ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. These troll through the web looking for pages they’ve never seen before, and send these back to the database for analysis and inclusion. The analysis is normally automated, but has some human supervision.
Pages are usually ranked by a mathematical formula, which differs from engine to engine. Google uses a variety of things to assess the pages in its databases.
Some search engines also have directories – the pages are also sorted into like groups – much like a library shelves all of the books on the same topic together.
These can also be useful if you’re looking for a specific topic.
Remember though – Search engines only index only about 2% of the internet! Most of the material out there is protected in some way, as commercial-in-confidence or saleable product and is not easily accessable…
Eg Infotrac Onefile is a database which the Library pays for to give access to you
Portals and Databases
Information can also be stored in a Portal or a Database hidden behind a web page.
Portals usually collate information from a variety of sources in a likely or useful way: www.ninemsn.com.au
Databases are like Infotrac – specific types of information organised according to rules and able to be searched: www.whitepages.com.au
What to do next…
Now you’ve found information, what to do with it? The first (and most obvious thing) that people forget is to ask themselves - Does this answer my question?
It doesn’t matter about the source, the reliability, how difficult it was to find etc if it doesn’t answer the question!
Have a quick read over the information, and make a decision on its usefulness before you do anything else!
What to do next…
Printing out – you can choose to just print the whole page, print a selection from the page, or cut and paste to a Word document, which allows you to remove advertising, menus, pictures and other useless features.
Either way – make sure you record the URL and the date you accessed the page, as web pages are protected by Copyright the same as books, and you need to be able to properly acknowledge where (and when) you retrieved the information.
Using the tips and tricks will help you find materials that are good quality and useful.
The Library (and Staff) are here to help you – we can be contacted by phone fax or email if you can’t get in to see us.