Education 249 Communication: Interpersonal and Intercultural

Where Do You Want to Start?

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Finding Worthwhile Web Pages

Infomine
"INFOMINE is intended for the introduction and use of Internet/Web resources of relevance to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It is being offered as a comprehensive showcase, virtual library and reference tool containing highly useful Internet/Web resources including databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, listservs, online library card catalogs, articles and directories of researchers, among many other types of information. " (from their homepage) INFOMINE has its own internal search engine and includes over 20,000 sites. It is maintained by librarians at UC Riverside and other California universities.
SEARCH TIPS: AND default; can use OR; automatic truncation (use " " to turn off); use " " around phrases; can select fields to search.

Librarians Index to the Internet
Don't be put off by the initial clutter you see on the screen. It may not be snazzy, but it is efficiently organized, if you take a moment to look closely. Either browse that opening screen to your topic area or click on List of Subjects Used to be led to the best sites on the WWW. All entries are well annotated, so you know where you are going. Includes over 8000 sites.
SEARCH TIPS: AND default; can use OR, NOT, () also; use * to truncate; use " " around phrases; can select fields to search.

Scout Report Archives
This is "...only the best Internet resources, as chosen by the editorial staff of the Scout Report." (from their homepage). They provide superb descriptions of the sites chosen. There are 4 different ways to search their catalog, Quick and Advanced key word searching and browsing by Library of Congress Subject Heading and by the Cyrus Classification scheme. Try all four! SEARCH TIPS: Use ADVANCED mode; AND, OR, or NOT; use " " around phrases; use * for multiple character truncation & ? for single.

Britannica Web's Best
About 150,000 web sites, hand-picked, annotated, and ranked by Britannica's editors.
SEARCH TIPS: OR default, but can use AND, ( ), ADJ (within 15 words); can use + to require & - to remove; use * to truncate; use " " around phrases.

Santa Clara University's Diversity Homepage has information on major local ethnic groups. Click on the link, Santa Clara Valley and Diversity and find links to local resources arranged by 6 major ethnic groups, African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Middle Eastern Americans and Native Americans. Included is information about history and demographics of the specific community as well as links to organizations, publications, cultural groups & events, famous people, and more!

Academic Info
This is another directory tailored to the academic community. Especially interesting is the Digital Library, which you can browse by subject for fulltext sources.
SEARCH TIPS: OR default; can use AND, OR, NOT & ( ); no truncation; no phrase searching; no field searching.

Bubl
This is another excellent web directory oriented towards the academic community. Bubl, though, is from Strathclyde University in England, so it does have a somewhat British orientation. It also has the novel capability of browsing by Dewey Decimal classification!

Education World
This is a very large (over 500,000 sites) searchable web subject directory directed at educators. Check out both their Advanced Search screen and their browsable topics page before deciding how to use it. You will also find original content produced for the site, relevant daily news reports, employment listings, and more very useful stuff for teachers. Be sure to see their annual "Best of..." series pages.

Searching the Education Literature

Oscar is the library's online catalog. Don't forget about old-fashioned books! They can still often be your best sources. From Oscar, too, you can search a combined catalog of more than a dozen other colleges and public libraries through a service called Link+. Look for the Link+ button on the Oscar screens to move into that catalog. The nice thing about Link+ is that these books are available to you very quickly thanks to vans that drive around from library to library moving books! If you find something you want on the Link+ catalog (could be something we don't have here or something that is checked out or missing here), just follow the instructions for requesting it right there on the computer. It'll come to the Circulation Desk here in Orradre in a couple of days.

Search Tips for Oscar:

• Choose KEYWORD searching rather than SUBJECT from the Oscar Main Menu.
• Use only words that are loaded with meaning, not articles, prepositions, very common or ambiguous words. Nouns are usually best!
• Uuse phrases only if you must. For example, try the phrase intercultural communication, but, if you don't get much, think about separating it into keywords by putting an and between them (See further details below).
• Always truncate, using *, to pick up possible plural endings, like school/schools as well as other variable word endings, as in cultur*, which would get culture, cultures, cultural, culturally.
• Use the Boolean and to combine multiple ideas, like this: communicat* and parent* and teacher*
• Use the Boolean or to allow for different ways of expressing one component idea, as in this complex statement: communicat* and parent* and teacher* and (asian+ or chinese or vietnamese)

ERIC is the master education information database. It is your guide to professional and scholarly education journal articles, some books and dissertations and a true goldmine called ERIC Documents. This is a very sophisticated database. Searching it well takes some thought, effort, and time. You're in luck, though! We have a very handy electronic guide to searching ERIC called Tips for Searching ERIC on the WWW. Use it!

Education Abstracts is another very valuable index to journals in education. Although it doesn't cover as many journals as ERIC, it does tend to be more current, and you will find articles in here that, for some reason, don't get caught in ERIC. It is worth your while to use it. Read the Search Tips below first, though!

SEARCH TIPS:

• Use only words that are loaded with meaning, not articles, prepositions, very common or ambiguous words. Nouns are usually best!
• If you must use phrases, you have to insert a w between the words, as in: intercultural w communication
• Truncate to pick up possible plural endings using a + sign, as in school+
• Truncate to pick up other variable word endings using the *, as in cultur*, which would get culture, cultures, cultural, culturally.
• Use the Boolean and to combine multiple ideas, like this: communicat* and parent* and teacher*
• Use the Boolean or to allow for different ways of expressing one component idea, as in this complex statement: communicat* and parent* and teacher* and (asian+ or chinese or vietnamese)

Citing Your Literature and Web Pages APA Style

PsychWeb has an APA Style Resources guide that links to a variety of sources of information on citing APA style, both your print resources and online or web resources.