The Best Sites for Conducting Online Research

In yesterday's posting I shared my opinions regarding the virtues of used book stores. Today I would like to introduce you to the Internet Era/cyberspace incarnation of such establishments that I have found to be useful or, on some projects, indispensable research assets.

Reliability of Sources and Citations

The stickier points of Internet-based research involve the questions of 1) what constitutes a reliable resource and 2) the proper method for citation of online resources.

As to question 1, the best advice I can give is that you familiarize yourself with the guidelines presented in Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask (maintained by the UC-Berkeley library). If you are researching as part of a classroom assignment, your instructor will discuss what he or she considers a reliable web resource.

As a rule of thumb, any time that you use information from a resource you must cite the source of that information. The recommended citation format varies but usually includes the author(s) name(s); title of the source; its place and date of publication, and the relevant page numbers. More specific information is available from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Chicago Manual of Style websites.

Required Software

If you want to download a book for reference or to read at your leisure from either Internet Archives (with certain exceptions, see below) or Google Books, you must have Adobe Reader installed on your computer. Fortunately, most computers now ship with this feature installed. If not, or if you want the latest upgrade, just follow the link given in this paragraph.

Books from Project Gutenberg are practically always available in plain text or XHTML 1.0 - / HTML 4.x - compliant formats. Stripped of the technical looking terms, this simply means that if you have a computer and a reasonably up to date web browser you can read anything available from their web site.

To read books from the Microsoft site you will have to download and install Microsoft Reader because, being Microsoft, they have to be different from everyone else on the planet. Fortunately, Reader is a tiny (by Microsoft standards) download and it doesn't eat up much memory.

My Personal Favorites

The Internet Archives

Of the web sites reviewed, Internet Archives is the across the board winner. As of today (April 3, 2008) it gives the visitor unrestricted access to 378,569 books/digitized printed materials; 242,630 audio files; 48,205 live concert tracks; 111,781 image/filmstrip items, and 33,650 software packages.

If the Archives has a weakness it would be that all the available materials are in the public domain. This usually means that an item's copyright has expired or that copyright restrictions have been released by the source's creator. This limits one's ability to search for recent information.

Google Books

This site, maintained by the 500-pound gorilla of the search engine world, doesn't come close to challenging the Internet Archives regarding the sheer amount of information available or in available formats. It does, however, beat the Archive in one important way: it has at last partial access to more recently-published books.

At Google Books there are three content divisions. First there is "full view," which presents the original work in a page by page manner identical to that used at Internet Archives. Next comes the "limited view" in which only portions of the books are available for online viewing. Finally there is the "snippet view" that will present only a few sentences, or even less, that contain key words from your original search.

Since this site is maintained by Google, you will find the usual Google ads splashed around the site giving you the "opportunity" to immediately purchase any book that catches your eye.

Project Gutenberg

This is the web project to first offer free online, and downloadable, copies of major literary works that were hard to locate or out of print. If you can't find what you need on the two previously mentioned sites, Gutenberg will sometimes have what you are looking for.

Microsoft - Microsoft Reader

This site presents only a fractional percentage of the information of the above mentioned web sites. I included it as a matter of interest to those that have, or plan to, publish in the electronic format. Like it or not, Mr. Softy is King Kong in a world of 500 pound gorillas.

There are, of course, hundreds of book sites on the Net. I selected the above sites for the benefit of those interested in online research and those of us that simply enjoy learning.

Happy reading.