Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this month’s readers’ queries.
Q Websites like Intute, Librarian’s Internet Index, Bubl or Infomine, which all select or catalogue educational websites, are usually a good starting point for students. Are there similar valuable databases I don’t know about?
A Take a peek at Pinakes, which lists a lot of these resources, including all the Intute ones (www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/pinakes/pinakes.html). You could also look at the WWW Virtual Library (www.vlib.org). You could expand your search out slightly to look for databases on the hidden or deep web, and a few example search engines you could try are: http://turbo10.com/ http://aip.completeplanet.com/ or www.oaister.org/
Q I’m not very good with foreign languages, and I find it time-consuming to hunt down online dictionaries when I may only ever want to use them once. Are there any internet resources that can help?
A A recent tip that I picked up is to use the image function of your favourite search engine. Simply type in the word that you’re interested in, and see what it comes back with. Obviously this is going to work better with nouns than with abstract concepts. It’s also useful if you’re trying to work out the gender of a person you’re emailing – just type their forename into the image search and you should quickly get a clear idea!
Q I’m a trainer and would like to surprise my audiences with some information that they may not know about Google. Do you have any good titbits that I can use?
A I can certainly give you a few, but you’d best hope that they’re not Update readers or they’ll have less impact than you hope! A really good source is at http://seekingalpha.com/article/58565-9-remarkable-stats-on-google, which includes information such as Google was searched 4.4 bn times in the US alone in October 2007 and Google is the ‘fastest growing company in the history of the world’.
Site of the month
My site of the month is Facebook (www.facebook.com − as if you couldn’t guess). There’s a lot of controversy about it, and I also know that it’s banned in some organisations, but I find it tremendously useful for work. Recently it’s helped put me in touch with a colleague who saw I was lecturing in his location and I’ve asked and answered questions from other librarians, been alerted to new resources I probably wouldn’t otherwise have found, engaged in interesting work-related discussions and used it as a quick way of alerting people to important information.
Updated: 21 January 2008