Internet Research Skills

Citation

Bawden, D. (2007), "Internet Research Skills", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 7, pp. 640-642. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710776097

The latest in Sage's portfolio of study skills book, this one shares its siblings’ qualities of being nicely produced, reasonably priced by current standards, and relevant to the needs of students, and – to some extent – of practitioners.

It is aimed at “students in the social sciences and the humanities” with a nod to “research professionals”; for both groups it proposed to help those who already use the Internet to use it more effectively and efficiently. And herein lies one problem with the book. It has a rather restricted subject scope, which means that it will be of very limited value to those outside the “social sciences and humanities” area, because its examples – and on well‐chosen and clearly explained examples must rest the success of a book of this sort – are all in this area. Even here it is limited – most people might consider library and information studies to be within this scope, but there is no mention of any of the specific sources for our disciplines. More seriously, many of the more interesting and innovative examples of Internet resources and their use come from areas of healthcare, medicine, science and technology, and without any mention of them the book loses some value. Its title – which gives no clue of its subject limitations – is far too general, to the extent of being grossly misleading.

These limitations aside, this is quite a good book, clearly written and with good examples. It is particularly commendable that the author makes the attempt in several places to show the link between internet resources, printed resources, and digital resources in abstracting and indexing databases. The first section heading of chapter 1 is “why not just search Google ?”, and this could be taken as the theme of the book. O Dochartaigh makes a valiant attempt to steer his readers away from reliance on any single search engine, giving cogent reasons and examples for this, and the book is to be commended on these grounds alone.

The content is familiar enough, and covers all that one might reasonably expect to be offered to the intended audience. An introductory chapter sets the scene, and gives a brief explanation of the Internet as an information‐finding environment. It seems to assume that the readership will be familiar with the information communication process, and the place of books, journals, web sites, indexes and so on. This is not necessarily so, particularly for undergraduate students, and a little more contextualizing might have helped – though the author may feel, perhaps rightly, that this audience prefers to cut to the chase. Some description of these aspects comes into the relevant chapters, which may encourage it to be read, but gives a rather “bitty” feel overall.

Chapter 2 deals with books online, including some of the newer features of Amazon and the like, but also giving a mention to library OPACs, something sometimes passed over in internet research texts. Chapter 3 moves onto the various ways of finding journal articles, and has an admirable clear and realistic account of the nature, merits and problems of systems like Google Scholar. It also includes an account of abstracting and indexing databases, and of full‐text sources, which explains their nature well, but is limited in the examples which can be provided by the subject scope. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with search tools: subject guides (gateways and directories) and search engines, respectively. These are generally quite clearly and competently written, though rather oddly Boolean searching is first mentioned in chapter 5, where it is arguably of relevance than to the databases described in chapter 3.

Chapter 6 deals with news sources and mailing lists/discussion forums, a somewhat ill‐assorted combination, linked by the idea of “interaction”, and not made clearer by the inclusion of some remarks about Web 2.0 services. This is probably the part of the book which would leave the reader in most doubt as to quite what they were reading and why, though the area is admittedly a difficult one to describe coherently. Chapter 7 is on more solid, almost traditional, ground, in giving a clear description of internet access to government materials, archives and statistical sources. The last of the eight chapters considers the evaluation of Internet materials – the treatment is concise to the point of being too brief to be really helpful – and the way in which they are best cited, where generally sensible advice is offered, including ways of dealing with the practical difficulties of long “on the fly” URLs, and of “framed” web pages.

This book can be recommended for students in its intended social science and humanities areas, as a generally clear and sensible guide to the topic. For most other potential readers, the restricted scope of the examples would probably relegate this to supplementary reading at best. This would certainly be true for library/information students or practitioners, who would find both exemplification and treatment of some issues inadequate.