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Book ReviewsFind It Online, Fourth Edition : The Complete Guide to Online Research (Find It Online: The Complete Guide to Online Research) |
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Book: Find It Online, Fourth Edition : The Complete Guide to Online Research (Find It Online: The Complete Guide to Online Research)
Written by: Alan M. Schlein |
Publisher: Facts on Demand Press
Average Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5
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BETTER THAN GOOGLE or at least in addition to GOOGLE
Rating:
5 / 5
Alan Schlein is the guru of search and find online . An award winning journalist he knows how to navigate through cyberspace. He includes lots of pointers from industry experts and divides the chapters into easy to find sections ranging from a) search strategy to search tools to b) saving and downloading your results to scouring government documents and public records-- great for ancestry searches and wills and other legal documents to getting the latest in news resourcesonline. A fabulous addition for any business book shelf and it belongs on every researcher's desk. Plus his section on Privacy Protection and your identity is probably worth the price of the book alone. I know and have the honor of having met the author-- he's a sharp guy who continues to update this reference tool and really knows his stuff.
Superb Reference Lacking CD-ROM or Online Version
Rating:
4 / 5
This is the second of three basic guides by Facts on Demand press that I am very happy to have in my collection and to recommend to others.
Some really top-notch information brokers contributed to this book, and it is a superb reference, well-organized, that lacks a CD-ROM with clickable links or an Online Version to which access can be gained for a fee or from a password in the printed version.
This book is extremely well-developed to the point that it can meet the needs of a first-time researcher eager to become quickly familiar with the ins and outs of the Internet, as well as the more experienced professional that wants a handy reference work to suggest new sources and methods.
The other two books are Helen Burwell's "Online Competitive Intelligence"--the one book to buy if you can only buy one of these three books--and Sankey & Weber's "Public Records Online" (buy only if you have do work in this area or want to protect yourself by monitoring your divorced spouse's assets, etc.)
An excellent guide for research librarians
Rating:
5 / 5
It used to be that a good reference librarian had only to keep up with the new books being published, and perhaps keep one eye on the newspapers and learned journals. Nowadays, one has to keep track of where best to find the answers to questions on the Web, as well. And it ain't easy! Massive printed volumes of Web addresses weren't much help even a decade ago because they were indiscriminate and seldom included annotations. What we needed -- and still need -- are a few collections of a (relatively) few carefully selected germane Web sites with the reasons given for their inclusion. And this discriminating and well thought out guide is the best one I've seen yet. It's intended mostly for the professional information broker or commercial researcher-for-hire, but librarians in any large public or academic library system do much the same sort of thing and will profit enormously by reading it. After an excellent introduction to the principles of online research, it's divided into topical sections: government resources, public records, news sites, business tools, and international (i.e., non-U.S.) research. Then there are several sections on managing and filtering what you find, how to evaluate its credibility and utility, and privacy concerns. Schlein spends considerable time on fee-based and "hidden" resources, too, not just the freebies on the public Web. Some of the sites he recommends I was already aware of, but there are many others I hadn't run across before. And I have been recommending his advice on search strategies and information massaging to my colleagues. There are a couple of annoying things about this otherwise superior book, however. One is the need for much, much tighter copyediting -- like saying "the software can be moderated" when they meant "modified," and the sometimes eccentric punctuation, and the tendency to break Web addresses in peculiar places (letting only the last character of ".html" fall to the next line gives you a quite different address). The other annoyance is a tendency by the author to laud (frequently) any book published by his editors, associates, or advisors -- so much so that it becomes embarrassing. But given the high quality of the book's actual content, I suppose I can live with that.
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