July 29, 2009
New at Intute
More kudos to Intute. The Intute consortium of seven universities in the UK, plus its partnerships with other educational institutions and libraries. continues to provide the world with splendid collections of web resources for faculty and students. Intute invests in reviewing and adding resources, adding self-study units, adding features such as MyIntute, and most recently improving the interface - again.
The new browse panel shows subject coverage much better through 19 subject headings from agriculture to veterinary medicine. These have been designed to "provide a simpler navigational structure and are aligned to university courses".
The Advanced Search makes selection of subject area, resource type, and country easier.
Search results now support some filtering: by resource type, and period. Intute invites ranking and comments of each result.
The main database consists of the catalogued and reviewed resources. But Intute can also be used to search the content of the resources it lists through a Google Custom Search (which it calls Harvester).
One of Intute's greatest strengths have been in the online tutorial guides in The Virtual Training Suite. Intute has added 31 new online tutorials to its collection of over 60 to orient students to the questions to ask and resources to use in a subject area. These go well beyond a tour of a few sites. A tutorial will alert a student to library materials, skills in study and research, variety of resources - journals, databases, communication, current awareness.
The Intute email about the Virtual Training Suite gave some background about changes to the content and style of the tutorials.
The feedback received indicated a growing recognition of the need to help students develop Internet research skills. It also suggested that helping students to understand peer-review was more important than ever in a Web 2.0 world of user-created content. We have re-written the tutorial content to reflect this, so the coverage of the four main sections of each tutorial is now as follows: 1) Tour – focuses on the academic information landscape on the Internet and aims to create a mental map for students of the key scholarly sources for their subject.2) Discover – offers updated guidance on how to find scholarly information online; choosing the right search tool and looks at the importance of developing a search strategy.
3) Judge – discusses how critical thinking can improve the quality of online research and provides guidance on how to judge which Internet resources are appropriate for University work.
4) Success – provides practical examples of students using the Internet for research – successfully and unsuccessfully, so that students can learn from the mistakes of others, as well as by example.
Frequent users will also benefit from the MyIntute account:
* Save records and searches
* Email alerts of new records from your subject area
* Export records to your web pages
Intute is on Twitter too -- http://twitter.com/intute/
This is a remarkable achievement in a time of declining budgets and general neglect of scholarly centres. Intute not only maintains its collection but it stays in step with technology changes and social web practices.
Posted by Gwen at July 29, 2009 04:35 PM