Knowledge Navigators
> because there is still so much to explore!
INSIDE | WE ARE PART OF THE INFORMATION AGE | HOW MUCH NEW INFORMATION PER PERSON?
We are part of the Information Age
Historians have named certain eras of time in the
past, such as the Bronze Age, the Industrial Age, the
Ice Age and the Space Age, to indicate the newest or
most prevalent thing around at the time. Therefore,
this current period has been dubbed The Information
Age, simply because there is more information
available, per person, than has ever been available
before in the history of humankind.
How much new information per person?
According to the Population Reference Bureau,
(http://www.prb.org) the world population is 6.6
billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information
is produced per person each year. It would take about
10 metres of BIG books to store the equivalent of
800 MB of information on paper.
Berkeley University (USA) completed a study to try to
determine how much new information was produced
in the 2003 calendar year. They concluded that print,
film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced
about 5 exabytes of new information.
How big is five exabytes? Five exabytes of
information is equivalent in size to the information
contained in 629,000,000,000 books!
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INSIDE | HOW BIG IS AN EXABYTE?
How big is an Exabyte?
Terabyte (TB)
Zettabyte
Kilobyte (KB)
> 1,000,000,000,000 bytes
> 1 Terabyte: 50000 trees made into paper and printed
> 2 Terabytes: An academic research library
> 10 Terabytes: The print collections of the U.S. Library of Congress
> 400 Terabytes: National Climactic Data Centre (NOAA) database.
> 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes
> 1,000 bytes
> 2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page
> 100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph
Megabyte (MB)
Yottabyte
> 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes
Googlebyte
> 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
000 000 000 000 000 000 000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes
> 1,000,000 bytes
> 1 Megabyte: A small novel OR a 3.5 inch floppy disk
> 2 Megabytes: A high-resolution photograph
> 5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare
> 10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound
> 100 Megabytes: 1 metre of shelved books
> 500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM
Petabyte (PB)
Gigabyte (GB)
Exabyte (EB)
> 1,000,000,000 bytes
> 1 Gigabyte: a ute filled with books
> 20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works
of Beethoven
> 100 Gigabytes: A library floor of academic journals
> 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes
> 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999
> 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings since human beings could speak!
> 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
> 1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001)
> 2 Petabytes: All U.S. academic research libraries
> 20 Petabytes: Production of hard disk drives in 1995
> 200 Petabytes: All printed material
No institution has attempted the same type
of study as Berkeley University since 2003.
The enormity of the project is considered to
be incalculable.Needless to say the amount
of information per person worldwide has
continued to grow and grow.
Source: Williams, R. 2000. “Data Powers of Ten” www.eaer.caltech.edu/~roy
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Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
INSIDE | WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO HAVE ALL THE INFORMATION? | CURRENCY | RELEVANCY | AUTHORITATIVENESS
What does it mean to have all this information?
Having all this information available to us is fantastic.
Theoretically speaking, there should be an answer to
every question imaginable. However, as there is so
much information, we now need some new skills to be
able to navigate our way to the information we want
when we want it.
In order to survive and thrive in the Information Age,
we need skills to determine some essential facts
about the information we are retrieving.
Quality Resources + Better research skills =
‘A Life’
As you progress through high school you will get
busier and not only with school work. Many of you may
also play sport, have cultural interests, get a part-time
job, and don’t forget the all important social life.
Practising some research skills now will save
you countless hours in finding information for
your assignments.
>Is the information current?
>Is the information relevant?
> Is the information authoritative?
Currency
Historical and scientific facts can change!
Researchers make new discoveries that alter
historical and scientific facts regularly. For example, a
book on astronomy published in 2006 would list Pluto
as the ninth planet in our solar system. Since then,
of course, Pluto has been re-assigned to a ‘Dwarf
Planet’, dramatically altering astronomy information.
To avoid stating incorrect facts, it is vitally important
that you check your information is up-to-date.
Authoritativeness
Can you trust the creator/author of the site you
are sourcing the information from? The Internet
has contributed to the information explosion
immeasureably simply by making self-publishing so
easy and cheap to achieve. The downside of this fact
is that there are individuals who falsely claim expertise
and/or knowledge in many areas. You must be able to
determine whether the person writing the information
actually knows what they are talking about!
Relevancy
When conducting research, especially online, it
is very easy to spend a great deal of time wading
through websites that may not yield any of the
information we require. It is important to be able to
determine quickly if the information is going to be
relevant to your needs and if the topic you require
information on is really in there.
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
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INSIDE | THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY | REMOTE ACCESS TO LIBRARY CATALOGUE | WEBSITE ACCESS
The role of the Public Library
Public libraries are here to support and complement
school library in providing information resources. You
may be often busy with sport and cultural activities
during lunch periods, and rarely have access to
the school library out of school hours. The public
library is an alternative for information needs with
longer opening hours, and remote electronic access
available 24/7.
A member of the Mackay Regional Council Libraries
is entitle to borrow 20 items on their card at any one
time. (Limit of 4 items on any one subject).
Not everyone has a computer at home, or the
computers people may have at home sometimes
misbehave! As a member of the library, you are
entitled to one free hour of Internet use per day, plus
one free hour of word processing use. (Extra time
can be purchased at $3.00 per 30 minutes up to a
maximum of 3 hours total use).
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Please note:
Remote access to library catalogue
> Children under the age of 12 must have a
parent/guardian with them while using the public computers.
> Children aged 12, 13 and 14 must have a ‘”Public Computer Permission’ form signed by a
parent/guardian, and witnessed by library staff,
before being able to use the public computers without a parent/guardian in attendance
> Black and white printing is available at 20c per sheet
The library catalogue is available online. The
catalogue is very easy to use and apart from
searching all our resources, members can also
obtain a password that will enable them to renew and
reserve items online.
Your local public library uses the same cataloguing
system as your school library, Dewey Decimal.
Therefore it only takes a little practise to recognise
and quickly find relevant items.
For example – should you be searching for information
on Ancient Egypt, you will find resources in the school
library, and in the public library, shelved under 932.
Once again, this can save a great deal of time.
Website access www.mackay.qld.gov.au/libraries
Your local public library has a comprehensive website
where, among other things, we detail all online
material available.
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
INSIDE | THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC LIBRARY | STUDENT LINKS
See Student Links www.mackay.qld.gov.au/
libraries/student_links for:
> Subject links - Library staff have collated and sorted a large amount of Internet resources
according to your school curriculum.
> Search tools – Are you limiting your searching to one main search engine? Not making use of some of the thousands of excellent and specialist search tools available will definitely cost you time.
By experimenting with various search tools, you will soon become familiar with which tools give you the best results for different types of searches.
> Tricks of the trade – Those of us who search online regularly soon become familiar with some tricks of the trade that can narrow down to accurate results in a flash! Some of these are:
Keyword: A word searched for in a search command. Keywords are searched in any order. Use spaces to separate keywords in simple
keyword searching.
Phrase searching: More than one keyword, searched exactly as keyed (all terms required to be in documents, in the order keyed). Enclosing keywords in quotations “ “ forms a phrase in most search tools. Sometimes a phrase is called a “character string.”
Boolean Operators: Way to combine terms using “operators” such as “AND,” “OR,” “AND NOT” and sometimes “NEAR.” AND requires all terms appear in a record. OR retrieves records
with either term. AND NOT excludes terms. Always enclose terms joined by OR with parentheses. (See page 12 for illustrations of Boolean searching).
Truncation: In a search, the ability to enter the first part of a keyword, insert a symbol (usually *), and accept any variant spellings or word endings, from the occurrence of the symbol forward. (E.g.,
femini* retrieves feminine, feminism, etc.)
Stemming: In keyword searching, word endings
are automatically removed (lines becomes ); searches are performed on the stem + common endings (line or lines retrieves line, lines, line’s, lines’, lining, lined).
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
Find: Tool in most browsers to search for word(s) keyed in document in screen only. Useful to locate a term in a long document. Can be started by the keyboard command, Ctrl+F.
For an extensive glossary of Internet and web jargon
see: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/
Guides/Internet/Glossary.html
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INSIDE | SUBJECT DIRECTORY VERSUS SEARCH ENGINE - WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? | WHICH IS BETTER? | WHEN TO USE A SUBJECT DIRECTORY | HOW DO I USE THEM?
Subject directory versus search engine – what’s the difference?
Subject directories are organised by humans. Web
sites are manually selected based on certain criteria,
therefore there is a high degree of accuracy and
quality in the results.
Search engines are constructed by robots, bots or
spiders that crawl through the web collecting links.
These links are stored in a central database from
which the results are returned when you do a search.
Which is better?
They both have advantages and disadvantages,
depending on the information you are seeking.
Subject directory advantages:
> Good for browsing. Useful for when you want to see what range of information is available on a topic – like reading the contents pages of a book.
> Compiled by human editors so results are quite accurate.
> Fewer hits than when using a search engine but results are likely to be more accurate.
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Subject directory disadvantages:
> The human element again. Some people may have different ideas about which subject category a topic relates to.
> When searching commercial subject directories, be wary about the reason for inclusion of
certain websites.
Tip: There are countless of very specific
subject directories on the Internet. To
locate them add the term web directories
to the subject you are seeking, into a general
search on any of the above directories, as shown.
When to use a subject directory
>When you want an overview of the categories of information available on a subject,
eg. Cooking, dogs, planets
> When you want to retrieve a list of sites relevant to your topic, rather than numerous individual pages contained within those sites
> When you are trying to decide on a topic eg. One of the planets in the solar system
How do I use them?
> Simply choose from the list of subjects the one that best suits your search
> Then work through the various lists of sub-
categories until you are presented with a list of
relevant websites.
> You can conduct a search at any time with any level of the subject directory tree
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
INSIDE | SUBJECT DIRECTORY VERSUS SEARCH ENGINE - WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? | WEB DIRECTORIES - A QUICK REFERENCE
Web Directories - A Quick Reference
Librarians’ Internet Index
www.lii.org
Infomine
infomine.ucr.edu
About.com
www.about.com
Google Directory
directory.google.com
Yahoo!
dir.yahoo.com
Size, type
Over 20,000.
Compiled by public librarians.
Highest quality sites w. Great,
reliable annotations.
Over 125,000.
Great, reliable annotations.
Compiled by academic
librarians from the University of
California and elsewhere.
Over 2 million.
Generally good annotations
done by “Guides” with various
levels of expertise.
About 5 million.
Selected by the Open Directory
Project and enhanced by
Google searching and ranking.
Often useful to find “better”
results, especially on broad or
widely covered topics.
About 4 million.
Very short descriptions. Often
useful, especially for popular
and commercial topics.
Phrase searching
Yes. Use “ “
Yes. Use “ “
|term term| requires exact
match
Yes. Use “ “
Yes. Use “ “qww
Yes. Use “ “
Boolean logic
AND implied between words.
Also accepts OR and NOT,
and ( ).
AND implied between words.
No.
Also accepts OR, NOT, and ( ).
OR, capitalized, as in Google’s
web search engine.
Yes, as in Yahoo! Search web
search engine.
Truncation
Use *. Also stems. Can turn off
stemming (“fuzzy search”) on
Advanced Search page.
Use *. Also stems. Can turn
stemming off. Use “ “ or | | to
search exact terms.
Use *.
Not accepted consistently.
No.
No.
Field searching
Advanced Search allows
Boolean searching within
subject, titles, description, parts
of URLs, and more.
Select options under search
box to limit to Author,
Title, Subject, Keyword,
Description, various subject
categories, and more.
No.
Same as in Google’s web
search engine.
As in Yahoo! Search web
search engine.
Web Directories
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INSIDE | SUBJECT DIRECTORY VERSUS SEARCH ENGINE - WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? | SEARCH ENGINES
Search Engines
Some points to remember:
> No one engine searches the entire web
> No two search engines are exactly alike
> Using a search engine is similar to using the index of a book
> Robots choose which words to index from a webpage based on their location on the page and how often they are repeated.
> Results are returned to the searcher in a ranked order, and once again, no two search engines rank in the same way. Google, for example, determines relevance by analysing how many other websites link to each web page and the importance of those pages. (A government site is ranked higher than a commercial site).
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Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
INSIDE | SUBJECT DIRECTORY VERSUS SEARCH ENGINE - WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE? | SEARCH ENGINES | WHEN TO USE SEARCH ENGINES
Search engine advantages
> Very easy to search for topic, simply type in a search word or phrase
> The ranking system allows you to view the most relevant search results quickly
Some search engines to try:
Search engine disadvantages
> As there is no human intervention, the accuracy of some of the pages found can be dubious. Some of the pages displayed may have no relevance to the initial search query.
> Web sites that include different terminology than the terms entered in the search will not be found.
Google http://www.google.com
See our search tools page for more examples of
different tools for different searches.
Carrot2 http://demo.carrot2.org/demo-stable/main
Soople http://soople.com
http://www.mackay.qld.gov.au/libraries/student_
links#Search
Web Wombat http://www.webwombat.com.au/
Yahoo http://www.search.yahoo.com/
Ask http://www.ask.com
Mahalo http://www.mahalo.com/
Turbo Scout http://www.turboscout.com/
Dogpile http://www.dogpile.com/
When to use search engines
Google Suggest http://www.google.com/
webhp?complete=1&hl=en
> When you are undertaking a specific search
> When you are searching for an obscure topic
> When you want to take advantage of the latest retrieval technologies
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INSIDE | ONLINE DATABASES | WHY USE DATABASES? | HOW IS SEARCHING ONLINE DATABASES DIFFERENT FROM SEARCHING THE WEB? | SEARCHING DATABASES STEP-BY-STEP
Online Databases
Online Databases – An online database is a
collection of articles from newspapers, magazines,
journals, encyclopaedias, conference papers and
other publications searchable by subject.
Most databases concentrate on one subject area or
resource. Articles indexed in databases are likely to
contain more reliable and more thoroughly researched
information than material on the web.
Searching Databases step-by-step
http://www.mackay.qld.gov.au/libraries/online_
resources#Databases
Therefore it is often easier to find a collection of
articles directly relevant to your assignment by
searching a database rather than surfing the web.
1. Think about your topic and what your assignment is asking.
Why use databases?
> Up to date quality information for study
and research
> More information than a library could ever hold
> Easy access from home or the library computers
> Digital media also available
> Easy to record citation information
for bibliographies
Unlike the Web, articles in a database have been
looked at by a real person, and that person has
decided what the article is about. This means that
if you can identify relevant subject headings or
keywords, you should be able to locate more articles
that use those headings or keywords.
How is searching online databases different
from searching the Web?
Databases are an expensive item and only available via
subscription. However, your library membership card
allows you remote access to
many excellent databases,
absolutely FREE!
The Web is an excellent source of information.
However, when you search the Web, you can also find
a lot of irrelevant information written by people who
are not necessarily experts in their field.
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A good search strategy is the key to successful
searching.
2. List the keyword(s) or phrases that could be used to describe the main subject(s). e.g. You are interested in researching the “history of Irish immigrants in the Australian film and television industry.” Keywords would include: film, films, film industry, Irish Australians, television, etc.
3. List any specific terms that could be used to limit your search such as location (e.g. Australia), time period (e.g. 2000 onwards) or people (e.g. mothers). Also think about including alternative words (synonyms, e,g, Youth and Adolescence) and alternative spelling, (e.g. Colour and Color), as many of the databases are American.
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
INSIDE | ONLINE DATABASES
4. Look at your choice of databases and choose databases relevant to your topic. E.g. The Literature Resource Centre will yield much more information about Shakespeare than the Health & Wellness Resource Centre.
To narrow search use AND
Tip: Follow leads but stay focused!
Tip: Too many articles returned – be more specific!
A search for “dogs AND cats” looks for information with both of these words.
Tip: Too few articles returned – be more general!
OK – I found some good information for my
assignment. Now what?
Use the Help Screens – they don’t bite!!
A search for “dogs
NOT cats” looks for
information with the
word dog only, and
excludes information
with the word cats.
5. Don’t be afraid to use the databases online help screens and Advanced search options. They can assist you to narrow and expand your search using Boolean logic etc. (Sounds a lot more complicated than it really is!).
6. Look at the results of your search and identify good articles.
To widen search use OR
A search for “dogs
OR cats” looks for
information with either
of these words.
7. Note the subject headings (also called descriptors). These are words or phrases that have been used to describe the articles returned in your search query. They may offer alternate keywords to
assist in your search and are often linked. Repeat your search using these alternate keywords. You may need to repeat this step a number of times.
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
You have some choices as to how you can transfer
the information to an easy format for later use.
> Print the article
> Copy and paste the text into a Word document
and save
> Email the article to yourself or to a friend
Remember! Copyright infringement is a
serious matter.
Always reference your sources of information
accurately. All articles contained in a database have
their reference information clearly displayed. Simply
copy and paste into your assignment, remembering
you may have to alter the formatting to suit your
school requirements.
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INSIDE | YOUR TUTOR | SUMMARY
Your Tutor
Summary
Your Tutor - Founded in 2003, Tutoring Australasia
is an Australian-owned company that provides a
unique online tutoring service to libraries, schools,
and territory education departments. Thousands of
students around Australia connect to the service daily
to get help with homework, assignments, projects and
exam revision. Professional one-to-one online tutoring
available for absolutely FREE – just by using your
library membership card.
> This is a mere overview of the resources available at your local public library. We also have numerous qualified staff on hand to assist you where needed, and get you started on becoming an independent and efficient search wizard!
> Practise, practise and practise some more. As with any skills, the more you do it, the better you get. Take 5 minutes out of your next research time to try a different search tool – you might be very pleasantly surprised.
> All the public library services are free to library members, and library membership is also FREE!
> Be brave and click about.
http://www.mackay.qld.gov.au/libraries/student_
links/your_tutor
> Expand. Look Beyond! Explore!!
> In order for you, as students to meet all your study, work, sporting and cultural commitments – and have a life – you need these basic research skills to manage time effectively and obtain your best possible academic results.
> These skills are not only applicable for study. They will also assist in any area of life where quality information is required to make an informed decision, Therefore adding to quality of life now and in the future.
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Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
Knowledge Navigators
> because there is still so much to explore!
www.mackay.qld.gov.au/libraries
Knowledge Navigators published by | Mackay Regional Council | © 2008
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