Instructional Technology

Searching Earlham's 'Deep Web'

Earlham has a host of online databases available to faculty and students via the Library’s Databases page . These resources are only available to Earlham users and only from the earlham internet ‘domain’ , ie from on campus (but by logging in to a ‘proxy server’ we can make them available from outside Earlham). This class of services is generally known as the ‘Deep Web’.

Many of the references you can find are available as full text. However, the procedure for finding and using this information can be hair raisingly complex with up to three different interfaces involved. Let’s look at an example search of the biggest database we have, Academic Search Premier (operated by EBSCO):

Finding the database

Everyone knows how to get to Google. You know you want to search an online database, but how do you find it in the Earlham web site?

1. Starting on the Earlham home page, selecting Information Services -> Libraries is a logical choice.
2. Then we’re faced with Find Books & Media, Research and Online Reference. A quick pass of the cursor over these reveals Research -> All Databases as the way to go.
3. Which gets us to the Databases page in two clicks. Good.
4. Now we select Academic Search Premier.

The first thing we might be confused about is that page is not called ‘Academic Search Premier’ — this apparently is the name of the database itself — the site is ‘branded’ with the name EBSCO and has a green theme.

Using the search.

The interface we find is a lot more complex than Google’s and the tiny Database Help link does some work of explaining the whole system. But we don’t have time for all this, we just want to do a search. So we type in a unique name and get the first page of results:

and we click on the second title to get the citation.

What do we want to do with this? If it’s of any use in our course then we’d want to get it into Moodle. So we open up Moodle in a separate window and go to our course.

1. in the week or topic section that we’re doing this poem we pull down the Add Resource : Add link to web site menu
2. Name is ‘Astral poem’
3. Then for the Moodle summary box we’re interested in ‘Authors’, ‘Source’ and ‘Abstract’ fields, so we’ll highlight the chunk of text containing these fields from the EBSCO window, copy, and then paste them into the summary box in Moodle. Then we’ll go in and delete the table rows we don’t want.
4. Finally we want to add the URL link. Normally, the way to do this for most web sites is to take the address of the page from the address bar, and many faculty do this. However, this link will change with time and so should not be used. The URL to use is labelled ‘persistent link to this record’ and so a faculty has to remember this detail. The URL itself is not clickable so one cannot right-click and copy, you have to carefully select the text (including the http://), copy and then paste it into theLocation field in the Moodle resource window.

Full text?

Now we’ve been told that many journals have full text with them. But this one doesn’t seem to do this. However, we vaguely remember a Librarian muttering something about SFX, so we click on the SFX button and a new window pops up (if we haven’t disabled pop-ups for earlham.edu).

Now there’s a new red page with “Ex Libris” and “SFX services for this record”. We may be wondering at this point what ‘SFX’ means. But we notice that there’s a GO for Full Text, a GO for ‘holding information’ (more librarian-speak mumbo jumbo…), and a GO under Reference.

So we GO with the Full Text, and voila, there it is in yet another new window. But how do we make this poem available for students? Do we expect them to know to click on SFX and then the GO with Project Muse Standard Collection? Perhaps not. But we notice that the article is available as a pdf so with a right-click on [access article in PDF] we can save the poem as an acrobat pdf file to our local drive and upload it into Moodle.

URL to full text

But what if we just wanted the URL to the full text in order to paste it in to our Moodle resource? Perhaps the ‘save link for course page, syllabus or notes’ in the SFX window is what we want. However, even though this is in bold red type and looks like a link to click on , it doesn’t work as a link. We have to click the GO button. Yet another window pops ups and this time it’s a selectable link in a text box.

But what a URL; look how long it is!

http://sfx.palni.edu:9003/sfx_ec?genre=article;issn=01612492;isbn=;title=Callaloo;title=Astral.; volume=28;issue=4;date=20050901;spage=894;sid=EBSCO%3Aaph;pid=%3C authors%3ESmith%2C%20Tracy%20K.%3C%2Fauthors%3E%3Cui%3E19776718%3C%2Fui%3E%3C date%3E20050901%3C%2Fdate%3E%3Cdb%3Eaph%3C%2Fdb%3E

Now we have to copy this and paste it in to the Moodle Location field instead of the EBSCO persistent link we used before.

Thoughts

It’s hard to justify complaints that students and faculty use Google to search for full text resources when executing the same process through the Academic Premier Database involves three different user interfaces in three separate windows and a multitude of user decisions and probably false starts. In this search there were three different ‘brands’ to muddy the waters — EBSCO, SFX, Project Muse — and a host of unfamiliar terminology — ‘persistent link’, ‘holding information’, and search terms mostly unfamiliar to non-librarians. Each of these interfaces had usability issues — for example, text that looked clickable but wasn’t a link, and URL which should be selectable and copyable in a single click but wasn’t. It was not clear which was the ‘best’ URL to use to point to the full text and when we finally discovered it the URL text string was so long and convoluted that it was easy to make a mistake in copying and pasting. One character missing or added breaks the URL.

In fact, the process of discovering and using full text resources via Earlham’s deep web facilities has not changed much in complexity since we used Dialog via dial-up modems 15 years ago. One could argue that it’s now more complex.

Posted by markp at March 3, 2006 12:34 PM