Practical hints about online searching
We cannot give a simple, universal recipe valid for all online services.
The best approach on one service, may be useless on others.
 Besides, recommendations will
vary considerably depending on whether you want "focused searches" designed
to find and retrieve a specific set of documents providing a specific set
of information, or "satisficed searches" designed to find just some hits
that are "good enough" regardless of the source.
On some services, searching
starts by selecting databases or type of source. This may help you get rid
of some irrelevancies. On other services, this selection is assumed.
The next step is to enter
your search words (or text strings), and a valid time frame (as in "between
1/1/90 and 1/1/91"), where such an option is available.
Here are some sample search
terms used on the net:
SONY AND VIDEO The term SONY and the term VIDEO. Both
words must be present in the document
to give a match.
VIDEO* search for all words starting with
VIDEO. "*" is a wild-card character
referring to any ending of the word.
VIDEO* matches words like VIDEOTEXT
and VIDEOCONFERENCE.
SONY WITHIN/10 VIDEO Both words must be present in the text,
but they must not be farther apart than
ten words. (Proximity operators)
IBM OR APPLE Either one word OR the other.
Some services have adjacency operators, and some automatic truncation. Truncation
allows searching on different word endings or plurals with the use of a
truncation wild card symbol. For example, if the truncation symbol is *,
then the search term econ* will return items that contain economics, economy,
economic, and econometric. Car* will return items that contain cars and cartoon,
so it is advisable to use truncation symbols carefully.
Many services let you reuse
your search terms in new search commands. This may save you time (and money),
when you get too many hits. For example: if IBM OR APPLE gives 1,000 hits,
limit the search by adding "FROM JANUARY 1st.," or by adding the search word
"NOTEBOOK*".
Most services offer full online
documentation of their search commands. You can read the help text on screen
while connected, or retrieve it for later study. Expect the quality of these
texts to be variable, but browse them all the same.
Make a note about the following
general tricks:
The use of ANDs and ORs
is called Boolean searching. It allows search terms to be put into logical
groups by the use of connective terms.
Using AND, OR,
and NOT search operators may seem confusing at first, unless you already
understand the logic. Here are some hints that you may find helpful:
Use the Boolean operator AND
to retrieve smaller amounts of information. Use AND when multiple words must
be present in your search results (MERCEDES AND VOLVO AND CITROEN AND PRICES).
Use OR to express related
concepts or synonyms for your search term (FRUIT OR APPLES OR PEARS OR BANANAS
OR PEACHES).
The purpose of NOT is avoid
listings of irrelevant records. Be careful when using this operator. NOT
gets rid of any record in a database that contains the word that you've "notted"
out. For example, searching for "IBM NOT APPLE" drops records containing
the sentence, "IBM and Apple are computer giants." The record will be dropped,
even if this is the only mention of Apple in an article, and though it is
solely about IBM.
Use NOT to drop sets of hits
that you have already seen. Use NOT to exclude records with multiple meanings,
like "CHIPS Not POTATO" (if you are looking for chips rather than snack foods).
Often, it pays to start with
a "quick-and-dirty" search by throwing in words you think will do the trick.
Then, look at the first five or 10 records, but look only at the headline
and the indexing. This will show you what terms are used by indexers to describe
your idea and the potential for confusion with other ideas.
Use proximity operators to
search multiword terms. If searching for "market share," you want the two
words within so many words of another. The order of the words, however, doesn't
matter. You can accept both "market share" and "share of the market."
Relevance ranking, and more
Some claim that boolean searches only find between 20 - 25 percent of the
relevant information. The problem is that you must know the terms to search
on before you begin. Many people don't know these terms and cannot guess
them.
Several online services are
busy trying to supply better "search engines" using techniques like natural
language searching, relevance ranking, concept searching, automatic subject
grouping, and more.
Relevance ranking tries to
measure how closely the retrieval matches the query, usually in quantitative
terms between 0 and 100 or 0 and 1,000. It usually provides a ranked listing
of search results, with a score for the relevance of the result, based on
the occurrences of the terms used and also their position in the document.
It provides somewhat the same results as AND searching. Also, it offers the
benefits of OR searching as all the terms in a query need not be present
in the result.
Alta Vista offers both boolean
and enhanced relevance ranking searches. For example, you can require that
selected terms be found in the results. The query "+apples +bananas oranges"
will not find a document missing the words apples and bananas. Those files
that contain oranges will listed before those that do not contain this word,
but files without this word will also be listed.
Some services let you search
specific types of information. For example, Alta Vista allows searches for
characters or words in an URL (a Web address), or a hyperlink.
Application: My Web pages are at http://home.eunet.no/~presno/. The query
"+link:eunet.no/~presno/ -url:eunet.no/~presno/" will most likely find all
links to my pages on other Web servers except my own. The "-" character in
front of a word works as a NOT operator. The "link:" phrase is for searching
in hyperlinks across the Internet. The "url:" code lets you search in the
URL addresses of the found pages.
Key Word In Context (KWIC) searching will return the key word and N words
near the key word to give the user the context in which the key word was
found.
Phrase Searching allows searching
of phrases when available. Note that some systems can be confusing if you
think "Online World" is searching the two words together as a phrase, when
in fact the engine is searching Online OR World.
Fuzzy searching is another
interesting concept. This option allows you to search when you don't know
the exact spelling of the word. Some systems use the Soundex algorithm invented
over 70 years ago to search name files. Names that sound alike should have
the same Soundex number. It uses these basic rules:
-
Vowels are ignored.
-
Consonants that sound alike in a pronounced name have the same "number".
-
Successive consonants with the same number are counted as one (Willitt is
equal to Wilith).
Note: Information in English may be just a small part of that available
in a country's national language. When English language sources fail to meet
the need at hand, consider the services of a skilled bilingual searcher.
Spelling errors are very common
reasons for search failures. Make sure you have that terminology term or
person's name right. Also, names are not spelled the same way in all countries,
and those who produce texts also make spelling errors. For example, the name
of the composer Tchaikowsky is supposedly spelled in 36 different ways on
the nets. 'Ciaikovsky' is one of them.
Important: Some users get so fascinated by advanced methodology
used by a search engine that they forget the purpose of the task: to find
good and relevant information. If a search engine does not hold this information
in its database, then it having the best search features on the net does
not justify using it!
Bare Bones
101 is a collection of lessons designed to help users get their web
searches on the right track quickly and easy. The tutorial has 20 independent
lessons, addressing topics such as meta-searchers, subject directories,
evaluating sites, Boolean logic, and field searching. It offers overviews
of the most popular search engines.
Searching file libraries
The commands used to find files are similar to those used in traditional
databases. Often, you can limit the search by library, date, file name, or
file extension. You can search for text strings in the description of the
contents of a file, or use key words.
On the Internet,
the Virtual
Shareware Library is a favorite. It links to a front end which catalogues
about 120,000 software files available from the 22 largest shareware and
freeware archives on the Internet (1996). Its search engine lets you search
descriptions, locate, retrieve, or order files.
Narrow your search by stating
the desired hardware or software platform, as in Commodore Amiga, Atari,
MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, Novell Netware, IBM OS/2, Unix/Linux,
etc.
Use Boolean operators (AND
and NOT), specify case requirements, use wildcards (like *, | and ?), delimit
by file creation dates, demand matches in paths and file names, and limit
the size of the search report.
Using a program like Netscape,
just click on the desired files to have them transferred to your local disk.
Easy.
To search a huge database
of files on the Internet, try
FTP Search . In September
1996, their index contained over 62 million files.
FTP Search features advanced
search options to help you narrow down to the file you want, including case
insensitive/sensitive substring searches, limiting to a given domain and
path, as well as many formatting options.
On bulletin board systems,
there are many different search methods.
Example: You're visiting a bulletin board based on the BBS program RBBS-PC.
You want a program that can show GIF graphics picture files. Such files are
typically described like this:
VUIMG31.EXE 103105 07-15-91 GIF*/TIFF/PCX Picture Viewer
From left to right: file name, size in bytes, date available, and a 40 character
description.
You can search the file
descriptions for the string "gif". You do this by entering the term "s gif
all". This will probably give you a list of files. Some will have the letters
GIF in the file name. Others will have them in the description field.
CompuServe has several "Find this File" services.
Searching conferences and forums
On Usenet, it is easy. Simply connect to The Deja News Research Service above.
Many mailing lists maintain log files, and offer ways of searching them.
Often, you must be a subscriber to search, so it is more cumbersome. Many
services have commands for selective reading of messages. For example, on
CompuServe you can limit your search to given sections.
You can also select messages to be read based on text strings in the subject
titles. The command
rs;s;CIS Access from Japan;62928
displays all messages with the text "CIS Access from Japan" in their subject
titles starting with message number 62928. Most users have their programs
do this automatically for them. For examples, OzWin and TAPCIS handles this
well. Such message filtering is also common in Usenet newsreaders. For example,
the Free Agent program
from Forte Advanced Management Software, Inc. lets you go online to retrieve
message headers, mark off those you want to read, and then call back to retrieve
the selected message bodies.
Searching by email
When searching a database stored on another continent, then the speed of
response may be a problem. In such cases, note that several databases on
the Internet can be searched by email.
Reference.COM (Chapter
11) allows for searching of Usenet postings, while the Agora-servers
let you search many databases using World Wide Web by email services
(Chapter 12). MCI Mail and MCI Fax have a program called
Information Advantage, under which online services and newsletters can deliver
search results and other information over the online services.
Using discussion lists through the Internet
For instructions about how to get a directory of LISTSERV based mailing lists,
send the following email message:
To: listserv@listserv.nodak.edu
Subject: (keep this blank)
Text:
LIST GLOBAL
You will receive a LONG list of available sources of information. The list
dated March 8, 1996, had over twenty-three thousand lines. Each mailing list
is described with two lines. Here are some examples from the list:
Network-wide ID Host address and list description
AARWA-L listserv@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu
African & Africa Related Women's Assoc.(AARWA)
AAT-L AAT-L-request@LISTSERV.UIC.EDU
Art & Architecture Thesaurus Discussion List
ACADEMIA listserv@technion.technion.ac.il
Academia - Forum on Higher Education in Israel
BBS-TR listserv@vm.ege.edu.tr
BBS Listesi (Turkish)
CAPES-L listproc@listas.ansp.br
Grupo de discussao da CAPES
EUROTRI_CV majordomo@uv.es
Foro de las OTRIs de la Comunidad Valenciana
HIRIS-L listserv@icineca.cineca.it
HIgh Resolution Infrared Spectroscopy - List
The column "Network-wide ID" contains the names of the mailing lists. "Full
address and list description" contains the email addresses that members use
when submitting discussion items, and a short textual description of each
conference. Keep the list on your hard disk. This makes it easier to find
sources of information, when you need them.
Subscribing to mailing lists
These mailing list, also often called 'discussion list', work like online
conferences or message sections on bulletin boards, but technically they
are different. (Read about
Kidlink
in Chapter 2 for background information.) All these
lists are controlled by a program called LISTSERV on the host given under
"Full address" above. Thus, to subscribe or signoff to the AAT-L mailing
list above, write to
listserv@listserv.uic.edu.
Mailing lists offer "conferencing" with the following important functions:
-
All "discussion items" (that is, electronic messages sent to the lists' email
address) are distributed to all subscribers.
-
Messages are usually automatically stored in notebook archives. You can search
these log files, and you can have them sent to you as electronic mail.
-
Files can often be stored in the lists' associated file libraries for
distribution to subscribers on demand.
The term "Network-wide ID" signifies that you do not need to subscribe by
email to the host running a mailing list's LISTSERV. If there is a LISTSERV
on a host in a country closer to where you live, then you can subscribe to
this rather than to the remote. This helps keep the total costs of the
international network down.
Example:
You live in Norway. There is a LISTSERV in nearby Finland at
listserv@fiport.funet.fi. You
can send your AAT-L subscription request (SUBSCRIBE AAT-L FirstName LastName)
to this address, rather than to
listserv@uicvm.uic.edu.
Use the addresses in column two when sending messages to the other members
of the discussion lists, but DO NOT send your subscription requests to this
address!! Your mail will be forwarded to all members. Chances are that nothing
will happen, while everybody will see how sloppy you are. So, you subscribe
by sending a command to a LISTSERV. The method is similar to what we did
when subscribing to Infonets in Chapter 7. If your name
is Jens Jensen, and you want to subscribe to CAPES-L, send this message to
a LISTSERV:
To: (enter a preferred LISTSERV address here)
Subject: (You can write anything here. Will be ignored.)
Text: SUB CAPES-L Jens Jensen
When your subscription has been registered, a confirmation text will be returned
to you. Note that some mailing lists will ask you to return a subscription
confirmation before accepting. From now on, all messages sent to the list
will be forwarded to your mailbox. (Send "SIGNOFF CAPES-L" to this address
to unsubscribe from the mailing list.) Some lists will forward each message
to you upon receipt. Others will send a periodic digest (weekly, monthly,
etc.). To send a message to HIRIS-L, send to the address in column two above.
Send to
HIRIS-L@ICINECA.CINECA.IT
Review the following example. Most mailing lists will accept these commands.
Example: Subscription to the China list
CHINA-NN is listed as follows in the List of Lists:
CHINA-NN listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu (Peered)
China News Digest (Global News)
You can send your subscription request to
listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu.
Scandinavians may subscribe by mail to
listserv@fiport.funet.fi. North
American users can also send their mail to
listserv@listserv.nodak.edu.
If your name is Winston Hansen, write the following command in the TEXT of
the message
SUB CHINA-NN Winston Hansen
When you want to leave CHINA-NN, send a cancellation message like this to
the LISTSERV where you subscribed:
To: listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu
Subject: (nothing here)
SIGNOFF CHINA-NN
If you subscribed through listserv@fiport.funet.fi, sending the SIGNOFF command
to listserv@asuvm.inre.asu.edu will get you nowhere. Send to
listserv@fiport.funet.fi. Never send the SIGNOFF command to the discussion
list itself! Always send to the LISTSERV.
Note: If the mailing list
has a web page with a public message archive, then it may be easiest to subscribe
from this page. At the
CHINA-NN list archive page, just hit "Join or leave the list (or change
settings)."
Searching mailing list log files
Many mailing lists maintain logs of messages sent through the list. Search
commands differ both by mailing list system, and version number. Check with
the administrator or other members of your lists about how to search these
resources. To search mailing list log files controlled by
listserv@listserv.nodak.edu,
send an email with the following command in the text of your mail:
search <keyword> in <list name>
Replace <keyword> with your desired search term, and <list name>
by the name of the list. Example: To find all messages in the log files of
the
Kidlink mailing
list containing the word "janeiro" (as in Rio de Janeiro), send the following
command to the Listserv's email address:
search janeiro in Kidlink
The Listserv returns the following type of report (Abbreviated. Only the
first hit is shown below):
From: "L-Soft list server at North Dakota HECN (1.8c)"
> search janeiro in kidlink
-> 15 matches.
Item # Date Time Recs Subject
------ ---- ---- ---- -------
000373 93/10/06 00:06 54 The first response from France
To order a copy of these postings, send the following command:
GETPOST KIDLINK 373
>> Item #373 (6 Oct 1993) - The first response from France
I will also give speeches in Maceio (the site of the
Portuguese language KIDLINK forums), Rio de Janeiro,
^^^^^^^
and Goiania/Goias. A lot of fun!
You could also restrict searches like this:
SEARCH search_string IN KIDLINK SINCE 96/01/01
SEARCH search_string IN KIDLINK WHERE SENDER CONTAINS NATHAN
The Usenet resource
Some interesting Usenet information articles are being posted regularly.
We call these articles Frequently Asked Questions texts, or just FAQs.
They tend to be useful both for novice and experienced users, and usually
fall into one of these groups:
-
How-to articles explaining the basics and fine points of network usage,
standards, etc. Examples: "How to Read Chinese Text on Usenet," and "How
to find more information about blues and jazz."
-
Introductory notes about one or more newsgroups, covering policies for
submissions to that group, usage, etc. Common questions and answers pertinent
to a newsgroup(s).
-
Indexes of archives, or pointers to archives for various groups. Periodic
newsletters, calendars, pointers to publications. Examples: "PostScript
interpreters and utilities index," "Index to the rec.radio.amateur.* Supplemental
Archives," and "FidoNet Newsletter."
-
Statistical information and reports about Usenet; tables of Usenet hosts,
links, etc.
-
Miscellany, including small useful sources, "fun" lists, and more.
The resource at
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/
provides an alphabetic list of all Usenet FAQs found in the
news.answers newsgroup. Many of these FAQs
are presented in the same format as they appear in the newsgroup, while others
have been further processed and split into additional documents. Click on
individual FAQs to read. The list of newsgroups and mailing lists is available
on hosts that run Usenet News or NetNews servers and/or clients in the
news.lists news group. The members of
news.newusers.questions and
alt.internet.access.wanted
will readily accept your help requests.
Other sources available through the Internet
The Galaxy service
offers: Search Galaxy Pages, Find Galaxy Entries, Search the World Wide Web,
Search Gopher Space, Search Hytelnet Services (includes traditional ``top-down''
interface), and has pointers to searchable indexes and databases at many
other sites.
Free vs. commercial sources: On commercial online services, the profit
motive provides continuous pressure to keep data plentiful and approachable.
On the Internet, the information you'll find is there often because of someone's
good will. So, unless the resource is sponsored or commercial in another
another way, beware of outdated information.
The Northern Light Search Engine's
"Special Collection" is a database of more than 8 million books, magazines,
journals, newswires and databases that aren't generally available via the
Web (1999). Many of the publications are dating from January 1995. Searching
the database is free, but there is a modest fee for documents actually retrieved.
The list of sources is sorted
by Arts & Entertainment, Business, Books & Literature, Careers, Cars,
Computers, Education, Fashion, Food & Cooking, General Reference, Health
& Fitness, History, Hobbies, Home Electronics, House, Investing, Kids,
Military, News, Parenting, Product Information, Politics, Science, Special
Interest, Sports, Vacations.
Their General Reference group
includes Africa News Service, African Affairs, Aging, Asian Folklore Studies,
Asian Survey, Business Wire, Collier's Encyclopedia, Compass Middle East
Service, East European Politics & Societies, East European Quarterly,
Economic Geography, Europe, Europe- Asia Studies, Futurist, Germanic Review,
Greece & Rome, Inter Press Service, ITAR/TASS News Agency, Journal of
Asian & African Studies, Journal of European Studies, Journal of
International Affairs, Journal of Palestine Studies, Latin American Research
Review, MEED Middle East Economic Digest, NACLA Report on the Americas, Pacific
Affairs, Russian Life, Russian Review, Scandinavian Studies, SwissWORLD,
UPI, World Press Review, Xinhua News Agency, Ziff-Davis Wire Highlights,
and more.
Northern
Light Search Alert is free service that will notify users via email
whenever new information meeting their search criteria is found in Northern
Light's daily updates to its database. After setting up a free Northern Light
account, users can enter their own topic for Search Alerts or choose from
a number of topics listed on the advanced search forms. From the email
notification, users can launch a results list with the new information, although
Special Collections articles may only be read after paying a fee.
The Electric Library has more
than 1,000 publications in its archive (1996). Users can enter a plain English
question to search over 900 full-text magazines, over 150 full-text newspapers,
over 2,000 complete works of literature (Shakespeare, Monarch Notes), 20,000
photographs, news wires, television and radio transcripts, book, movie and
software reviews, and Compton's Encyclopedia. They also have a dictionary,
thesaurus, almanac, fact books, and more.
Getting more out of your magazine subscriptions
To garner new subscribers and keep current readers, magazine publishers turn
to online services to create an ancillary electronic version of their print
product. Their readers are being transformed from passive recipients of
information into active participants in publishing.
You can "talk" with PC Magazine's
writers through ZiffNet on
CompuServe. Their forums function as expert sources. Here, you will often
learn about products and trends sometimes before the magazines hit the newsstand.
Time magazine has a forum on America Online. There,
readers can discuss with magazine reporters and editors, and even read the
text of entire issues of Time electronically before it is available on
newsstands.
Stanford University's
HighWire Press
lets you search in the full text of hundreds of thousands of science
articles.
Time Warner's
Pathfinder provides the full text
of Time magazine, including a feature called Time Daily, updated with the
latest stories each evening around 8 p.m. ET.
PC Magazine (U.S.A.) is one
of those magazines that arrives here by mail. We butcher them, whenever we
find something of interest. The "corpses" are dumped in a high pile on the
floor. To retrieve a story in this pile is difficult and time consuming,
unless the title is printed on the cover. Luckily, there are shortcuts. Connect
to ZD Net Search. Here, you can search for stories.
Once you have a list with title references, turning the pages gets much easier.
However, as the articles are in full text, you may not want to hit for the
floor at all.
FindArticles.com
offers free access to the full-text of articles published in over 300 magazines
and journals dating from 1998. Users can search the database by keyword and
subject categories (Arts & Entertainment, Computers & Technology,
Reference & Education, Sports, and more).
On
CompuServe,
ZiffNet offers Computer Database
Plus. It lets you search through more than 250,000 articles from over 200
popular newspapers and magazines. The oldest articles are from early 1987.
Their database is also available on CD-ROM, but the discs cover only one
year at a time.
CDP contains full-text from
around 50 magazines, like Personal Computing, Electronic News, MacWeek and
Electronic Business. Stories from the other magazines are available in abstracted
form only. To search, you pay extra per hour. In addition, you pay a fee
per abstract and per full-text article. These fees are added to your normal
CompuServe access rates.
ZiffNet also offers Magazine
Database Plus, a database with stories from over 130 magazines (1994) covering
science, business, sport, people, personal finance, family, art and handicraft,
cooking, education, environment, travel, politics, consumer opinions, and
reviews of books and films.
The magazines include:
Administrative Management, Aging, Changing Times, The Atlantic, Canadian
Business, Datamation, Cosmopolitan, Dun's Business Month, The
Economist, The Futurist, High Technology Business,
Journal of Small Business Management, Management Today, The Nation, The New
Republic, Online, Playboy, Inc., Popular Science, Research & Development,
Sales & Marketing Management, Scientific American, Technology Review,
UN Chronicle, UNESCO Courier, U.S. News & World Report, and World Press
Review. (In Chapter 11, we present another
ZiffNet magazine database: the
Business Database Plus.)
Magazine Index (MI), from
Information Access Company (U.S.A.) covers over 500 consumer and general-interest
periodicals as diverse as Special Libraries and Sky & Telescope, Motor
Trend and Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone. Many titles
go as far back as 1959.
Although most of the database
consists of brief citations, MI also contains the complete text of selected
stories from a long list of periodicals. It is available through several
commercial vendors.
The
Ei Compendex database (Ei CPXWeb) from
Engineering Information offers information on various disciplines of engineering,
from marine to chemical to electrical to nuclear. Over 3 million summaries
of journal articles and conference proceedings, and 220,000 new additions
every year.
What to do if you have so
many references to a given magazine that you want to check it out? Try
the Electronic Newsstand. It has
links to over 2,000 magazine sites (1996). If you like, you can subscribe
(with discounts) to over 300 of them.
Finding that book
Many libraries are accessible through the Internet. For a list of links to
library web servers, look up
Libweb, or
webCATS. Both Libweb
and webCATS have geographical indexes with links to libraries in Africa,
Americas, Asia/Pacific Rim, and Europe/Middle East. Also, check the
Searchable Bibliographies
& Major Library Catalogs page.
Some libraries can be searched
by Internet mail. This is the case with
BIBSYS, a database
operated by the Norwegian universities' libraries.
I am into transcendental
meditation, and therefore constantly look for books on narrow topics like
"mantra." To search BIBSYS for titles of interest, I sent a mail to
genserv@pollux.bibsys.no. The
search word was in the subject title of the message. By return email, I got
the following report:
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 93 13:54:18 NOR
From: GENSERV@POLLUX.BIBSYS.NO
Subject: Searching BIBSYS
Search request : MANTRA
Database-id : BIBSYS
Search result : 5 hits.
The following is one of the references that I forwarded to my local library
for processing:
Forfatter : Gonda, J.
Tittel : Mantra interpretation in the Satapatha-Brahmana
/ by J. Gonda.
Trykt : Leiden : E.J. Brill, 1988.
Sidetall : X, 285 s.
I serie : (Orientalia Rheno-traiectina ; 32)
ISBN : 90-04-08776-1
1 - UHF 90ka03324 - UHF/INDO Rh III b Gon
The Russian State Library
has a books by e-mail system that lets readers around the globe read any
of its 42 million books, manuscripts and documents at the click of a mouse.
All it takes is by paying a few cents per page. They send maximum 40 percent
of a book.
The Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture Resource Center is a bibliographic site devoted
to the culture of twentieth-century China. It contains: (1) lists of translations
of modern Chinese literature; (2) bibliographies of literary studies, media
studies, visual arts, education, and music; (3) lists of important journals
in the field (with links to their websites); (4) announcements, lists of
relevant associations and institutions; (5) an image archive; (6) links to
Chinese e-text; (7) relevant internet resources; (8) links to websites of
university course; and (9) information on how to join the associated MCLC
mailing list.
The British Library
is at http://www.bl.uk/.
"Book Lovers: Fine Books and
Literature" has links to writers and poets, libraries, publishers
and booksellers, both of new and second hand/antiquarian books.
The Complete Guide to
Online Bookstores is a handy guide to the net's offerings. Their
list is broken down into categories like: Academic bookstores, Alternative,
Archive, Australian, Automotive, Business & Career, Children's, City,
Computer & Technical, Cooking, Co-Ops & Book Trading, Gay & Lesbian,
General, German, Health & Nutrition, How-To, Israeli, Irish, Martial
Arts, Medical & Chiropractic, Multilingual, Museum, Mystery & Fantasy,
Future Fantasy, Nature, Organizational, Photographic, Progressive, Rare Books,
Religious, Special Interest, Spiritual, Swedish, Travel, University &
College, and more.
Roswell Computer Books Ltd.'s
online book store in Canada has a large database of titles.
The Internet Book Shop in
the United Kingdom offers over 750,000 (1995), while
Book Stacks Unlimited offers over
410,000 titles. Search online, read book reviews, enter order and credit
card information to have the books shipped. They also offer several free
virtual volumes. Amazon.com claims
over 1.5 million titles. For yet more books, check
http://www.barnesandnoble.com.
For more on science fiction,
browse William Gibson's self-destructing electronic book
"Agrippa".
OCLC's
WorldCat is a reference database
covering books and materials in libraries worldwide. Their Online Union Catalog
(OLUC) is the world's largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database.
The Peking University Library
(Beijing, China) contains about 4,500,000 items. It includes 2,700,000 items
in Chinese and 900,000 items in different foreign languages. There are also
650,000 volumes of periodicals and other documents and 160,000 rare books.
The National Library of China (NLC) is at
http://www.nlc.gov.cn/etext.htm.
Bookworms may appreciate
the DOROTHYL
list, and especially if they like Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey
and Dorothy L. Sayers. The Mark Twain forum
(TWAIN-L) is
at listserv@yorku.ca.
For Stephen King, check
out
http://www.wco.com/~pace/king.html.
Usenet has alt.fan.holmes, and there is
a "Sherlockian
Connection" Web page with many links.
The Internet Poetry
Archive brings selected poems from several contemporary poets in
different languages, including text, photo of poet, voice of poet reading
the poem, select bibliography, and brief biographical note.
If you are into Very Rare
Books, visit the
Vatican Library, one of the world's oldest and most tightly restricted
libraries. Founded in the mid-1400s, the library houses over 150,000 manuscripts
and a million printed books, including 80,000 books published during the
first fifty years of the printing press.
Digital images of several
full printed volumes, manuscripts, and artworks are gradually being made
available through the Internet. 200 of its most precious manuscripts, books,
and maps -- many of which played a key role in the humanist recovery of the
classical heritage of Greece and Rome, is available.
If quite impossible to locate
a given book, try EXLIBRIS,
the
Rare Books and Special Collections Forum.
The Bibliophile Mailing
List is for collectors and sellers of old, rare, scarce, and/or
out-of-print books. It is a forum for buying, selling, and trading books.
On Usenet, they have
alt.books.reviews,
k12.library,
alt.books.technical,
rec.arts.books, and more.
Online books
You needed strong muscles to read the earliest books. In ancient Babylonia
and Assyria, books consisted of numbered collections of rectangular clay
tablets. They were inscribed with cuneifom and packaged in a labeled container.
Taking a book from the shelf and carrying it to a reading table required
the help of several assistants.
Today, you'll find full electronic
versions of books on the World Wide Web and in other types of Internet archives.
The first issue (version 1.0)
of this virtual book is one example. You can find it in the archives of Project
Gutenberg. You can retrieve it to your disk for later reading, or read it
with your Web browser.
Project Gutenberg's offerings include
The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, Aesop's Fables, The Unabridged Works
of Shakespeare, The Love Teachings of Kama Sutra, Tarzan, The Oedipus Trilogy
(Sophocles), Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee, Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, Peter Pan, The Holy Koran, Roget's Thesaurus
(1911), Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and The World Factbook (CIA).
The Electronic Text
Center offers a collection of thousands of English, French, German,
Japanese, and Latin texts.
The Alex Catalog
of full-text Electronic Texts gives pointers to more offerings. The
catalogue is divided into Search the catalog, Browse the catalog (by author,
date, host, language, subject, or title), and Information about cataloging
Internet resources.
Books in other languages
On the Internet, there are a rapidly growing number of library online
public-access catalogs (OPACs) from all over the world. Some provide users
with access to additional resources, such as periodical indexes of specialized
databases. More than 270 library catalogs are online (1992).
For Chinese books in Chinese
(and in English language), check
the China International
Book Trading Corporation.
Non-Chinese speaking people
will probably classify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many of them are impossible
to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters, and you
know their meaning. Interested? Subscribe to
the CHPOEM-L
mailing list. Be prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias
OneLook Dictionaries, The Faster
Finder, lets you search words in several dictionaries and glossaries
in one operation. By March 1999, it had 2,299,280 words in 461 online
dictionaries indexed. A search for "backbone" returned definitions in six
specialized dictionaries.
Your search may be limited
to specific dictionaries/glossaries sorted in groups like Computer/Internet,
Science, Medical, Technological, Business, Sports, Religion, Acronym, and
General Dictionaries.
The
Xrefer reference search engine
meta-searches and cross-references several encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri,
books of quotations, and a number of subject-specific titles. After a simple
keyword search, initial returns consist of a brief description and the source.
Full returns can vary significantly in length, some quite brief, with a useful
collection of cross-references and adjacent entries displayed on the right-hand
side of the browser window.
The Research Institute
for the Humanities in Hong Kong offers extensive links to reference
works, dictionaries and thesauri in many languages. Their offerings include
Chinese, Dutch, English, Esperanto, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese,
Latin, Norwegian, Qur'anic Arabic, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Welch
dictionaries; Dictionary of Acronyms; Quotations; Abbreviations for International
Organizations; History-related reference works; Philosophy-related reference;
Computer-related reference; White & Yellow Pages; Maps; Encyclopaedias.
A Web
of Online Dictionaries is another great resource. For example, it
contains :
BURMESE: Burm.-Eng.-Burm. On-line Dictionary. CHINESE: Chin. Character Dictionary
Web; A Chin. Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton by S.
L. Wong; Chin.-Eng.-Chin. Character Dictionary; Chin.-Eng.; Chin.-Japanese-Korean
Dictionary of Buddhist Terms; Chinlex Chin.-German Socio-Economics Dictionary;
Eng.-Chin. (gopher); Eng.-Chin. (PC-DOS download); Eng.-Chin.-Eng. Dictionary
of Commerce and Trade; Eng.-Chin.-Eng. Dictionary of Medical Terms; Eng.-Chin.
Dictionary; Guoyu Cidian Chin. Dictionary; Marjorie Chan's Index of Chin.
Online Glossaries and Dictionaries; World Wide Web CJK-Eng. Dictionary/Database;
Zhongwen Zipu Chin. Character Genealogy; Kingsoft Chin.-Eng.-Chin. On-line
Dictionary; Dictionary of Chin. Characters; Hakka Dictionary romanized (Dylan's
Sa Tdiu Gok Hak Ga Su Dien); Hakka Pronouncing Dictionary; I Ching Lexicon;
Kanji Base Query form (50,000 chars). TAIWANESE: Daiwan Way Taiwanese
On-lineDictionary; Modern Literal Taiwanese Dictionary. TIBETAN: Rangjung
Yeshe Tibetan-Eng. Dictionary (85,000 chars); Tibetan-Eng. Dictionary of
Buddhist Teaching and Practice; Jim Valby's Tibetan-Eng. DOS dictionary (FTP
download); Zhang-Zhung/Tibetan/Eng. Dictionary.
There's another comprehensive resource at
http://www.xlation.com/, and "an
annotated listing of dictionaries, glossaries and encyclopedias that have
some sort of version online or, if you will, a glossary of glossaries"
at
http://stommel.tamu.edu/~baum/hyperref.html.
The Places for
THINKers web has links to sources like Webster's Dictionary, Roget's
Thesaurus, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and FAQs about Copyright.
The real Roget's Thesaurus
of English Words and Phrases can be found at
http://www.thesaurus.com/.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations can also be searched at
http://www.search.com/Single/0,7,150425,00.html
and
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/.
You can also search
Webster's,
and Roget's
Thesaurus elsewhere.
I wanted quotes for a speech
for my wife's birthday, and entered "wife". Here are two examples of what
I found in Bartlett's:
Euripides. 484-406 B. C.
... Man's best possession is a sympathetic wife.
Plutarch. 46 (?)-120 (?) A. D.
... Pittacus said, "Every one of you hath his
particular plague, and my wife is mine;
and he is very happy who hath this only."
At Search.Com, you can also search
the Complete
Works of William Shakespeare,
the
Koran,
The
Bible, and The World Wide Web
Acronym
and Abbreviation Server.
Try
http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/HTML/Dictionaries.html
for more dictionaries.
Dictionaries and
Encyclopedias has links to Esoteric Dictionaries and Encyclopedias,
Technical English dictionaries, and some resources in other languages.
Assorted Encyclopedias
on the Web has a collection of links to various encyclopedias including
Biology, Environment, Medicine, Crafts, Hobbies, Sports, Cultures, Geography,
History, Economics, Finance, General Knowledge, Internet, Mathematics, Computing,
Mysticism, Mythology, Philosophy, Physics, Cosmology, Religion and Social
Sciences.
Research-It!
has free searching of dictionaries, thesauri, language translators, acronyms,
quotations, maps, phone numbers, postal information, package tracking, financial
info and more.
The UNESCO trilingual
Thesaurus (English/French/Spanish) contains more than 7,000 terms
for education; science; culture; social and human sciences; information and
communication; and politics, law and economics. It also includes the names
of countries and groupings of countries (political, economic, geographic,
ethnic and religious, and linguistic groupings).
At
the Phrase Finder
page , type in a word to get a list of phrases related -in some way-
to that word. The database includes: Lines from Shakespeare (or phrases related
to the word Shakespeare), Quotations (or phrases related to the word quotation),
and One-liner jokes.
Searching and reading well-known
encyclopedias like Grolier's Academic American in full text costs
money. Some services, like Dow Jones Interactive, will give you access at
discount prices.
The Concise Columbia Electronic
Encyclopedia has made over 17,000 articles from their Third Edition
searchable for free. (Related links turn the encyclopeida into a subject-oriented
front-end to the fee-based Electronic Library.)
The
Encyclopaedia Britannica's
32-volume set is available online for free . It also gives access to articles
from over 75 magazines. Detailed encyclopedia entries and articles (as well
as related books and Websites) for specific topics are accessed through the
keyword search engine at the top of the page. |
