I'm going to take a look at this:
From: Meyer, H J
Sent: Thursday, September 14, 2006 3:37 PM
To: Senior Leadership - CSREES Distribution List
Subject: INTUTE Education and Research web site
To: All interested in web searching for quality information relating to international resources on research and education on the web….here is an international site hosted in the UK by a consortium of institutions. Try the INTUTE web site at http://www.intute.ac.uk/
Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research (their words, not mine!). The service is created by a network of UK universities and a host of partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in the database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 113, 329 records. Broader search results can be obtained by using the “Harvester” search capability which is created by running a software tool over each site listed in the main Intute database and indexing ("harvesting") more pages from that site. In some cases this may provide up to 100 additional pages from within a site, thus building a much larger database. The drawback is that the quality is likely to be lower, since not all the pages collected in this search have been screened for quality.
So, does using the Harvester search mean that bigger is better?
Yes, and no. You are likely to retrieve a larger number of results; but, the core resources in Intute have been specially selected by cataloguers and subject specialists, and the descriptions are provided by Intute site specialists. In the Harvester search, the descriptions are taken directly from the web pages so there is no guarantee on the quality of the information. Similarly, links are not checked or otherwise monitored in the Harvester as they are with the core Intute database.
The site has a reasonably good search utility. Areas covered include: 1. Science and Technology; 2. Arts and Humanities; 3. Social Sciences; and, 4.Health and Life Sciences. I can’t vouch for the quality of hits for your areas, but for entomology it is quite good. (It does pick up the really good entomology web sites at LGUs! In the core Intute search it collects 323 records and a Harvester search hits a whopping 2293 records.
Give it a try and see what you think for your area.
This information is brought to you via the Librarians' Internet Index at http://lii.org/. Look at this site too, if you haven’t already seen it.
Primary funding for LII is from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian. Other funders include the Washington State Library.
Copyright 2006 by Librarians' Internet Index.
Cheers,
Rick Meyer, PhD
National Program Leader, Entomology
Room 3470 Waterfront Centre
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Phone: 202-401-4891 FAX: 202-401-4888
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