Definition: 

Search like a pro by using openly-available tools for finding research materials, including specialized search engines, open content collections, shared bookmarks, and more.  Evaluate those materials for appropriateness and accuracy.

Tools:

• AnkaSearch: "AnkaSearch is a Meta Search and Deep Web Search Desktop tool. Apart from searching for pages, AnkaSearch also enables you to save selected downloaded pages, organize and manage the saved pages." (Free, Windows)
• BlueOrganizer: "BlueOrganizer adds a button to your toolbar with a menu that has been automatically personalized based on your browsing history. This menu contains contextual shortcuts to make all relevant information for books, music, movies, wines, recipes, stocks, and more just 1-click away."  (Free, Firefox add-on)
• CiteULike: "a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references"--find scholarly resources other researchers have added to their bibliographies (Free, web-based) [review]
• Dispute Finder: Firefox extension that allows "activists" to annotate disputed claims on web pages and "readers" to see those annotations and discover other points of view. (Free, Firefox add-on)
• Google Books: can search a large and growing collection of digitized books [review] (Free, web-based)
• Google Scholar: "can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations" (Free, web-based)
• Library LookUp: "Bookmarklets for looking up catalog records from book-related sites."  (Free, bookmarklet)
• LibX: "a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides direct access to your library's resources. " [review] (Free, browser plug-in)
• National Academies Reference Finder: "take a large block of text (from an article, a rough draft of a paper, a book chapter, a news story), and use it intelligently to 'find more like it.'" (Free, web-based)
• OAIster: "union catalog of digital resources...can be searched by Title, Author/Creator, Subject, Language or Entire Record"  (Free, web-based)
• Referencecenter.com: a mashup of various reference and research information that provides a deep dive into a given topic.
• SearchMe: a visual search engine; flip through results like album covers in iTunes (Free, web-based)
• Worldcat.org: a union catalog that searches collections of over 10,000 libraries worldwide (Free, web-based)

References:

• Evaluating the Quality of Electronic Texts, Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Fondren Library, Rice University. May 9, 2008.

See Also: