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Thursday, November 27, 2008

Reflections (Week 6)

How much do you know about the invisible web (databases)?

Invisible web (databases) consists of information and resources that are "hidden" in the World Wide Web. In another words, these information and resources cannot be found using general search engines due to certain limitations. These resources include articles, abstracts and citations, etc.

An example of an invisible web (database) would be: Complete Planet.

My experience with using databases was a wonderful one.

Databases are more authoritative. Informative details such as the place in which the resource comes from, author, citation, year, abstract of the resource and subject, are provided in the search results. This helps to make the resources more reliable and useful as the full details about the resource are available, compared to search engines, meta search engines or subject directories, which give less details.

The search results are mostly scholarly literature and is thus informative. It provides me with alot of information that definitely does add value to my research. In the text, keywords of my search will also be highlighted. This makes it easier to read and identify whether the resource is relevant to my topic.

Apart from that, i have also learnt something new when using TP's databases to research for resources during EIR lesson.

Using TP's databases, the full-text of articles are given for certain articles. However, for those in which the text is not available, it provides a link to TP's library catalogue such that i would be able to know the location i can get the resource from.

In conclusion, I feel that databases are indeed useful in research purposes, especially since it is detailed and informative, which makes the resources highly reliable as well. Also, resources from databases are also valuable as they cannot be found using search engines, meta search engines or subject directories. Thus, it is effective to use databases for research purposes.

However, I feel that I cannot consider the use of databases to be more effective compared to search engines, meta search or subject directories, because in order to make the most out of the search facilities available on the Internet, databases cannot be used alone. If I were to use only databases for researching resources relating to my topic, I will not be able to benefit as my research will be an ineffective one consisting of resources only from databases alone.

Databases have to be used in combination with search engines, meta search engines and subject directories. This will then lead to a variety of resources from the different search facilities and hence make my research a fruitful one.

Hence, after learning about another new search facility – databases, I would definitely put this to good use by applying it to my Diploma.

I am really glad that I have learnt about databases, because a number of my subjects require me to find news articles and analyse the news articles, such as having to find two news articles for my Microeconomics Portfolio and conducting an economic analysis on the articles.

It is definitely not easy to find the relevant articles just by using search engines.

With databases, I am confident that I will be able to retrieve relevant articles and the articles will also be reliable since databases are authoritative.

Success in EIR! ;