20070811

1-Minute Tutorial on Finding the 9,000+ E-journals in the Peninsula College Library


Peninsula College Library has over 9,000 full-text E-journals available via the Web for students, staff, and faculty. These titles are searchable by title and by academic subject area in a database called A-to-Z Index to E-Journals.

To view a one-minute tutorial on how to access the E-Journal index (starting from the College home page), click this link: A-to-Z Index to Electronic Journals.

hakia.com is a new semantic search engine


From the hakia.com website:
hakia is focused on delivering core benefits to provide search efficiency, richness of information, and time savings. Here are some of the important "distinguishing" factors of hakia.

GALLERIES:
For short queries such as cancer or Winston Churchill, hakia presents search results in a categorized format to provide meaningful variations of the subject. Each gallery has 10 categories on the average, that is equal to running 10 queries in conventional search engines.

RELEVANCY:
Although the development is in progress, hakia already shows superior capability to handle long-tail (complex) queries via its semantic capabilities. Try what is Palladium useful for? Popularity based search engines may bring results like the London Palladium to this query.

RICHNESS:
Although the development is in progress, hakia is able to bring search results of the equivalent meanings of the search terms. For example, what is the latest bill George Bush killed in the senate will bring results including the word VETO, which is the correct interpretation of the search term "kill". This capability continues to improve in parallel with hakia's progress.

FRESHNESS:
Dynamic pages, like news, often create problems for the popularity based search engines, because there is never enough time to collect statistics. With its semantic capabilities, hakia can analyze and retrieve search results from dynamic pages without a compromise.

HIGHLIGHTING:
For complex and longer queries, hakia highlights relevant phrases or sentences that best correspond to the meaning match of your query. Try Why did Enron collapse? You do not have to open the documents to see the quality of the results - a key to saving your time!

COMPLETE TEXT:
hakia often displays uninterrupted sections of Web pages in search results that provide a full point of view of the content. Presenting complete snippets enables you to evaluate the search results instantly and saves you significant search time.

DIALOGUE:
hakia points out good answers in a dialogue mode in addition to making suggestions, correcting spelling errors, and listing related hakia Galleries. This hakia capability continues to evolve. Try What is the most common type of volcano?

PRIVACY FRIENDLY:
hakia has no interest in who you are and where you live. Neither our technology nor our business model relies on this information. Thus, hakia is not engaged in any practice that may compromise your privacy.

20070809

Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research


To read the annotations for each step, click on the link below to the original at lifehack.org by author Dustin Wax. Here I just provide the steps.

Advice for Students: 10 Steps Toward Better Research

Schedule!
Start, don’t end, with Wikipedia.
Mine bibliographies.
Have a research question in mind.
Deal with one piece at a time.
Use a system.
Know your resources.
Ask for help.
Carry an idea book.
Bring it up to date.

Remember, though, that until a few years ago, most of us managed to do research with no Internet at all! With typewriters! Walking uphill! In the snow! Barefoot!