The British Library is now to store web pages...

...in an expansion of its collections. Up until now, the British Library (along with the other UK 'national libraries') has had the right to store all print material published in the UK, but a new agreement means that they will now have the right to store all online material published in the UK. Most webpages are short-lived, be it through minor updates, radical alterations or even complete deletion, so this project to archive online content is a major development for researchers. More information can be found on the British Library website: 'Capturing the digital universe'. A story was also featured on the BBC News website: 'Libraries to store all UK web content'.

In reality, the British Library has already been storing websites for many years, and these can be searched or browsed at the UK Web Archive. It's a resource which you may find yourself wondering how you'd never heard of it before!

Free British Library workshops...

...run regularly at the British Library in St Pancras. They are normally free and cover a wide range of topics related to using the BL and more general research and information skills. Information on up-coming workshops can be found here: http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/inrrooms/stp/workshop/workshops.html.

Web 2.0 tools, apps and resources...

…are abundantly available on the Internet and can be very useful in helping organise both your work and your life. However, they are so numerous that it can often seem like more trouble than it's worth finding the quality ones. This is where I would recommend Phil Bradley’s free online guide to Web 2.0 (http://www.philb.com/iwantto.htm). Things are arranged in categories to make it easy to identify what you're looking for, e.g. ‘calendars’, ‘mindmapping’, ‘presentation software’, ‘project management’, ‘screen recording’ and many dozens more. I would highly recommend checking it out!

Stop words...

…are found in all search engines, from library databases (such as EBSCO PsycINFO) to web search tools such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!. They are words which the search engine will ignore because they are simply too common. For example, ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘if’ and ‘but’ will not be searched for. Normally this poses no problem, but what if you are searching for a specific phrase, such as ‘children in care’ or ‘vitamin A’? Well, on some databases the use of speech marks resolves the issue e.g. “children in care”, while others, such as Google, are clever enough to realise that the ‘a’ in ‘Vitamin A’ is a key component of what you are looking for. However, many databases, including those found on EBSCO, will ignore the stop word regardless of whether speech marks are included – there is no way to force the search engine to look for that word. Slowly but surely the people who make these search tools are recognising the problems this can cause and making changes – the Web of Knowledge database has recently abolished all stop words – but if you are using a search engine which hasn’t yet made this change, then the best advice is simply to find alternative terms or descriptions for what you are looking for.

Psychology in the news...

…can be a great way of seeing how the wider world (well, the media, at least) perceive and report both psychology and the psychology profession. Generally, if the stories make it into the news then they are likely to be either ‘fun’ stories or fascinating new discoveries. Either way, news stories can be a way of finding out new things either in your own field of interest or in areas of psychology that you may never have considered. Relatively frequent examples of psychology (or psychologists) appearing in new stories range from educational psychologists being interviewed about ‘behaviour in schools’ to personal tales of amnesia or other such memory dysfunction.

Finding mainstream news articles can be done in two main ways. The first way is through the library’s subscription to a database called Nexis UK, which provides access to several decades worth of articles from all of the UK’s national newspapers (both broadsheet and tabloid), many regional UK newspapers and a range of international newspapers (including ones in foreign languages). You can normally find today’s issue, as well as ones from several decades ago, so it is a fantastic resource! It can be accessed through the library's Databases and e-Journals webpage (click on 'N' for Nexis UK).

Aside from newspapers, the other main way to find news stories these days is on the Internet. More ‘traditional’ sources such as BBC News and Reuters are very effective, although broader (but less reliable) searches can also be done through news search engines such as Google News and Yahoo News Search.

Unreliable websites...

...are everywhere on the Internet. If you're planning on using information you've found online in one of your assignments then you need to be very careful. Often the best thing to do is to only use information from academic (.ac.uk) or government (.gov.uk) sites as they are likely to be more reliable. Of course, this isn't always possible and there are lots of other factors to consider, too (e.g. is the website up-to-date?). So what do you do?
I would suggest the first thing to do is get clued up about evaluating websites. There is advice about this in the Evaluating Information section of UEL's Info Skills site. I would also recommend exploring an excellent online tutorial called the Internet Detective. If you're still not sure whether or not a website is reliable, then don't use the information in your assignment. It's as simple as that!

The invisible web...

…is the part of the Internet that conventional search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, simply can’t reach. Also known as the ‘Deep Web’, it can be an excellent source of research. Of course, as with the rest of the web, there can also be some rather dubious information, so it is vitally important that you carefully evaluate how reliable the information may be!

There have recently been some attempts to produce guides to this ‘unsearchable’ part of the web, including: www.completeplanet.com and www.deepwebresearch.info. There has even been an attempt to create a search engine for it: www.incywincy.com.

Better searching in Google...

…can be achieved by using just a few simple search tips. Take the following example: you want to find UK government publications on the future treatment of schizophrenia. While there is no ‘correct’ way of searching for this on Google, I would recommend typing in: 

schizophrenia site:gov.uk OR site:nhs.uk filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc 2011..2025

So what does all that mean?

schizophrenia is the keyword.
site:gov.uk OR site:nhs.uk means that we only want to see results coming from UK government or NHS websites.
filetype:pdf OR filetype:doc means we only want PDF or Word files – the most common format for publications i.e. we don’t want webpages to be returned - we want documents.
2011..2025 is a number range identifying that we want documents which state a date in the future to appear in them (i.e. any date in the range 2011 to 2025).

Internet for Psychology...

…is a free-to-use online tutorial aimed specifically at psychology students in UK universities. It is provided by Intute as part of their ‘Virtual Training Suite’. The psychology tutorial can be accessed here.

The tutorial includes information on:

• journal databases and library catalogues
• internet research skills
• psychology conferences
• blogs, podcasts and discussion lists

...and much more. It also features plenty of links to get you started straight away.

Get more out of Intute...

...with the advanced search options. And don't be put off by the word 'advanced' - it's actually a quicker and easier way of finding high-quality websites for your research and general reading. For example, make your way to Intute - Psychology and click on 'advanced search'. From the advanced search screen, scroll down to 'resource type', deselect 'all resource types' and select 'blogs'. Enter your search (e.g. 'psychology') and click the green search button. This particular example should bring up over 30 blogs dedicated to different fields of psychology.

Other resource types you can choose from include...

• archives
• bibliographic databases
• government publications
• mailing lists and discussion groups
• news
• professional organisations
• reference sources
• statistics

...to name but a few. Go on, give it a go!

Teenagers vs. adolescents, counsellors vs. counselors...

...women vs. gender – which would you pick as your search terms?

The words you type in the search box on the library catalogue, PsycINFO, Google or any other search screen can make a huge difference to the results you find. Take the first example: teenagers vs. adolescents. Look them up in a dictionary or thesaurus and you will probably conclude that they are interchangeable and you could use either. However, look them up in PsycINFO and ‘teenagers’ returns less than 5000 results, while ‘adolescents’ returns a staggering 143,000 results. Why? Because ‘adolescents’ is a more academic term than ‘teenagers’ and PsycINFO is a database full of academic research articles. Try the same search on Google and you get the opposite result, with ‘teenagers’ returning more hits. The reason? Google finds web pages, web pages are generally not very ‘academic’ and neither is the word ‘teenagers’. The lesson? Tailor your search terms to the source you are searching.

As for the difference counsellors vs. counselors, it’s a little more simple. The first spelling is British; the second American. Increasingly the difference doesn’t matter when searching. For example, PsycINFO automatically searches for either spelling so returns the same number of results whichever you choose. However, neither Google nor the library catalogue has this facility, so you will need to try both. Then again, if you only want British articles, then perhaps it’s good that they don’t search for the American spelling at the same time...

Finally, women vs. gender – this is an example of when you have little choice but to try them both separately. They have different meanings, but can be used interchangeably or, indeed, differently dependent on the context. You will also need to refer to a thesaurus for further alternatives: female, feminist, equal opportunities…

Finding quality websites for your research / assignments...

...is a tricky business. We all know (or hopefully we do!) the perils of using the web for finding reliable academic quality information. Many websites you find through Google, Bing, Dogpile, AltaVista or any of the other mainstream search engines are likely to be of dubious quality. The sites you find may be strewn with careless (or even malicious) mistakes, they may have been written for a particular audience (e.g. people of a certain political persuasion, potential clients for a company and so on), they may be horribly out-of-date and, above all else, all the above may not be at all obvious (seeking information on the 'tree octopus'?: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/). For further advice on sorting out 'good' sites from the 'dubious' ones, pick up a copy of our free guide, 'Evaluation of Web Sites' from any UEL library.

Of course, your primary port of call for quality information should be the library's resources - high-quality academic databases such as PsycINFO, our book stock and so on. However, sometimes the web can be useful for finding other information. So, how do you find reliable, high-quality websites?

The answer is that there are many different ways. And the means I want to highlight today is through 'gateways' or 'directories'. These are alternatives to search engines where instead of searching across the whole web, you are searching across specially selected collections of websites, organised into categories (meaning you can either search or browse through the websites). In the case of Intute, these websites have been selected specifically with UK universities in mind. This means that all the websites you find through Intute have been 'verified' as being of academic quality, and, importantly, won't be primarily American websites (as is often the case with general search engines). Another example is Google Directory. You will need to be a little more careful with this one, but it is a large and growing directory which should give more reliable websites that a standard Google search as all websites have been handpicked. I would suggesting browsing the 'Psychology' section of Google Directory (the link is on the front page, under 'Science') - you will see that this then expands out into dozens of sub-categories of psychology which can then be browsed through for websites on that subject area.

One little health warning: even through Intute, Google Directory, Yahoo! Directory, dmoz, Best of the Web and other gateways and directories, you must always evaluate the information you find before using it in your research or assignments - just because it is more likely to be reliable doesn't mean it is reliable!