Primary information sources these days can be part of the following overlapping categories, which are mentioned here more or less in chronological order:

- millions of books

- thousands of journals, together offering millions of articles

- thousands of discussion groups based on electronic mail, on Usenet, and more recently on the WWW or on combinations of these

- more than 10 billion static, public access WWW pages and other files, that include text, images, multimedia, hypermedia and computer programs, plus similar items that are not present and available as static stand-alone files, but more deeply stored in databases that can be extracted, exploited through the WWW

- open archives / repositories of documents, set up and maintained mainly by scientific organizations

In view of this huge volume, pointing out a selection of interesting sources for a general audience is not feasible or meaningful. Therefore, this tutorial presentation gives an overview of information services that help us to find, locate, access and use primary information sources that are needed for some purpose, fast, efficiently, effectively.

The information services can be categorized as

A. public services, available to all users through the WWW on a worldwide scale;

B. systems that have been set up by an organization for its members only, offering more focused and targeted services that make sense and offer added value primarily in the framework of this organization.

 

Ad A:

The information services for all can be categorized further:

- they can work in open access, available for all users through the WWW free of charge,

- or they are available to a user only after a fee has been paid by this user directly or at a higher level by his/her organization, region or country.

Here we spend most attention to

- open access services,

- academic, scholarly, scientific and technical information.

The information services for all include the following:

- Some general, horizontal subject directories guide us to selected WWW sites. Well-known directories are accessible free of charge.

- More specialized, vertical subject directories guide us to WWW sites in some specific subject area or related to some specific geographical area. Many are available free of charge.

- General, horizontal search engines help us to find WWW pages and other files by using search queries. Famous examples are today Google Web Search, Microsoft Live, Search Yahoo, Ask. A few other ones offer categorization and clustering of results on similar subjects, to cope with the classical problem in information retrieval of ambiguity of meaning of words in a query, such as Mooter and Wisenut. Most of these are accessible free of charge.

- Meta-WWW-search engines transmit the user’s query to existing general WWW search engines and combine and merge the obtained search results. Remarkable among these is Vivisimo / Clusty, which offers categorization of results to cope with the classical problem in information retrieval of ambiguity of meaning of words in a query. Most are accessible free of charge.

- Several systems to search for information offer not only automatic categorization/clustering but also graphical visualization of the categories/clusters on the user’s computer display. Examples are Kartoo and Grokker. Several applications on the WWW are available free of charge.

- Several databases offer bibliographic descriptions of books and related information. Examples are the big online shop Amazon, which includes a bookshop, and of course the book databases/catalogues of many libraries, such as the great Library of Congress and the British Library. Most are available free of charge.

- Several open access meta-search systems allow us even to search in one action through several databases of bookshops; an example is Antiqbook. Some systems even include other meta-search systems in their targets; an example is Addall that searches for instance in Amazon and in Antiqbook mentioned above.

- A few databases allow even full-text searches of the contents of a selection of books. Examples are Amazon and Google Book Search, up to now free of charge in the search phase.

- A few general, horizontal open access databases with search engines allow us to find article titles in most areas of science and technology, such as Infotrieve ArticleFinder, Ingenta, Scirus, and most recently Google Scholar.

- Thousands of more specialized, vertical databases allow us to find published articles and other documents in some specific domain of science. However, production is expensive and only few are accessible free of charge, such as Pubmed for biomedicine and Eric for educational science and library and information science.

- A specialised database for searching and browsing allows us to find scholarly open access journals and articles published in these journals: the Directory of Open Access Journals = DOAJ. Access is free of charge.

- Several more specialized systems allow searching through open archives/repositories, such as Scirus, OAIster and more recently Google Scholar.

- More specialised search engines allow us to find images on the WWW. A famous and popular example these days is the open access Google Image Search.

- Current awareness services can alert a user when a new document has become available, which corresponds well with the user profile stored with the system. For public access WWW pages as well as for newsgroups, Google Alerts offer such a service free of charge.

- A few systems allow not only subject searching, but also citation searching as an alternative method to find scholarly information. A well-established system is the Web of Science, but this is costly. Scopus by Elsevier is a new competitor that is also expensive. The open access alternative is Google Scholar. These systems also allow some evaluation of an article through the number and types of citations received by that article.

- A database, browsing system and search engine allows you to find Usenet newsgroups and newsgroup articles generated during recent years: Google Groups. Usage is free of charge.

 

Ad B:

Systems that have been set up by an organization for its members only, can offer more focused and targeted services that make sense and that offer added value in the framework of the organization. Many universities have already installed such systems, in most cases under the responsibility of the library or information center. The two main building blocks of such a system are described briefly below:

1. A system for federated searching = meta-searching allows searching through several databases / search engines simultaneously, in one action, to save time and to obtain a higher recall. In contrast with public access systems, such an institutional service can take into account local interests and licenses to access particular databases that are not offered in open access.

2. Starting from an item which has been found and is known by the user, a link generator can create relevant links to related documents or services on the WWW, which are hopefully relevant for the user. This takes into account the context, the local situation, including geographical location and contents and services available to the particular user. The most obvious, classical example of an application of such a link generator is offering a link to bring a user from a known bibliographic description of an article to a WWW full-text database of the publisher, to obtain the full-text article fast and directly through the WWW. Many other paths are possible and interesting.

 

Conclusions:

- An increasing amount of information becomes available online. A growing amount of this online information becomes available free of charge. The quality and ease of use of software on the server as well as on the client computers is growing. Furthermore, many secondary information sources / services are now also accessible free of charge. As a consequence, an increasing number of end-users search for information online.

- The relatively new companies Yahoo! and more recently Google have become important, famous and popular players in the information industry. They offer access to many information sources and services, more or less integrated in their portal.

- In the case of simple, factual information needs, the WWW and the search tools can work fast and efficient, like “magic”. However, in the case of more complicated information needs, there is still is no “magic button” that brings us immediately to all the required information.

- Besides the public information services on the WWW for all, an increasing number of organizations implement additional digital information services that offer added value by taking into account the local context.

 

Looking into the future, we can hope for systems that offer

- better GUIDANCE in formulating queries, in particular to cope with the problems associated with using human natural language to express information needs, so that recall and precision are increased

- better automatic subject CATEGORIZATION of database contents and search results

- more and better VISUALIZATION of database contents and search results, to guide searching

- more OPEN ACCESS primary information sources such as articles, atlases, books, learning materials…
(concretely for instance: growth of the OAI data layer)

- more open access information SERVICES for navigation, searching, citation analysis…
(concretely for instance: more and better systems in the OAI services layer)

- more open and more standardized API’s (programming interfaces) of systems to search databases / search engines = format of INPUT of queries and also database contents that consists of well structured records/items, with a standardized structure, so that these systems can be incorporated more efficiently at the client side in federated search systems and other information services = better integration of information sources, NOT locked behind their own proprietary user interface

- more open and more well-structured and more standardized OUTPUT of databases / search engines, so that the documents/items extracted from these systems can serve efficiently at the side of the client as input into a local link generator or a database or some system to analyze the documents/items

More information is available through the WWW:

about the author:

note: BIBLIO in uppercase (not “biblio” in lowercase)

http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/professional/

other tutorial materials available:

http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/courses/chapters/