Getting hold of the information you need
A discovery tool tells you what is available and may also tell you where to find it. Some other resources help you to discover relevant information sources and then take you to them. Examples include:
- Subject-based gateways such as those in the UK Resource Discovery Network (www.rdn.ac.uk);
- Electronic Journal Services such as ScienceDirect or Emerald; and
- Internet Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo or Lycos.
Although these have features in common, they are very different. An important difference is that the first two resources listed above have been carefully selected for quality and authority.
Internet Search Engines do not discriminate between high-quality and poor-quality resources. If you use an Internet Search Engine, you must evaluate these resources yourself. For example, you must consider how accurate, authoritative, objective and current the information is. This requires you:
- to identify the author;
- to gauge the author's credentials (perhaps referring to the institution or organisation with which s/he is affiliated);
- to differentiate between objective copy and advertising; and
- to find the date on which the document was published.
These activities increase the cost, in time, of finding and using information.
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