Information literacy - a good start for library searching

San Francisco State University. OASIS - Online Advancement of Student Information Skills. http://oasis.sfsu.edu/

"OASIS is a set of online lessons designed to help improve your skills at finding, using and evaluating information of all kinds." An excellent assortment of tutorials geared toward students for improving information literacy. A sample quiz is available, but other quizzes are for students of SFSU only.

Rutgers University Libraries. Knowledge Maze. http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/kmaze/index.htm

A set of tutorials on how to use the library online tools and resources. While geared toward Rutgers Libraries, Knowledge Maze provides a good basic introduction to searching and use of digital resources in general.

If you take one tutorial about Internet searching - THIS IS IT!

University Of California, Berkeley Libraries. Finding Information on the Internet: A Tutorial http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Strategies.html

"This tutorial grew out of the experience of the Teaching Library at UC Berkeley in offering beginning, intermediate, and advanced courses on using the Internet's resources to find information." But this is much more than an excellent tutorial. It is also a reference work for experienced searchers, and a compendium of great many useful links. Provides detailed instruction and description of features of a number of search engine, the invisible Web, and beyond general Web searching. Well organized and presented. If there is one Web tutorial to be taken, this is it!

Libraries and the Web: tutorials, guides

Chamberlain, E. Bare bones 101: a basic tutorial on searching the Web. University of South Carolina, Beaufort Library. http://www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/bones.html

Created by a librarian for librarians and library users.

Gale Group/ALISE. Bibliographic Instruction Support Program. http://www.galegroup.com/customer_service/alise/

The Association for Library and Information Science Education and the publisher Gale have teamed together to provide a modular instructional program that "provides tips and suggestions for designing or supplementing bibliographic instruction programs that feature electronic resources". The modules include content positioning, reference interview, user interface, and evaluation.

Koehler, W. Web Documents Management Course. http://www.ou.edu/cas/slis/courses/LIS5990A/slis5990/

A most comprehensive site with a number of modules on different topics dealing with documents on the Web.

National Cable Television Association. WebTeacher. http://www.webteacher.org/windows.html

Oriented toward K-12 teachers and students but appropriate for any new Internet user, webTeacher provides a thorough introduction and tutorials to all things Internet. Coverage from using web browsers and E-mail to image files, chat, distance learning, and basic and advanced HTML. "The National Science Digital Literacy Report for Math, Engineering and Technology, part of the Scout Report has honored the webTeacher website with the distinction of being chosen from hundreds of websites as an outstanding source for educators. The Scout Report has been published every Friday since 1994, making it one of the oldest and most respected publications for high quality newly discovered online resources. Go to http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current to check it out!" DO THAT!

Resource Discovery Network (UK). RDN Virtual Training Suite. http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/

Tutorial for many fields, well organized and presented. Includes a tour of Internet resources in the given filed, and ways to improve skills. "Teaching Academics to become eLiterate! The RDN Virtual Training Suite is a national initiative designed to teach Internet information skills to students, lecturers and researchers in higher and further education in the UK, though it is also freely available for any one else to use." It comprises a set of "teach yourself" tutorials, delivered over the Web, each of which offers Internet information skills training in a particular subject area."

Search Engine Watch. Search engine tutorials http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/tutorials.html

A general and rich site that includes among others, a number of tutorials, links to many useful sites for searchers and searching, and to a collection of articles related to search engines and their evaluation. Includes a newsletter with articles to help in searching, such as " Seven Stupid Searching Mistakes, Part 1 and 2." reviews, http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0327-stupid1.html and http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0328-stupid2.html
The Search Engine Watch site (http://searchenginewatch.com/) is a premier site concerning information about search engines: lists, reviews, ratings, resources etc.

ZDNet. http://www.zdnet.com/

A comprehensive site about Internet and hardware news, reviews, and analyses, free downloads, and much, much more. In the search box enter 'tutorials' and get a list of a number of tutorials on many specific topics.

Tutorials for searching DIALOG and LexisNexis
(While these tutorials are specific for Dialog and LexisNexis, they also provide a good general grounding for searching and about databases).

DIALOG Corp. Dialog new user guide. http://support.dialog.com/guides/dialog_new_user/

Title says it all.

DIALOG Corp. DialogWeb tutorial. http://products.dialog.com/products/dialogweb/tutorial/

Use this introductory Tutorial to familiarize yourself with the DialogWeb interface and to learn the basic search concepts.

DIALOG Corp. Successful searching on DIALOG. http://support.dialog.com/searchaids/success/intro.shtml

Advanced guide. Includes definitions of commands, and access to a variety of features, such as Bluesheets and Bluesheet categories. Click on Tutorials (under Training) to get to a number of tutorials and quick tours at http://training.dialog.com/tours/

DIALOG Corp. Hot Copy: Searching DIALOG tutorial. http://training.dialog.com/tours/hotcopy/

A comprehensive tutorial with exercises. Follow the instructions and download the Hot Copy.

LexisNexis. Products and services.http://www.lexisnexis.com/productsandservices/

A handy list of all that is offered by LexisNexis. A self help site offers answers and guides: http://www.lexisnexis.com/custserv/Selfhelp/default.shtml

LexisNexis. nexis.com online tutorial. http://www.lexisnexis.com/tutorial/nexis/

The tutorial for the web version of nexis.com. To view the tutorial your web browser needs a Micromedia Shockwave Player installed on your computer. This is general playback software to play the tutorial and movies in general. If you do not have it, the tutorial will prompt you to download the Micromedia Player (free).