WWW Resources for Research

The Internet is now emerging as an important tool for teachers and for the academic community. E-mail is probably the most commonly used medium at present, but is only the gateway to a larger world of information for scholars. Databases, for example, are providing increasingly easy access to information, and new on-line publications are challenging our conceptions of what it means to publish work. Researchers, publishers and other interested parties are involved in debating these rapid changes. On the one hand, there is a need to provide structure to support standards, on the other hand, it is important to be flexible to profit from this new forum.

To support research the Internet is used, first and foremost, as a source of information. As of September, 1999 there were 3.6 million websites on the WWW, with the largest 25,000 sites accounting for approximately 50% of content on the web. Finding accurate and useful information is, however, always a challenge with over a million sites are under construction or in a transitory state (OCLC, 1999: http://www.emarketer.com/estats/092099_size.html). Numbers are rising rapidly; out of the 3.6 million total sites, for example, 2.2 million offer publicly accessible content covering about 300 million web pages. This represents a considerable increase from 1997, when there were 800,000 similar sites.

Important online sources include pre-existing databases that have moved online, and new types of information sources such as web search engines, news and discussion groups, and online newsletters. Future Internet development may significantly enhance these resources. The All-In-One search page, for example, advertises over 500 of the Internet's best search engines, data-bases, indexes, and directories in a single site (William Cross, 1999: http:/www.allonesearch.com/). An example of the growing number of specialized search engines is the Manga Search Engine http://www.mangacenter.com/ specializing in seeking out anime and manga.

Search engines allow users to search for pages or sites that contain information on specific topics. Popular search engines include: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, and Webcrawler. Search engines are becoming increasingly fast and comprehensive. AltaVista Search, for example, boasts a 0.4 - 0.5 seconds average response time, and a 140 million page index http://www.altavista.com/av/content/about.htm.

Search engines often have clickable subject guides with headings, such as education or computers, which are useful for exploring general topics. The best way to locate specific information, however, is to use a key word search. These searches locate files in the search engine's databases and the results depend on the size of the database, frequency of update, and the search capability and design (Kansas City Public Library, 1999: ).

Different search engines have different properties aimed at making searches more efficient and effective. Most have Boolean connectors such as AND, OR, and NOT. Users can also include words using "+" and eliminate words with "-" in search engines such as AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, and Infoseek. Wildcards and truncation in WWW search engines usually involve using "*" after a minimum of three letters. Some have special features such as limits by date, format, or field when the information follows a full colon, as provided by AltaVista. Ask Jeeves allows for more concept-based, esoteric questions such as 'Why is the sky blue?" http://www.askjeeves.com/. Search engines are evolving rapidly and more detail-specific information on any of these search engines is available by browsing their help files on their sites.

One example of a database that provides annotated information on other resources of the Internet is The Scout Report http://wwwscout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/index.html. The Report is published every Friday both on the Web and through e-mail. The Scout Group consists of a team of professional librarians who select, research, and annotate resources on the Internet to provide readers with a fast, convenient way to stay informed. Under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation, the parent organization of the Scout Report, InterNIC, provides information about the Internet to the US research and education community. The group encourages organizations to link to the Scout page from their own Web sites, and also provides an HTML version of the Report each week via e-mail for local posting. In addition, the Scout gopher site provides an Internet directory and database services as well as a mailing list archive. The generous attitude of the Scout Report towards the sharing and distribution of information is a fairly common feature of sources presently on the Internet.

Newletters provide an important information service on the Internet. Consider the example of the Asian Studies WWW Monitor, which surfs Asian Studies' cyberspace and compiles summaries and evaluations of the latest web sites and other relevant online information systems with a focus on social sciences research. Subscribe by visiting website: http://coombs.anu.edu.au/asia-www-monitor.html. The newsletter is part of the Gateway to Asian Studies site with many links to information on Asia  http://iias.leidenuniv.nl/gateway/publications/onlinepub/index.html.

Discussion groups are also valuable providers of information both through their day-to-day deliberations and also through their archives. H-Net, for example, sponsors over 50 electronic discussion groups or "lists" by and for professional scholars in the humanities and social sciences http://www.h-net.msu.edu/lists/. In total the lists have over 18,000 subscribers in 54 countries. Each list is moderated by one or more scholars and has a board of editors. The groups are supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Michigan State University, and a team of volunteers. The group H-CLC, is an example of an H-NET newsgroup and provides an international electronic seminar on the application of computer-related approaches to literary studies.

Previously existing types of databases can often be overlooked on the Internet, yet for scholars they can provide a valuable resource. One indispensable type of database is one that links the computerized holdings of local and national libraries. The library science community has been at the forefront of exploring the resources of the Internet and the National Library Catalogues Worldwide is a good example of an overall site, which offers login access to national library catalogs in 38 countries http://www.library.uq.edu.au/ssah/jeast/.

Several of the large databases that were previously available only in the library or on CD Rom are now accessible through the Internet. Popular databases for researchers in the humanities include the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) http://ericir.syr.edu/, Modern Language Association (MLA)  http://www.mla.org/ and CARL UnCover http://www-lib.iupui.edu/erefs/carl.html as well as Sociological Abstracts (SA) and Language and Language Behavior Abstracts (LLBA) http://www.socabs.org/html/8websa.htm.

ERIC, as an example of the type of service available, offers a bibliographic database of more than 850,000 conference papers, reports, instructional materials, and research articles. ERIC was established in 1966, and is supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and the National Library of Education (ERIC, 1999).

CARL UnCover provides keyword searching of over 12,000 journals, listing over 1 million articles (from 1988). Searching UnCover is free and if you would like to order articles you can have them mailed or faxed to you for a fee (you will need a credit card for this service).

For full access to some of the commercial databases, researchers usually need an account with the particular service. It is, however, often possible to do a free limited searches and order articles for not much more than the cost of the copying and postage/faxing. Also, many libraries already have accounts and may let you order through their own systems. Governments are also interested in employing the Internet for dissemination of their reports and white papers. Government sites often include pointers to national government documents, state, county and local information, databases of statistics and international government information. The United Kingdom, for instance, has set up an official publications current awareness service that groups publications thematically and also offers title searches  http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bopcas/. While search engines will continue to dominate Internet searching, e Marketer http://www.emarketer.com/estats/092099_size.html notes an increase in e-mailed newsletters and web sites as a source for people searching information on the net. They also state that increasing numbers of web sites will filter information, aid searches and provide external links using human beings. Although more costly for companies to provide, human filtering agents, add vital layers of judgment and common sense to the process.

It is being argued in online discussion groups that the use of the Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, will change the way we access information and may affect the direction of the publishing industry. Opportunities like wider dissemination of information, instantaneous publication and feedback are weighed against uncertainties such as the need for a set of standards for citations and perhaps the future of print publishing. A brief overview of some of the issues involved are presented here.

E-magazines have recently emerged on the Internet. One advantage such publications have over print journals is their potential for increased circulation. Their possible audience is vast, there are over 62 million users in the U.S. alone and 1.3 million new users log on to the Internet in the States every month http://www.inet-profits.com/ofinterest.htm. These e-magazines, and the other myriad of Internet sources, are also increasingly able to make their findings available to readers, months or even years ahead of print journals.

Wired magazine is one of the most popular of these new e-magazines and bills itself as a "the voice of the digital revolution" and a "chronicler of the emerging future in culture, politics, business and technology" http://www.wired.com/wired/current.html. In Wired magazine online you can learn about technology and its impact on business and culture by browsing selections from the latest issue. Readers can also talk online with Wired's editors and other readers. Wired claims to be more than just a magazine—offering "everything from cutting-edge books to around-the-clock digital news, from the world's best search engine to the Web's hottest sites".

Another interesting initiative is the use of the net to disseminate affordable academic publications. The International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication ( ICAAP) is, for example, a Canadian project designed to provide an international alternative scholarly system of communication that operates outside of the commercial mainstream. ICAAP journals are, therefore, designed to be freeware or low-cost shareware publications http://www.icaap.org/.

Instant and continuous publication is another new feature of publishing on the Internet. On the Web information often changes frequently and without notice. This may be said to be true of "thought processes" in general and it may be argued that many journal articles artificially restrict authors to present their ideas as locked or finished. When accessing sites on the World Wide Web, readers are sometimes told that the page is under construction: something that is often not the case—or at least specifically stated as such, in a print journal. In an Internet publication, the developing nature of the ideas, combined with the ease of interaction with other interested parties, may mean that future evolution of research papers will be more fluid.

The almost instantaneous interactive nature of the Internet may mean that future papers will consist of a combination of the text form of a publication with conference-style discussions. Consider the following scenario. Instead of providing a series of short papers, authors in the future might create one larger, linked work that would allow them to continually update their research pages to take into account new input. This aspect of the Web might even change the idea of peer review. Papers may move to be more like discussion groups and ideas of individual scholarship may become blurred. This might, in turn, affect the way in which scholars are judged in terms of tenure.

Another important aspect of the World Wide Web is the instant retrieval of sources as provided by flexible linking. The equivalent for "quoting" on the Web is "linking" one page to another. Authors may wish to publish a work taking into consideration the "context" of the information, and thus be able to provide access to other documents in the same field. It is argued that this will, in time, affect the concept of the "independence" of a piece of work such as a journal article. Scholarly works will no longer be considered in isolation, but instead as gateways to other works. In the future, sources might be referred to by pointing to a central site that contains a link to the relevant document. When documents are interlinked, retrieval of sources can be instantaneous, allowing the reader to be more easily and rapidly aware of related work.

One pioneer publication, entitled Sociological Research Online, has undertaken to publish a number of "thematic issues" of the journal alongside their current issue (June 1999). These thematic issues have a Debating Forum attached to each. There is a discussion forum to encourage you to debate these issues, which can also be accessed from within each of the collections. The editors write: "You might like to read and contribute to these, and the other lively discussion areas which can be accessed from the Pinboard."

Changing patterns of carrying out and disseminating academic research will take time, but already the Internet is offering academics several important features. First, there is an increased ease of access to databases which makes it more convenient to search for and retrieve information. This service predominately provides for word-based and visual searches at present, but in the future may expand to include more concept-based and sound queries. After collecting information, researchers can then debate and discuss their new knowledge by subscribing to related electronic journals, read electronic newsletters and reports, and take part in numerous other activities online. This paper has only touched the surface of what is available in these areas. Next, after collecting and discussing information, a researcher may write a draft paper to post on a Web site or to distribute to an electronic conference. Feedback may then provide important information for editing and rewriting the document. This entire process can all take place at one networked computer.

The foundations for the future academic use of the Net are being laid now. New databases and information sources will be available to aid in research and the resulting papers will be presented in new ways. It is certain that the future will see new types of communication with less emphasis on the printed word and perhaps more focus on visual and sound information (the technology is, in fact, already here).

Taking advantage of the new forum is important but more crucial is the need for teachers and learners to be part of the process of the evolution of these future resources. This paper ends, therefore, with a call to researchers to influence the future development of the Internet. There is a need to explore the "frontier" of the World Wide Web such as its ability to relay pictures, sound and video. Linguists may wish to consider the potential uses of a databases of human speech complete with appropriate software. Ethnographers may wish to explore collections of discourse and visual materials. Instructors in general need to explore the way in which the Web can change the nature of research—change the nature of what it is as well as how it will be presented.