EFFECTIVE USE OF SEARCH ENGINES

Search Engines: What are 21st Century Literacy Skills?

An interesting example of how I counsel in the area of searching in my home ballpark. Since most of my work in this area is verbal this is a rare chance to see how I counsel search clients on real problems.

Date: Wed, 3 Nov 1999 23:37:34 -0500 (EST)
From: David P. Dillard <jwne@astro.ocis.temple.edu>
Subject: Re: Form: http://www.library.temple.edu/ref/ereform.htm

Your search is a complex problem because there are several issues you need to address in attempting to come up with viable techniques for getting at the information that your are looking for.

First of all there is the matter of terminology. You need to think hard about "American Media Icons" and come up with synonymous terminology that describes what you mean by that phrase in the context of your entire problem statement. For example would media idols or media spokesperson(s) work in your context. Similarly synomyms for popular
culture should be employed that are relevant to your search.

Secondly, you need to look at a mix of databases to get a comprehensive literature review on this topic, because your topic screams the phrase interdisciplinary and because media and scholarly communications literature is not focused in any one or two databasess but is scattered to the database winds. I therefore recommend that you use the following databases to conduct this search:

RLIN
WorldCat
Education Abstracts
Social Science Abstracts
ProQuest Dissertations Abstracts
ProQuest Direct
Wilson Business Abstracts
Humanities Abstracts
General Business File
Business and Industry
ERIC
Sociofile
PAIS
PsycINFO
MLA
RILM
Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

I hope these suggestions will prove useful to you and if you have any questions or want to discuss my suggestions or how to implement them further, feel free to give me a phone call.

Study: Internet Rage Hits the Information Highway
By Tim McDonald
NewsFactor Network
April 9, 2001
<http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/8806.html> A study released Monday said information overload on the Internet is increasingly leading to "Internet rage." The survey, conducted in the United Kingdom, claimed that 71 percent of British Internet users have suffered from "Net rage" at one time or another.

The sheer volume of information available on the Web -- and the slowness in accessing it -- causes a great deal of stress, according to the independent survey commissioned by WebTop, a British Web indexing company.

With so much information available, users are becoming increasingly frustrated by irrelevant responses brought up by search engines.

"They may produce thousands of results, but often these are full of links to useless information, advertising banners and promotional garbage, and not to the information the person is looking for," said the study's writer, Edward Kerr