Knowledge Handler

Information Sources & Information Sifting Techniques

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Location: Independence, Ohio, United States

I am a retired librarian, most recently serving at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland Education Center.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

LibriVox

LibriVox.org is a volunteer project to create audiobooks and distribute them using the Internet. Due to copyright restrictions, almost everything on LibriVox was printed before 1922.
-D.D.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Second Life

WWW.SECONDLIFE.COM is a virtual world created by Linden Labs. Some businesses and universities have embraced this environment for educational purposes. A recent Time magazine article indicates that Second Life is still an awkward platform for distance learning, especially for those who are not technologically advanced.
-D.D.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

THEFREELIBRARY.COM

WWW.THEFREELIBRARY.COM is a full-text database which offers access to 3 million articles from Gale Research.   It does not provide full citations to the paper source material (just article title, author, journal title, date of publication) and appears to be funded by advertising.   I am not impressed with the abscence of helps and weak indexing of THEFREELIBRARY. If one does a keyword search for phrase like "Indiana Wesleyan" (using quote marks), the results are those of an "OR" search showing every document that has either the word "Indiana" or the word "Wesleyan".  
Every search engine and database I have used recognizes that terms placed in quotes should be treated as a phrase, so the lack of this functionality is an unexpected frustration.


-D.D.

Friday, July 06, 2007

WWW.SPEEGLE.CO.UK - Provides Audible Results

WWW.SPEEGLE.CO.UK is a search engine that has a computer-generated voice speak the text of the search results. This might be useful to a person with visual problems, but I was amazed at how much less time it takes to visually scan the result list.
-D.D.
NOTE:Speegle seems to have disappeared by the close of 2007 -- too bad

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Tuesday, July 03, 2007

KwMap



KwMap is one of the new "visual" search engines that, like Grokker, display alternate phrases or related concepts that the user might try to obtain better results. The byline for this product states that it is "A Keyword Map for the Whole Internet". The visual aid (in this case, two intersecting lines) is typically at the top of the page, followed by the results (see above).


-D.D.