17:610:530 Principles of Searching
Tefko Saracevic

Exercise 8

Comprehensive Web search

This exercise can be a group or individual exercise - you decide. If it is a group exercise. please do not forget to list the members of the gropu in the heading.

The exercise concentrates on using the Web search engines and Web resources (reference and digital libraries) for finding sources that may answer user questions. The exercise involves that you search comprehensively and then from what you find select ten best answers (documents, sites, ...) to questions posed. These do NOT have to be ranked - just deliver a set of ten answers in any order as you judged them.

The exercise is real, in a sense that it answers a real question that I received via email from a librarian from Indonesia.

Beyond the exercise, this is a 'hot' question that great many libraries in this country and abroad are struggling to resolve. You can learn from the results in general, and remember them for use in a future interviews or job searches. In other words, remember what you found for future use.

Here is the email I received (text copied as is, but reformatted):

From: Diao Ai Lien <>
To: "tefko@scils"@Rutgers.EDU
Subject: collection development policies

Dear Prof. Tefko Saracevic,

I am Ai Lien. I am in charge of the Atma Jaya Catholic University Library in Jakarta (Indonesia). I would like to ask you some questions concerning collection development policies of a digital library. As we know, Internet technology has caused several, and I think, major changes in libraries:

1. an integration between three main traditional jobs of a library, i.e., acquisition, processing, and dissemination.

2. more participation of the library users in these jobs.

3. a change of focus from acquisition to access (providing and increasing access to personal and non-personal information).

Accordingly, what should be the content of the collection development policy? Should it cover also the development of metadata: search engines, subject-based homepages, etc.; weeding, user education? Or what? Who should perform the tasks: seperate peoples carry out different jobs, or the same team is responsible for the ‘three traditional jobs’ concerning a subject?? Do you have any example of the policies??

Thank you very much for your help.

God Bless

Ai Lien

Assignment:

  1. Search Web search engines, Web reference sources, domain sites, and/or digital libraries on the Web to find answers to the questions about content of collection development policies and their implementation, as asked in the message.
  2. At the same time note what options do different search engines provide for advanced search, and the differences and similarities between engines in that respect. You do NOT have to report on this, but note for yourself.
  3. You can select which search engines and/or sources to use. List all the sources you used.
  4. Evaluate the results, and select what you consider to be the ten best sources (sites, documents ...) as answers to the questions posed. Provide a short descrption or evaluation. List separately the sources and short description or evaluation of the ten answers you selected to email back.
  5. Print the results and hand them in.

Thus there are two "deliverables:'

If each student selects 10 sources and they are completely different from student to student, then we will have 460 sources or answers (there are 46 students in the class). If there is a complete agreement between the students (an unlikely event) then we will have 10 sources. In reality we will have something in between. We will try to pool the results and compare the overlap - this may be interesting in itself.