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Go BackWELL FACTSHEETFinding Water and Sanitation Information on the Internet Author: Ingeborg Krukkert, March 2006 Quality Assurance: Kristof Bostoen and Caroline Hunt For many people, the Internet has become the
first medium to turn to when they need information.
Water and sanitation professionals are no different.
Currently there are around 1 billion Internet users
worldwide(1) who can access trillions of
WWW pages with information. These
pages are not indexed by subject headings, author or
title as in library databases. So, how to find the
information you are looking for? Is it enough to use
Google? In many cases it is, but in many cases it is
not and it would be better to use other search
services. This fact sheet focuses on water and sanitation information on the Internet. It gives insight in to what is available and what search tool you could use for which purpose. It also provides some tips on how to evaluate the quality of the information you have found and keep track of information in the water and sanitation sector. Search Tools and Search Services The main search tools and search services that you should be aware of in your search for water and sanitation information are:
Key search engines Search engines work with “robots”, which are
indexing full texts (or large parts of it) of
internet documents. While doing a search this robot
is retrieving data from the indexes. The search
system looks for documents with the best resemblance
to your search question, and sorts the results based
on resemblance. This is called relevance ranking. Very often there is not much overlap in the
results search engines come up with(2), so it is worthwhile to try
more than one search engine when you are not happy
with the results you get. For an overview of search
engines worldwide, you may want to check the international directory of search engines.
Three search engines are suggested to support
your searches: Google, http://www.google.com
is the most popular search engine. Google offers a
good free guide to help you in your searches: http://www.googleguide.com.
To search for authors or scientific articles,
Google has developed http://scholar.google.com
Yahoo! http://search.yahoo.com Originally just a subject directory,
it is now a search engine, directory, and portal. Teoma, http://www.teoma.com Teoma is a good search engine for
identifying metasites and communities, for research
in new areas, and for topics where you don’t know
yet who’s involved.
A search engine will often not be able to search for information:
Databases Databases often give
access to information that cannot be found by search
engines. Other advantages compared to search engines are they give access to specialised
collections, provide advanced search options and
quality control is implied.
Subject gateways or water and sanitation portals Web sites or subject gateways providing a broad
array of resources around specific topics are often
called ‘portals.’ Water and sanitation portals
are a good starting point for topics that are easily
classified or for new information on a specific
topic.(3)
Many portals provide fact sheets, thematic overviews
or technical briefs on specific topics, see http://www.irc.nl/page/10923 Discussion groups and communities of practice A way to find more information on your topic is to ask other people or organisations interested in your topic. On the Internet you will find many groups that have emerged around a discipline or problem. They are called discussion groups or sometimes communities of practice. A small, but relevant group is the water-and-san-applied-research discussion list.
Discussion lists are useful to keep up to date in
your field of interest. Many lists offer the
possibility to search the list archive. Blogs A web log, or simply ‘blog’,
is a web site for which an individual or a group
generates text or audio-visual materials on a daily
or otherwise regular basis.(4) More and more experts are using web logs to publish new insights, and to
share their (personal) viewpoints. Many
blogs are also just ‘news aggregators’,
collections of news items based on topical web feeds
(see 5.2).
You can search for weblogs using: Feedster, http://www.feedster.com/ Bloglines; http://www.bloglines.com/ Google Blog Search beta, http://blogsearch.google.com/ As blogs usually are personal, and not
necessarily linked to an ‘authority’ or renowned
organisation, it is recommended to check how widely
known these bloggers are. A good example is
Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/), where you can track what other people are saying about the author of a
blog and how popular their weblog is. Just type the
url of the blog you want to check, and you will get
the number of links to that blog, sorted by
‘newest posts’ or ‘most authority’. One way to set up your search strategy is to look at the number of elements a topic consists of. The following table is a free adaptation of this strategy, developed by Karen Drabenstott (5).
Tip: documenting the source and the date it was
downloaded for future reference, as well as the
strategies used, is useful to write down! It helps
when an exhaustive search is required. You can also
build your collection of relevant web sites into a
personalised web page, such as MyYahoo! or Google.
When selecting Internet information to use in
your research, training or project, it is important
that you are confident about the quality of the
information. A simple, basic check involves at least
three key points(6):
Who? Can you find out who has written the material? Is
the author affiliated to a well-known organisation
or is it a personal document? Is it reliable? Is it
accurate? Where? The domain part of the URL,
that is the part of the URL before the first single
slash / , can help you find out where in the world
the service is. For example: .gov for governmental
institutions; .org for non-profit organisations -
they can be anywhere in the world! and .com for
commercial sites - again, anywhere in the world.
Furthermore, each country or territory has its own
two-letter suffix for use in URLs. For example:.uk
– is the United Kingdom; .nl - is the Netherlands;
.in - is India; .de - is Germany; .th - is Thailand. When was the information created? When was the
web site last updated? Try your best
to form an opinion about how accurate or up to date
the information on a Web site may be before you
start to use it for your work. Keeping
Track of New Information Keep up with new sites and resources in your
field of interest. You can do this by using personal
alerting services or by subscribing to web feeds. Personal alerting services These are automated
notices sent by publishers, databases and other
entities to alert you to new publications or events
in your field of interest. There are alerting
services for journals, such as table of contents
alerts, saved search alerts or new issue alerts. See
for example Blackwell Synergy or Elsevier Science
Direct (7). A
nice alerting service for conferences is Conference
Alerts, http://www.conferencealerts.com It is a free service providing monthly
or occasional emails, listing only events with
keywords matching your interests and in countries
you specify. iMorph's InfoMinder, http://www.infominder.com enables you to track web sites and get
notification when content changes. It is not free.
‘Watch that page’ is free although less
powerful, http://watchthatpage.com/ . To keep track of a name or a publication, Google
Alert, http://www.googlealert.com/ is a good general way to keep track of new websites or new topics. Web feeds Another way to keep on top of things
is by subscribing to web feeds. They are a useful
tool for receiving news, blog or web site updates,
not just for text but increasingly also for audio
and video broadcasts. Web feeds are usually offered
in RSS or Atom format. In order to receive them you
need special aggregator or feed reader software,
which can often be downloaded for free – popular
online aggregators include bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), NewsIsFree (http://www.newsisfree.com/) and My Yahoo! (http://my.yahoo.com), for more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_news_aggregators. Web feeds are preferable to (e-mail)
newsletter updates because they are instantaneous;
you don’t have to wait until a designated day of
the week to receive your summary. They will also
never be held up by a spam filter.
Click on the orange "RSS”
or “XML" button next to the topic of your
choice and copy the URL into your feed reader.
There are several search
engines for web feeds such as syndic 8, http://www.syndic8.com/,
while Yahoo! advanced search
offers an option to search on RSS/XML files (http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?vf=rss) (see Fagan Finder for more search engines - http://www.faganfinder.com/blogs/) Last but not least, do not forget there is a world beyond the Internet! Web pages are generated by people, and sometimes people are the most valuable search resources you can find(8). So, look at the contact details of relevant organisations (see http://www.irc.nl/page/10860 for a selection of water and sanitation portals, check some organisations directories) or try to get your query answered by contacting a specialised help desk; such as:
This fact sheet is based on Krukkert, I., Dietvorst, C. (2003). How to find water and sanitation information on the Internet?Revised version, 5 Nov 2004. Delft, The Netherlands, IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre. http://www.irc.nl/page/10742
__________________________________________________________________ (1) Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics, updated 31 Dec 2005, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (2) See SearchEngineWatch for the latest developments on search engines: http://searchenginewatch.com (3) Effective Internet Searching: The Itrain Network Student Manual and Instructor Manual (2000), updated version, http://www.bellanet.org/itrain/materials_en.cfm (4) Blog from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog (5) Drabenstott, K.M. (2001). Web search strategy: strategy development. In: Online, vol 25, no.4, p.18-27. Partly available at http://www.hsis.pitt.edu/services/instruction/presentations/pophtc/websearching (6) Zussman, T. (2002). Internet for Development. Eldis, Institute of Development Studies, university of Sussex, http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/tutorial/development (7) Elsevier Science Direct, http://www.sciencedirect.com Volume/issue alert service. Registration needed - free of charge; Blackwell Synergy, http:/www.blackwell-synergy.com Table of contents alerts and saved search alerts. Registration needed - free of charge. (8) Calishan, T. (2004). Web search garage. USA, New Jersey, Prentice Hall PTR, http://www.researchbuzz.com/web-search-garage.shtml Home > Resources > Fact sheets > HIV/AIDS and water supply, sanitation and hygiene |
