FEATURED TOPIC THIS ISSUE:  Harnessing the Internet                              August 2007

 

asa Eresource

 

ALABAMA SUPERCOMPUTER AUTHORITY

Anyone who has used the Internet knows how vast and confusing it can be to sort out such large amounts of information. It didn't take long for educators, businesses, and consumers alike to realize that there needed to be a way to organize the Internet into smaller, usable pieces. Safety and reliability issues spawned the creation of catalogs of information that could be used by the ordinary person.

Librarians were some of the first professionals to realize that vast amounts of information with no organization was practically useless. Many of them began to attempt to pull Internet information into subject specific categories and lists.  Pretty soon businesses and consumers were seeking simpler ways to find and use information- first from the desktop at work or home, and then to a variety of mobile devices.

In the meantime search engines were devised to "go out" and retrieve information, but even then the resulting list was too long for most people to handle. Remember Alta Vista? It's still around, along with Yahoo.and Google that are universally known. There are other search engines that are unique such as KartOO, Ask, and Dogpile .Take it a step further and investigate the invisible web and the deep web. In this issue of E-Resource we will take a look at some of the interesting ways users have attempted to make sense of all this information, created organizational tools,and attempted to harness the Internet.

The Alabama Supercomputer Authority is a member of Internet2  that allows for dedicated expanded bandwidth for special events such as virtual field trips, videoconferencing, and media. Internet 2 may provide a new way of harnessing the Internet in the future to provide a quality of service that can't be obtained through regular Internet access.

 

READING ABOUT HARNESSING THE INTERNET

"...it behooves the information worker and the information user to make some sense of order if good information is to remain the basis of learning and decision making and if documents are to continue as an archive of human knowledge." Andrew Torok included this thought in the introduction to an entire issue of Library Trends, Fall 2003 dedicated to organizing the Internet. Read what leading educators, librarians and researchers have to say in full-text at the Alabama Virtual Library (EbscoHost Search Premier) or read Torok's introduction.

What will libraries look like? If Academic Libraries Cease to Exist, would we have to invent it?

 

EDUCATION  AND HARNESSING THE INTERNET

Search Engine Showdown will give you a comparison of search engines and reviews along with what companies own them.

The Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly-funded web site and weekly newsletter serving California, Washington state, the nation, and the world. Subscribe to the newsletter or browse the web site for thousands of categorized sites.

Need statistics? The Electronic Statistics Textbook   offers training in the understanding and application of statistics. The material was developed at the StatSoft R&D department based on many years of teaching undergraduate and graduate statistics courses and covers a wide variety of applications, including laboratory research (biomedical, agricultural, etc.), business statistics and forecasting, social science statistics and survey research, data mining, engineering and quality control applications, and many others.

National Repository of Online Courses (NROC) is a growing library of high-quality online courses for students and faculty in higher education, high school and Advanced Placement. Courses in the NROC library are contributed by developers from leading online-learning programs across the country.

Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans.  Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web.  The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.

Eduhound is a highly specialized educational directory with built-in resource links offered free to educators, students and parents. EduHound.com seeks to harness the vast information resources of the Web, while enabling educators to use the Internet as a classroom tool. In addition to weblinks there is clip-art, lesson plans, templates, and Hispanic education.

 

NEWS YOU CAN USE

The Alpha Dictionary allows users to search 992 English dictionaries at once!

Library Thing provides a cataloging tool for books.

Gizmo Richards' Tech Support Alert is a compilation of free utilities, PC tips, how-to guides, and reviews. Visitors may also subscribe to a free Support Alert newsletter.

Internet News has all the news you can use including more tech news at NewsLinx.


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