Going beyond Google: there's a treasure trove of valuable research online—if you know how to find it

University Business, August, 2005 by Tom Warger

Complete Planet, which bills itself as "the deep web directory," claims to present resources gleaned from 70,000 databases and specialized search engines. A white paper at the company's website argues that ordinary web searching is limited by failure to retain information once a search is repeated (and in effect superseded) as a next round of inquiry. The key is instead to keep search results in an index for future retrieval, and this is in essence how Complete Planet--and other deep searches--operate.

Basic reference sources, long familiar in printed form, have moved to the internet, where they are web-approachable but available by subscription only. Merriam-Webster dictionaries and the Encyclopedia Britannica provide web travelers with a glimpse of the resources offered, just enough to serve as an advertisement.

Meanwhile, FreeTranslation.com offers a sample of online human language translation services. Its brief, machine-processed translations of submitted text invite--for a fee--submissions of larger text sections, more refined translations, or even a translation written by a person.

The premium sources of scholarly knowledge online are the commercial indices and bibliographies typically available to students and researchers through academic libraries. LexisNexis combines various publishing brands that dominate the markets for legal information. EBSCO Information Services is a major aggregator of publications in print and electronic formats for libraries. Its Academic Search Premier product is one of the most widely subscribed collections of abstracted, indexed, and full-text journals. It claims indexing for more than 8,000 publications, of which 6,800 are abstracted and indexed and 4,500 are full text. Thomson Gale, another major reference and full-text provider, offers among its many products Academic ASAP, a database spanning most Liberal arts disciplines and offering full text from 600 publications.

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching is a free-membership catalog of online learning materials contributed by subscribers. At its center, MERLOT is a collection of metadata documenting digital resources available for adoption and shared use. It also offers technology, design, and policy guidelines to help standardize and improve faculty developed materials.

A SEARCH FOR TOMORROW

Scholarly research today begins with the web but quickly branches into wider and deeper domains of information. Technologies to search, index, rank, and retain texts--or at least the means for potential access to them--are in rapid development, frequently subject to the secrecy and volatility of the commercial marketplace.

Many of the major players in online information are familiar from the print-publication industry and hold increasingly concentrated control over formerly numerous sources of information. Students and faculty have unprecedented, unmediated access to overwhelming quantities of information. Librarians and other IT professionals attempt to assist scholars in coping with this bounty, but how effective their guidance will prove is yet unknown. Research has gone paperless, figuring out how to function effectively in this environment is a work still in progress.