The logistics of effective online information seeking.

0. NOTE

This 2009 paper is an extended (approx 145KB) version of a summary (43 KB) article: Ciolek, T. Matthew. 2010. The Electronic Anthropologist: on sources of information, strategies, techniques and timing of online research. in: Malewska-Szalygin, Anna and Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz. (Eds.). Antropolog wobec wspolczesnosci : tom w darze Profesor Annie Zadrozynskiej [Anthropologist in the face of contemporaneity : a volume offered to Professor Anna Zadrozynska]. Warszawa: DiG, Instytut Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW. [www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/e-anthropologist.html]

1. INTRODUCTION

The habitats of scholarly information

Information of relevance and value to social scientists comes in a great variety of types, forms, and formats. Very often it is text-based information such as writings, notes, and records. Equally often it can be visual information: images, maps, drawings, and still photographs. Sometimes, it can be numbers, or charts, or three-dimensional objects, or computer models, or sound recordings. It can arrive as separate items, or be interleaved and commingled.

All this galaxy of raw and cooked information and its many containers is scattered - as individual items as well as clusters and collections - across three vast and vastly different habitats of knowledge. The first of them is formed by the overlapping networks of interconnected, data-swapping computers. There the information is stored as electronic bits. The second habitat is a great planetary labyrinth of interacting and competing museums, archives, and libraries. This is the physical world where information is stored as tangible objects - books, manuscripts, microfilms, artifacts - and kept on shelves, or in vaults. Finally, there is the boundless archipelago of groups and clusters of people themselves. Researchers, experts, archivists, journalists, court-clerks, shamans, interested laymen, students, librarians, managers, and so forth form the third habitat of knowledge. There the information is stored in biological form, either etched in the memories of people, or created by them afresh.

All three environments: the Internet, Libraries, and Experts have their own peculiarities and characteristics. These are summarised in Appendix 1.

The three habitats of knowledge strongly differ in terms of information that they contain. The Internet publishes four groups of research information: (a) the actual contents of the published digital resources, (b) pointers to and summary details of the digital resources, (c) pointers to and summary details of analogue resources held by the libraries, museums and archives, and (d) pointers to human experts who are eminent in their respective fields of specialisation.

Three different groups of scholarly information are to be found in the physical world of libraries and archives: (a) the contents of analogue resources themselves, (b) pointers to all collected analogue resources, (c) pointers to digital resources kept by the libraries, and other institutions, and to their select range available on the Internet.

Finally, the world of thoughtful human beings is a home to another set of research information. These are: (a) contents of scholarly information as recalled or as created anew by experts, (b) pointers to the existence of other experts, as well as ad lib commentaries on their strengths and weaknesses, (c) pointers to and summary details of select analogue resources held by a select range of libraries and archives.

This article is concerned only with research uses of only one of those informational environments, that is, with quests for digital pointers and digital contents that are kept on the Internet.

Naturally, information-gathering operations, whatever habitat they occur in, do not take place in a vacuum. There are at least twelve distinct, consecutive stages of research, from Orientation and Preparation to Data Tidying, to Judgment and Writing-up the findings [2]. This article focuses on the second and the third of these stages - the Preparations for Research and the process of Information-Seeking itself, i.e. the pursuit of sources of information and ways of accessing their contents. Therefore, this paper will not deal with vexed problems of the information quality and evaluation (Alexander & Tate 1999, Blackhurst 2008, Harris 2007, Jacobson 2008, Kirk 1996, Ravia 2004a, Sebek 2007, Smith 2008). Similarly, the paper will not visit the complex issue of recommended vs. practical citation formats for electronic sources of information (Greenhill & Fletcher 2003, Warlick 2006, Xia Li & Crane 1995). Instead, our attention will be focused on evaluation of methods of electronic investigation that people can undertake within the domain of the Internet.

Collecting online information - a simple model

Collecting online information is a simple yet highly convoluted task. Please consider, for example, the following hypothetical scene:

It is a dark and stormy night. A person stands at the edge of a revolving theatre stage, divided into sections. The section of the stage, in which the person stands, is full of containers, each with a different label. Some of the boxes and trays are large, while others are tiny. All of them are filled with seeds. Some containers contain a just a few seeds, while others store many. Some of the boxes are open. Other containers have some kind of a lid which needs to be removed to reveal the seeds they shelter. Sometimes the theatre rooms suddenly become invisible, or new ones are being added, or old rooms become repainted with a new colour. Sometimes, the boxes may change their particular location in a room, or suddenly move to another room, or change the type or amount of seeds they store, or be re-labeled, or vanish from the observer's sight altogether.

The person unwinds a piece of string attached to his digital camera, and swings the camera in the direction of trays. As it flies over one of the trays, it snaps a picture of the tray's contents. The collected pictures show seeds on the bottom of the tray. The person retrieves the camera, and examines the new images. These images may reveal either full or partial contents of the container just photographed. Also, they may merely suggest that some other tray, some other box, could contain materials of potentially much greater importance to the photographer. Any relevant and sharp images are retained, while images with no interesting content, or which are technically faulty, are discarded. Next, the person attaches the camera to a fishing rod and moves in the direction of either the same, or a different tray. They may also try a telephoto lens, or a stepladder to get a better view of the container. Many further images are thus collected, examined, and saved/disposed of. From time to time the person presses a lever, and the stage revolves by several degrees, and stops to reveal another room. The photography session continues until the person is satisfied with his findings, or until all trays in all rooms have been photographed, or until the time allocated for picture taking runs out.

Now, lets translate this dream-like imagery into everyday language, or better still into a schematic description of the information-gathering process:

• Dark and stormy night - a very good time to do some work with the Internet. However, other times are also good.
• Person - a researcher, an investigator.
• The revolving stage - the Internet.
• Variously coloured rooms - online resources e.g. mailing lists, web sites, a newsfeed.
• Trays and boxes - online resources, containers of electronic information, e.g. records in a database, or pages of a web site.
• The appearing, disappearing and changing rooms and trays - the state of flux that characterises all information available on the Internet.
• Camera and string, lenses, and other contraptions - various data-gathering techniques.
• Camera is moved or aimed towards some container - a general question is posed.
• Camera is moved or aimed towards the particular section of the specific tray - a detailed and particular question is posed.
• Camera is ready to take a picture of some portion of some box - promising target information has been located.
• The camera snaps the picture - the target information is now collected.
• Seeds - items of potentially relevant information: data, descriptions, opinions, etc.
• Name of the tray - a general pointer, i.e. the general address description of the information container. For example, in case of a statement: "Smoka pokonać trudno, ale starać się trzeba" (i.e. "It is hard to overcome the dragon, but one should persevere"), the general pointer to this 18th c. gem of zoological lore (Chmielowski 1966) leads a reader to the Rev. Chmielowski's compendium "Nowe Ateny."
• Detailed coordinates of the centre of the photographed area - directional pointer, i.e. precise references to the location of data to be found within the resource. Detailed directional pointers to information containers are of vital importance. Without them, that is without correct and sufficiently complete bibliographic records, or without the ISBN, or ID number, barcode, URL, phone number, postal address, email address, and so forth we would never be able to find, pin down and confront the information (or the person) we seek. For example, in the case of Chmielowski's combative dragon the directional online pointer to the statement is http://univ.gda.pl/~literat/ateny/0050.htm
  

Two general observations can be drawn from the above model as the process of information seeking combines two dissimilar groups of skills. Firstly, a researcher needs to possess technical dexterity to effectively move the metaphorical camera in the direction of various data containers. Without the full command of the data-gathering techniques, the collected informational details will not meet research requirements.

Secondly, and more importantly, a researcher needs to exactly understand his methodological predicament and to fully exercise his or her planning skills. Such a person has to determine the most promising information resources and the most promising research strategies so that any online investigations are conducted without blunders and on time. For smooth, and productive investigations it is advisable to establish well in advance what are the key logistical elements of the online data-gathering endeavour, and under what circumstances are these elements mutually compatible.

Earlier studies of information-seeking practices

Literature on the uses of the Internet for research purposes tends to fall into four groups:
• Work dealing with sources of online information - (Beck 2008, Blackhurst 2008, C. Harris 2006, R. Harris 2008, NIASLINC n.d., Ravia 2000b, Zillman 2008).
• Discussions of information-seeking tools - (Bergman 2001, Cohen 2008e, 2008d, Google 2008, Ravia 2008d).
• Analyses of the finer points of information-finding techniques (Cohen 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2008d, Harris 2000, Monash University Library 2004, Overture Services 2007, Ravia 2000a, 2002a, 2002b, 2004b, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c), and
• Admonitions regarding the pitfalls faced by novices or careless online researchers (Cohen 2008d, Harris 1997, Mississauga Librarians 2008, NIASLINC n.d., Ravia 2008a).

All these works exist in electronic format and are feely accessible on the Internet. Also, and importantly, they are frequently revised and updated to keep up with technological progress. This type of material does not need to be restated here.

To date however, the methodological factors responsible for successful (or otherwise ) online research, have been ignored. This paper, tries to darn this large methodological hole. The questions posed by this paper are not "what are the best ways to obtain information online?", or "what are the best sources of electronic information?", but rather - "under what methodological circumstances is our online research most likely to succeed?" So it is not an enumeration of tools and opportunities, but rather a critical assessment of these.

This paper attempts to accomplish three tasks. Firstly, it will try to identify the key variables of the logistics of online research. Secondly, it will look at the range of possible combinations of those variables. Thirdly, it will try to determine which of these combinations of logistical factors are most likely to be of the greatest practical use.

The paper observes the following convention: words which denote technical concepts - e.g. Chase, Mull, Query, etc. - are capitalised.

2. INTERNET, THE ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT OF INFORMATION

The chaotic nature of the Internet

Two things about the Internet, the electronic environment of information, are immediately apparent to any observer: its dire lack of organization and its enormous physical size. The Internet is a highly unpredictable and confused place, and the materials it carries are of very uneven quality. Gorman (1995:34) wrote: "The net is like a huge vandalized library. Someone has destroyed the catalog and removed the front matter, indexes, etc., from hundreds of thousands of books and torn and scattered what remains... 'surfing' is the process of sifting through this disorganised mess in the hope of coming across some useful fragments of text and images that can be related to other fragments. The net is even worse than a vandalized library because thousands of additional unorganised fragments are added daily by the myriad cranks, sages, and persons with time on their hands who launch their unfiltered messages into cyberspace."

Similarly alarmed concerns were also voiced by Kirk (1996) when she warned her students: "When you use a research or academic library, the books, journals and other resources have already been evaluated by scholars, publishers and librarians. Every resource you find has been evaluated in one way or another before you ever see it. When you are using the World Wide Web, none of this applies. There are no filters. [...] Excellent resources reside along side [sic] the most dubious. The Internet epitomizes the concept of Caveat lector: Let the reader beware."

Tellingly, more than a decade later the situation remained unchanged. Thus Beck, writing some thirteen years since the initial damning assessment by Gorman, concurs with the earlier criticisms by noting that the Internet continues to be "disorganised, volatile and dynamic. Web sites appear, disappear, move or mutate daily. [...] The useful and useless co-exist in cyberspace much as they would and do at a flea market." Beck (2008)

Though the world wide web was initially constructed as a crisp, thoughtful and disciplined environment (Gillies and Cailliau 2000), the stubborn persistence of chaos strongly suggests that, actually, disorder is the natural state for the Internet to be in; and that it is not an accidental or short-lived lapse from an otherwise orderly norm. The prognosis also seems clear: the Net always will be a complex and complicated informational mangrove swamp. There, any signposts and guidebooks are - and always will be - intermittent and unreliable. To put it differently, the Internet is a habitat where the explorers' own superior navigational and organisational skills are vital to the success of their projects.

The measures of the Internet

The other outstanding feature of the Net is its immense size, and the fact that it continues to grow very quickly. In late 1995 the world wide web (which, is only one of many component parts of the Internet ) consisted of approximately 300,000 servers and of 2 million WWW documents (Ciolek 1996:106). Five years later, those numbers grew to over 25 million web sites serving more than 1.5 billion web pages (Ciolek 2004). This explosive growth continued unabated for the next eight years. Consequently, in mid-2008 there were approximately 175.5m servers (Netcraft 2008) and over 8 billion web pages (Google 2008).

Importantly, all these figures refer only to the information that is visible to standard search engines and their data-harvesting "spiders." This is an important caveat. In addition to the popular surface Web there is also a massive, and largely unacknowledged constellation of other, i.e. non-WWW containers of electronic information. These other resources remain largely unknown to Internet users at large, and to the search engines people rely on. This is because they are difficult to track, to access and to index. The enormous scale of that invisible, deeply hidden world of documents and data repositories is revealed by a study by Bergman (2001). His findings are impressive indeed:

* Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.
* The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of information compared to nineteen terabytes of information in the surface Web [1].
* The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web.
* More than 200,000 deep Web sites presently exist. [...]
* The deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Internet. Bergman (2001)

In addition to the proliferation of networked computers and the growth in variety and volume of their contents, the number of people with regular access to the Net also grows. For instance, in early 2001 there were nearly 410m Internet users (Ciolek 2004). By mid 2008 this number has passed the 1,460m mark (Miniwatts 2008). Internet penetration rates vary significantly across geographical regions (e.g. 73.6% in North America vs. 48.1% in Europe and 5.3% in Africa (Miniwatts 2008), and across countries comprising each of the regions.

Appendix 2 provides Internet statistics for twelve selected countries from various geographical regions.

3. THE LOGISTICS OF ONLINE INFORMATION SEEKING

Finding the right information in vast masses of all potentially relevant electronic materials is a complex undertaking. Therefore, it requires a work plan which correctly matches the available: (a) research strategies; (b) favoured sources of online information; (c) time available for completion and finally, (d) online research techniques.

Each of these four key variables has its idiosyncratic aspects. Let's look at them, one by one.

The First Logistical Element: Research Strategy

Every research operation is based on the researcher's passionate involvement with their questions and answers, as well as with the relevant sources of data and knowledge. These questions, sources, and answers can be unambiguously and directly stated, or not. These are important distinctions, as explicit scholarly questions (as well as explicit definitions of sources of data, and explicit factual answers) are precisely those statements which one can argue with and subject to testing and refutation (see Popper 1969:51-53, 1972:242-244). At the same time, ill-defined questions, sources, and answers form a background intellectual fog which has the potential to generate endless future revisions and revolutions to the established frameworks of knowledge. The full range of combinations of these clear-cut and fuzzy questions, sources, and answers comprise the eight possible research strategies.

Questions
Scholarly questions usually involve the traditional cluster of phrases revolving around such words as "Who?", "What?", "When?", "Why?", "Where?", "How?", "What If?" and "To What End?" If the researcher states his or her questions clearly and explicitly, then they will call them by their generic upper case label "Q". Should they remain at a given stage of investigations implicit, unstated, unarticulated, then they will be labeled here with an upper case character "X".

Sources
Secondly, there are the Sources that a researcher seeks and uses. Examples of sources are many: a book, database, web site, library, archive, newspaper, field notes, an expert, an interview, and so forth. Naturally, such containers of information - whether large or small and whether electronic, analogue, or biological - in order to be of use to anybody need to be: (a) precisely defined, (b) located (i.e. learned about, identified, and found); (c) accessed (i.e. visited, handled, and unlocked), and (d) investigated (i.e. read, critiqued, consulted, verified, etc., etc.). Sources, depending on whether the researcher defines them explicitly or not, will be labeled here as "S" or "X", accordingly.

Answers
Thirdly, there always need to be some Answers. These are thoughts and ideas that the researcher pursues and which need to be stated, deduced, discovered, or just postulated on a purely temporary basis. Again, depending on the ontological status of these answers (i.e. depending whether the researcher states them explicitly or only hints at them) they will be accordingly labeled here either "A" or "X".

All this means that at any moment of any imaginable line of inquiry all investigators face a choice between one of the eight (and always no more, and no less than eight) theoretically possible research strategies. Obviously, not all of them are used equally often. Which particular research strategy a researcher adopts fully depends on the explicitness and clarity (or otherwise) with which he or she has defined their Questions, information Sources, and Answers. Any of these strategies can be initial, or interim, or final. Moreover, they can be mixed and combined. Above all, they can be interchanged at a moment's notice. Thus the specific choice, the speed of changes, and sequencing of the elected strategies depend on the researcher's intellectual makeup and his or her (as we shall see towards the end of this paper) specific, day-to-day research circumstances.

The eight theoretically feasible research strategies are:

• Confirm - Confirm details of the findings and/or details of the sources; Verify and proofread the collected data; Find another example of an answer that you already have. The logical structure of this research strategy is denoted by its acronym: QSA (= definite Questions, definite Sources, definite Answers).

• Link - Link your research to the correct sources; Document the findings established thus far; Test earlier findings against new, presently unidentified sources; Collect additional answers from new, presently unidentified sources. Logical structure: QXA.

• Deliver - Deliver answers to the explicit research questions; Identify the sources, access them and look for answers relevant to the questions; Collect new data. Logical structure: QSX.

• Chase - Chase the promising sources to get answers to your explicit research questions; Look afresh at the range of possible sources and think of new ways of investigating them. Think of new answers that they can yield. Logical structure: QXX.

• Form - Formulate your explicit research question in the light of the temporary findings supplied by the identified sources; Look for the exiting new questions to be asked of the known sources which have given us the current answers; Contest the existing framework of thought and methodology. Logical structure: XSA.

• Match - Match your tentative inklings, your tentative and conjectural answers with the best questions and the most promising sources; Use the answer you already have to think of new data sources and new questions you could pose. Logical structure: XXA.

• Explore - Explore the located sources to formulate your explicit research questions; Investigate the available materials; Try inventing new conceptual framework. Logical structure: XSX.

• Mull - Examples: Mull and brainstorm over the best questions, apt conjectures and the likely sources of data; Look afresh at everything related to your research; Be creative and iconoclastic. Logical structure: XXX.

So, for every potential research scenario we have a gloss, a mnemonic label, and a logical skeleton. In the above taxonomy the Confirm strategy is the simplest and quickest. At the opposite end of the scale rests the hazy, open-minded, time-hungry Mull strategy.

The Second Logistical Element: Online Resources

The Internet is a planet-wide archipelago of sources of online information connected by a lattice of general and directional pointers. These archipelagos of containers, contents and connections are furthermore surrounded by a comet's tail of contextual hints [3], oblique references, tags and metadata (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 2003, National Academy of Sciences 2000). Some of these electronic resources and metadata reside on intranets and other protected sub-sets of the Internet. However, a great mass of informational resources is freely accessible to anybody with access to the Net.

There are no less than nine basic types of online information sources. For specific examples of those nine types of sources, and their online pointers (i.e. URLs) please see Appendix 3. All these resources can be summarised as follows:

• Databases - Containers of digital information in which data are organised in records, with each record comprising a number of precisely defined numeric, alphanumeric, or image-storing fields. Examples: Bookstore Catalogues and Bibliographies, Dictionaries, Directories of People, Library/Museum/Archive Catalogues, and Telephone Directories. Databases may operate on- or off-line, and be connected and disconnected from the Internet at will. Users of databases can access the stored information, but cannot edit it. Also, it is unusual for them to suggest addenda or deletions. As a rule, the databases are not able to index contents of other databases, although sometimes they can index pointers to them, as well as some of their metadata. Likewise, the exact contents of databases are not visible to (and thus are not catalogued by) the other eight types of online resources, which are described below.

• Search engines - Automatically constructed indices of contents of such resources (see below) as Directories, Repositories, "Flowing" and "Frozen" websites, Collaborations and Gatherings. Search engines make every word and every image in the harvested online documents separately indexed and linked to its exact electronic address within the document, and within the resource itself, and within the Internet as a whole. Users of search engines can access the stored information, and suggest addenda, deletions and modifications. However, they are not allowed to implement them. Search engines specialise in provision of full-text indexes of the contents of unstructured online documents, and of captions and other metadata for numeric data sets, images, moving images, and sound files. Search engines may be global (e.g. Internet-wide) or partial (e.g. local, thematic). They deal with easily indexed html and pdf files (i.e. the surface web search engines). They may also deal with less readily indexed files in other data formats, or with files residing on non-web servers as is the case with the deep web search engines. As a rule, search engines are not able to index contents of other search engines. Also, by definition, they do not index contents of online databases.

• Online directories - Manually constructed online bibliographies and catalogues of online resources. Examples: Bibliographies of links and Lists of web directories. Users of such directories can access stored information, and suggest addenda, deletions and modifications. However, they are not allowed to implement them. Directories are organised alphabetically by name of the resource; or geographically by area; or chronologically by the time to which resources pertain. Also, they may be organised by the resource type (i.e. books, journals, soundfiles, photographs), or thematically, i.e. by the subject matter of resources.

• Repositories - Online collections, warehouses, libraries, and archives of substantial and well-formed bodies of digital information. Examples: Bibliographies of Paper Publications, Digitised Books, Digitised Documents, Digitised Images and Documentary Photographs, Digitised Maps and Digitised Periodicals. Users of repositories can access the stored information, but not edit it. However, they are usually welcome to suggest addenda or corrections to it. Repositories bring together under a single electronic roof complete digital publications (e.g. books, periodicals, maps, numeric data sets, sound files) as well as volumes of raw material (e.g. press clippings, photographs, field notes, archival documents).

• "Flowing" websites - Containers of online information whose content, size and scope are heavily influenced by input solicited from or volunteered by their users/readers. The web sites act as small-scale repositories. Frequently such web sites can also act as directories or online bibliographies of links to online materials of interest. Users of such web sites can access the stored information, but not edit it. However, editors of such web sites encourage and invite their readers to submit new digital materials for publication on the site. They also welcome suggestions for corrections and improvements. In this way both the architecture and contents of the website undergo a series of slow, incremental transformations.

• "Frozen" websites - Containers of online information whose content, size and scope do not significantly change in response to input from their users. These web sites frequently resemble "flowing" web sites in terms of content and architecture. However, they do not have a policy of either inviting or acting on readers' input.

• Collaborations or collaborative environments - Containers of online information whose contents and to some extent architecture are either under the control of all, or only some of its readers (such as site administrators, registered co-editors, registered readers/commentators). Examples: Blogs and Wikis. Users of collaborative work environments can access the stored information, as well as add to it, delete from it, edit it, rearrange it, or annotate with a tag or comment. Not all collaborative environments offer the full range of read/write rights to its users. Wikis tend to be especially open to substantial input/modifications. Blogs also welcome user-generated addenda, albeit primarily in the form of comments on the entries published by editors.

• Gatherings - Two-way online communication systems used for the speedy exchange (i.e. sending and receiving) of digital information. Examples: Discussion Groups, Chat Rooms, Mailing Lists and information Bazaars. Exchanges between members of a Gathering (i.e. questions and answers, announcements, request for clarifications, statements and commentaries) are stored in form of an archive of messages and are indexed by a local search engine. Depending on the policies of a gathering the right to participate (and thus the right to generate and receive messages, and to view the record of past transactions) is given to all people on the Net, or only to their specific subset. Users of a gathering are able to add to the volume of the circulated news, announcements and commentaries. However, as the norm, they do not have the right to subtract from or modify contents of the archives.

• Feeds - One-way manual distribution channels for the sending of news and alerts from a source directly to the readers. Examples: Info/Alert/Update services. Feeds specialise in a great range of content: news, newsletters, updates on events in some organizations, details of new material published on some remote information system. Such content usually quickly ages, hence the emphasis on the speed and frequency with which material is dispatched to its readers. Readers/subscribers of the feeds cannot control the contents that reach them. However, they are given the means to control the frequency and appearance of such deliveries. Also, as a rule, contents of the feeds avoid being indexed by external search engines.

The Third Logistical Element: Work Schedules

Researchers always need to consider the amount of time they want to allocate to the business of information seeking, as opposed to other research tasks. Ravia suggests (2008b, Ravia 2008c) that, essentially, there are only two search schedules, a short-term (lasting under one hour) and the long-term one (lasting months and years on end). Obviously, the amount of time earmarked for completion of the data-gathering stage of research varies from case to case, and from scholar to scholar.

For our purposes, however, it will be useful to distinguish three types of research schedules:

• Urgent research - One to be completed swiftly in a relatively short span of time. This span can range from a mere few minutes to a handful of frantic days.
• Standard research - A schedule of work that needs to be completed calmly and systematically by some well-defined deadline while there is ample time to carry it out fully and satisfactorily. Normally, such projects last a few weeks, or longer. Sometimes they can stretch for several months.
• Long-term - A leisurely, open-ended research project; one which has no clearly defined completion date. There the investigations stretch for long periods of time, although not all that time is used for online inquiries with the same degree of intensity.

It is only natural that a good researcher spends short periods of time on information-seeking tasks that can be performed swiftly, and longer periods on tasks that require ample time for their development and refinement. A very good researcher, however, has one more logistical skill under their belt. A very good researcher can tell in advance which of his research tasks will be which. Therefore, he or she can plan their commitments accurately.

The Fourth Logistical Element: Data-Gathering Techniques

Once decisions regarding preferred research strategies, viable resources, and adequate timetables are taken, but before any of the resources are actually located and accessed, one needs to pause, and think about the best approach to the task of data collection itself. Thus Ravia (2008b) advises:

"THINK ABOUT YOUR QUERY! Seekers do not 'plunge' into a search out of the blue. Like artists, they visualize the correct result before they begin. The 'perfect' answer is driving their queries. The perfect answer creates the correct question(s) What kind of results do you want? Books? Doctoral thesis? Images? News? Biographies? How many results do you want? Three hundred pages of material? One single authoritative book? A dozen pdf-articles? A short and concise essay? [...] Two skills a seeker needs: how to formulate a question correctly and knowing where to look. And this means knowing which resources you should use for your searches. And this means you must first of all know how to search those very resources you should use for your searches. In fact each 'part' of the web requires a different approach. [...] Before even beginning, think about your query: prepare your question(s) for the perfect result and decide which resources you will use."

In addition, throughout all information-seeking operations there is the constant need to focus exclusively on the task of finding your target. Fjalar Ravia (2004b), himself an information-seeker extraordinaire, observes: "'Focus always on your specific needs. Otherwise, you can spend a lifetime drifting through archipelagos of fascinating, but ultimately fruitless links'. I don't need to underline how true this is for Internet searching..." [4].

There are at least ten distinct ways of conducting online research. Each data-gathering technique can be applied once only, or in a sequence, as a part of a longer and more complex information quest. Also, they can be used one technique at a time, or in bulk, in parallel with each other. The ten online data-gathering techniques are:

• Ask - This involves using one's social skills to obtain in the shortest possible time the exact information we seek from experts, and to do so without wearing out or antagonising our informants. Ask is a labour intensive but highly effective method. [5] The Ask technique revolves around the skillful approach to those people who have appropriate knowledge so that they could be engaged (either directly, or via mail or email) in a Questions & Answers session. Typically, such exchanges are about addresses/pointers, or commentaries and other metadata regarding online and offline resources relevant to our detailed research question. The people who are presented with Questions are those who have been already known to the researcher, or those that some credible intermediary recommends, or who are members of a specialist online Gathering (i.e. a scholarly mailing list, or a professional discussion forum). Alternatively, the human sources of information can be the highly knowledgeable strangers who are "out there" in the world and whose expertise and contact details have been established and verified via the Query or Comb techniques (see below).

• Query - This means quizzing electronic databases for pointers, contents, or metadata for online and offline target resources. Query works best if the researcher is well acquainted with the technical characteristics and informational architecture of the interrogated database. Productive questions posed to such a resource are those which are precise, concise and well structured. Valid or promising results need to be recorded in full, put into meaningfully labeled files, and stored for future consultations.

• Search - The technique quizzes global or local search engines for details of content and the electronic address of the target information. Search is a very powerful technique. However, its correct use assumes that the researcher is thoroughly focused (yet flexible and adaptive) while working with the wide range of variously designed search engines. This means that before embarking on searches investigators should acquaint themselves with the scope and technical features of all the search tools that will be used (Google 2008). The prospects of a successful, fruitful search are greatly enhanced when many special purpose techniques are combined. For further discussion of the effective search sub-techniques please see Appendix 4.

  Throughout all these online investigations, valid or promising results need to be recorded, put into a meaningfully named file, and safely stored. Details of the search engines used also need to be clearly recorded. Furthermore, the dates of the searches as well as details of the search techniques need to be written down. This is especially true when conducting "standard" and "long-term" research operations. The reason is that searches conducted at various points in time seldom generate identical results: information located on one day will not necessarily be indexed by the search engine at a later date.

• Browse - This technique involves using one's reading and navigational skills. Here the researcher tries to find target information in particular online resources. Browsing means keeping in mind well defined questions while surfing the Net from one online resource to another resource and purposefully exploring its nooks and crannies. Browsing is an activity only superficially similar to web surfing. Browsing is a focused investigation. It aims to achieve concrete intellectual results. Surfing is a mere pastime. Purposeful searches for target information are greatly accelerated by configuring web browsers to stop loading images. They are also speeded up by researchers fast-reading (skimming) the encountered text or images in pursuit of only those contents that directly bear on one's explicit research question. Naturally, effective browsing means keeping good records of their activities. Experts advise: "Keep a detailed record of sites you visit and the sites you use. Doing research on the Net inevitably means visiting some sites that are useful and many that are not. Keeping track is necessary so that you can revisit the useful ones later, and also put the required references in your paper. Don't just rely on your browser's History function, [... instead] write down or bookmark the sites you've found useful, so that you'll have a permanent record. Double-check all URLs that you put in your paper. It's easy to make mistakes with complicated Internet addresses, and typos will make your references useless. To be safe, type them into the Location box of your browser and check that they take you to the correct site." (Mississauga Librarians 2008)

• Track - This technique resembles the actions of a detective conducting a criminal investigation. Here a researcher uses all their investigative and navigational skills to identify, in the wide range of online resources, any traces of the existence, nature, contents, and whereabouts of potential target information. Track is a slow-paced, forensic technique, and as such is very similar to Comb. Track makes heavy use of all other information-finding methods, especially Query, Search, Browse, and Monitor. Also, it relies on meticulous record-keeping and on the tricks-of-trade. For example: "If you accidentally neglect to write down the URL, but have a printed or disk copy of the [... valuable information that you have just discovered], you can either see the URL printed at the top of the page or you can use a search engine to locate the article for you again. To do this, type in from the article a four or five-word phrase that contains the most unusual words you can find. Then perform an exact phrase search for these words. The engine will almost always take you right to the article." (Harris 2000)

• Comb - This technique focuses on identification of the suitably knowledgeable people who operate online. Comb aggressively looks for background information and contact details of those people who have proven expertise in our target information. In essence, Comb is very similar to Track, but it focuses on pointers to human beings as opposed to online resources. Like Track itself, it thrives on combining several complementary information-finding techniques. The creator of the term 'combing', Ravia, explains: "[it is] searching those that have searched [well before you have embarked on your investigations] and are willing to share [...] you lurk around usenet, maillists and messageboards trying to find some authorities in the matters you are seeking. Then you use the cumulated knowledge of these savy-people [sic] to jumpstart on your search. [...] 'the 'combing' approach is useful in order to find treasures hoarded by people that are willing to share what they know and have found." (Ravia 2000a)

• Monitor - This technique involves using one's reading skills. It aims to find in accidentally encountered resources pointers and metadata bearing on the target information. Unlike the previously listed research techniques Monitor is a passive method. It works best when the researchers keep in mind a series of well-defined questions about the research problem. Only then will they be ready to perceive the significance of the snippets spotted while perusing their mailbox or visiting the Net on some other errand. Data gathering through monitoring is accelerated by joining a large number of complementary (topic-wise) Gatherings and information Feeds. However, such an approach has its downside: it usually results in a heavy overload of irrelevant or low-quality information.

• Collect input - This is another technique which taps knowledge carried by people. It involves creation of online questionnaires (published as a web input form, or distributed as email circulars) and making them available to potential online informants (Coomber 1997, Mannion 2008, Sheehan i Grubbs Hoy 1999, Stewart 2003, and Zhang 2000). This technique collects data pro-actively. It combines questionnaire design skills with elements of computer programming. The Collect technique is very productive. Unfortunately, it carries a disadvantage. Researchers making use of this technique tend to encounter greater than normal range of electronic accidents and mishaps, as well as instances of deliberate (Clarke 1998) hacking, online vandalism, and pigheaded misinformation.

• Trigger input - This online research technique requires very good social skills. Trigger is similar to the Ask, Collect input and Invite input (see below) techniques. All of them pursue knowledge that is predominantly stored in biological format, i.e. as human memory. However, unlike the other three techniques it is a ploy; it acquires the target information indirectly. It does so by publishing online material which intentionally stirs readers and provokes them to express online their passionate comments, arguments, objections, and alternative viewpoints. In other words, the Trigger collects data pro-actively. It works well with "Fluid" websites and with the Collaborative resources such as wikis and blogs. Input-triggering technique is also very productive in the context of mailing lists and other forms of Gatherings. An advanced version of this technique also exists. There Trigger no longer takes advantage of the existing online resources, but - instead - it deliberately creates brand-new, specialist, problem-focused resources that are intended to operate as hothouses and testing grounds for new ideas and esoteric data. However, for this to happen such new Gatherings and Collaborations need first to attract the attention of the prospective readers. Then they need to earn the respect and participation of a substantial number of acknowledged experts and practitioners of a given field of knowledge. To this end Gatherings and Collaborations need to be very skillfully moderated so that the triggered contributions by readers are always relevant, informed, timely, lively, courteous, and not too scarce or too plentiful. Without high quality content, high quality members of an online gathering cannot be recruited and retained. Moreover, finding the right balance between the information famine and overload is always a magical skill.

• Invite input - This method makes use of human sources of information again. It is, however, less demanding than input triggering, or input collection. It simply encourages readers to supply you with information you need. Again, Invite input is a pro-active technique. It comprises five consecutive stages. Firstly, the researcher publishes online some preliminary but nevertheless serious and interesting body of information: data sets, raw materials, or draft conceptual frameworks. Secondly, next to the online offering he/she publishes an explicit, polite, and not too overbearing invitation for comments, addenda, corrections, etc. [6]. Thirdly, researcher patiently waits for the possible arrival of useful input. This waiting period can stretch for weeks, months, or even years. Fourthly, all readers' input - when received - is promptly acted upon. This means that suggested corrections, emendations and additions are immediately implemented. It also means that the party who provided the submission is equally promptly, preferably within a day or two, thanked for their kind help, advice and assistance. Such acknowledgement is best done amply, courteously, and via a private channel of communication. Finally, and critically, in the documentation to the online materials themselves all reader's contributions are fully and publicly acknowledged online and - again - thanked for. The last stage is the crux of the successful deployment of the Invite technique. Without it, the chances that other readers would be inclined to contribute to the researcher's online work, and to translate this inclination into practical activity, are very slim. In short, the objectives of this five-step exercise are two fold: one - to establish and promote an atmosphere of an easy-going, good natured and friendly cooperation among readers and users of a particular set of materials; two - to transform casual, one-off contributors into long-term, regular, and committed (though informal) collaborators on the research project.

4. SIX CONSTRAINTS OF INFORMATION SEEKING

None of the above four logistical aspects of online research - the strategies, online resources, work schedules, and data-gathering techniques - ever occurs alone. On the contrary - they always work in concert, as a dynamic system.

In this section we shall look at the entire range of their interactions. To this end all six logically possible permutations of the variable-pairs (i.e. in case variables a, b, c, and d their unique pairs are: a-b, a-c, a-d, b-c, b-d, and c-d) will be examined. Each of the variable-pairs will be inspected for these instances where they seem to "work together well", that is, when they appear to be supportive of each other, and appear (in the experience of this author) to be productive. All such workable combinations of variables will be marked with the word "yes."

Table 1.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Research Strategies and Online Resources.

STRATEGIES & RESOURCES	1. QSA Confirm	2. QXA Link	3. QSX Deliver	4. QXX Chase	5. XSA Form	6. XXA Match	7. XSX Explore	8. XXX Mull	Usefulness Score of the Resources
1. Data Bases	yes		yes		yes				3
2. Search Engines	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	8
3. Directories				yes	yes	yes		yes	4
4. Repositories	yes		yes	yes	yes		yes	yes	6
5. "Flowing" websites		yes	yes	yes	yes				4
6. "Frozen" websites	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes		yes	yes	7
7. Collaborations		yes		yes	yes		yes	yes	5
8. Gatherings		yes	yes	yes	yes		yes	yes	6
9. Feeds			yes				yes	yes	3

Table 1 looks at the compatibility of the eight types of research strategies with the use of nine types of online resources. The table finds that in 46 out of 72 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 64% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the four most useful online resources are: Search Engines (usefulness score: 8 points out of 8 or 100%), "Frozen" web sites (score: 7/8 or 87%), and Repositories and Gatherings (score: 6/8 each or 75%, each).

Table 2.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Work Schedules and Online Resources.

SCHEDULES & RESOURCES	1. Urgent	2. Standard	3. Long-term	Usefulness Score of the Resources
1. Data Bases	yes	yes	yes	3
2. Search Engines	yes	yes	yes	3
3. Directories		yes	yes	2
4. Repositories		yes	yes	2
5. "Flowing" websites			yes	1
6. "Frozen" websites		yes	yes	2
7. Collaborations			yes	1
8. Gatherings	yes	yes	yes	3
9. Feeds		yes	yes	2

Table 2 looks at the compatibility of the three types of work schedules with the use of nine types of online resources. The table finds that in 19 out of 27 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 70% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the three most useful online resources are: Databases, Search Engines, and Gatherings (usefulness score: 3 points out of 3 or 100%, each).

Table 3.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Work Schedules and Data-Gathering Techniques.

SCHEDULES & TECHNIQUES	1. Urgent	2. Standard	3. Long-term	Usefulness Score of the Techniques
1. Ask	yes	yes	yes	3
2. Query	yes	yes	yes	3
3. Search	yes	yes	yes	3
4. Browse		yes	yes	2
5. Track		yes	yes	2
6. Comb		yes	yes	2
7. Monitor		yes	yes	2
8. Collect input		yes	yes	2
9. Trigger input			yes	1
10. Invite input			yes	1

Table 3 looks at the compatibility of the three types of work schedules with the use of ten types of data-gathering techniques. The table finds that in 21 out of 30 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 70% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the three most useful data-gathering techniques are: Ask, Query, and Search (usefulness score: 3 points out of 3 or 100%, each).

Table 4.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Research Strategies and Data-Gathering Techniques.

STRATEGIES & TECHNIQUES	1. QSA Confirm	2. QXA Link	3. QSX Deliver	4. QXX Chase	5. XSA Form	6. XXA Match	7. XSX Explore	8. XXX Mull	Usefulness Score of the Techniques
1. Ask	yes	yes		yes			yes		4
2. Query	yes		yes						2
3. Search	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	8
4. Browse	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	8
5. Track	yes	yes	yes	yes		yes	yes		6
6. Comb		yes		yes	yes	yes			4
7. Monitor			yes		yes	yes	yes	yes	5
8. Collect input			yes						1
9. Trigger input		yes	yes	yes	yes	yes			5
10. Invite input	yes	yes	yes	yes			yes		6

Table 4 looks at the compatibility of the eight types of research strategies with the use of ten types of data-gathering techniques. The table finds that in 49 out of 80 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 61% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the four most useful data-gathering techniques are: Search, Browse (usefulness score: 8 points out of 8 or 100%, each), Track, and Invite Input (score: 6/8 or 75%, each).

Table 5.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Work Schedules and Research Strategies.

SCHEDULES & STRATEGIES	1. Urgent	2. Standard	3. Long-term	Usefulness Score of the Strategies
1. QSA - Confirm	yes	yes	yes	3
2. QXA - Link	yes	yes	yes	3
3. QSX - Deliver	yes	yes	yes	3
4. QXX - Chase		yes	yes	2
5. XSA - Form		yes	yes	2
6. XXA - Match			yes	1
7. XSX - Explore			yes	1
8. XXX - Mull			yes	1

Table 5 looks at the compatibility of the eight types of research strategies with three types of work schedules. The table finds that in 16 out of 24 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 67% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the three most useful research strategies are: Confirm, Link, and Answer (usefulness score: 3 points out of 3 or 100%, each).

Table 6.
Online Research: Effective Combinations of Online Resources and Data-Gathering Techniques
and Their Relative Usefulness.

RESOURCES & TECHNIQUES	1. Data Bases	2. Search Engines	3. Direct.	4. Reposit.	5. "Flowing" websites	6. "Frozen" websites	7. Collab.	8. Gather.	9. Feeds	Usefulness Score of the Techniques
1. Ask							yes	yes		2
2. Query	yes									1
3. Search		yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes		7
4. Browse			yes	yes	yes	yes	yes		yes	6
5. Track		yes		yes		yes	yes	yes		5
6. Comb		yes		yes		yes	yes	yes		5
7. Monitor						yes	yes	yes	yes	4
8. Collect input					yes		yes	yes		3
9. Trigger input							yes	yes		2
10. Invite input					yes			yes		2
Usefulness Score of the Resources	1	3	2	4	4	5	8	8	2	[not  applicable]

Table 6 looks at the compatibility of the ten types of data-gathering techniques with the use of nine types of online resources. The table finds that in 37 out of 90 combinations possible between these two variables, that is in 41% of cases, the resulting mix is likely to be congenial and productive. In this context the four most useful data-gathering techniques are: Search (usefulness score: 7 points out of 9 or 77%), Browse (score: 6/9 or 66%), and Track and Combs (score: 5/9 or 55%, each). In the same context the three most useful online information resources are: Collaborations and Gatherings (score: 8/10 or 80%, each), and "Frozen" web sites (score: 5/10 or 50%).

5. CONCLUSIONS

This study leads to three conclusions:

1. Not surprisingly, long-term research projects are especially advantageous to a serious students of the world. They enable researchers to make a better use of the passive and pro-active data- and knowledge-gathering techniques. All mentioned above people-centric techniques need ample time to start blossoming, and they are definitely worth careful cultivation, and fine-tuning. Ultimately, it is more efficient to be either sporadically or regularly supplied with the factual or theoretical information we need, than to try to locate it all by ourselves in a cyber-mangrove forest. However, any advantages we may gain in our work are necessarily always relative, and always contextual. Whenever we choose any particular way of doing our research, we are bound to compromise in our selection of suitable research strategies, or time frames, or sources of information, or data-gathering techniques. To gain an advantage in one area necessarily means losing some advantage in another.

2. Serious online research is a technically and intellectually demanding activity. It involves patient and systematic thinking, long attention spans, heightened attention to detail, and the ability to make quick inspired guesses with regard to logical connections between seemingly unrelated bundles of electronic, paper and human pointers and contents. Such a research requires (a) staying perfectly focused on primary objectives; (b) keeping systematic and detailed records of operations, so that one does not go in circles or miss a vital step; (c) consulting and mining as many information resources as possible. This is because they all store slightly different - in terms of the details and volume of their contents - groups of the target information, and they do so by using different data architectures and formats. This all means that the actual task of information gathering goes far beyond the rushed, non-reflective use of any of the well-marketed search engines, or copying off the screen materials published by the Wikipedias and their cohorts.

3. Voluminous amounts of hitherto untapped and insufficiently tapped high-grade research information is known to exist in the form of memories and notes kept by other people. Gatherings and Collaborative work environments are especially seminal types of online resources. However, to mine them effectively we still need to determine - by observational as well as experimental means - under what exact social circumstances such forms of scholarly interactions are most productive and most informative. It would be good if more attention of anthropologists and social psychologists were to be paid to the social and cultural organisation of the Internet and its academic users.

In other words, while at the surface level the Internet appears to be defined mostly by our interactions with the disembodied, cold-headed technology, ultimately the full research value of the Net is best realised through multifaceted intellectual relationships that we can form with other human beings that are contactable online. Seen from this point of view, the modern Internet becomes a virtual bridge which links the three habitats of information. Firstly, the Internet almost instantaneously connects the researcher with the online containers of digital information he or she seeks. Secondly, it spans the gap between a researcher and the pointers to the masses of analogue data preserved in libraries, archives, historical monuments, and museums. Thirdly, the Net is a superb tool for the closure of the gap between a researcher and the wealth of skills and wisdom of his or her colleagues, no matter who they are, and where they work.

6. APPENDIX - 1

The habitats and characteristics of contemporary scholarly information.

Each of the three environments of scholarly information - the Internet, Libraries, and Experts have their own peculiarities and characteristics:

INFORMATIONAL HABITATS / CHARACTERISTICS	DIGITAL The Internet: the archipelago of networked computers	ANALOGUE Public Libraries/ Archives/ Museums	BIOLOGICAL Human Experts
1. Medium of the information resources	digital (electronic signals).	analogue (paper, parchments, microfilms and other physical objects).	biological (human minds, human memory).
2. Main focus of the resources	* contents of digital resources * pointers to digital resources * pointers to analogue resources * pointers to human experts.	* contents of analogue resources * pointers to analogue resources * pointers to digital resources.	* contents of information recalled or created anew by experts; * pointers to other experts; * pointers to analogue resources.
3. Form of access	indirect contact with electronic containers of knowledge.	direct contact with physical containers of knowledge.	direct face-to-face or phone contact, or indirect contact (via fax, letter, email) with biological containers of knowledge.
4. Access time	for long periods; during un-limited days and hours.	for long periods; during limited days and hours only.	for short periods; during limited days and hours only.
5. Access space	many collections and many resources (on many computers) at a time.	one collection of resources (in one building) at a time.	face-to-face, phone - one collection of resources (= one person) at a time fax, letter, email - many collections (= many persons) at a time.
6. Access cost	free access; free access with a password; paid access if using commercial digital services.	free access.	predominantly free access; paid access if using commercial human services.
7. Restrictions to complete access	plenty of large pockets of inaccessible (in obsolete format, forgotten, temporarily disconnected, unindexed, censored, password-protected, or embargoed) information.	no large pockets of inaccessible information although some information may be embargoed.	some small pockets of partially or fully inaccessible (censored, or embargoed) information.
8. Obstacles to access	very common: equipment/ software/ connectivity failure or obsolescence, hacking, viruses, accidents, disasters.	rare: holidays, strikes, accidents, disasters, sabotage.	common: animosities, absences, sloth, illness, death.
9. Researcher's expenditure	time; equipment, money.	time; money.	time; cultivation of contacts; need to develop skillful public presentations of self.
10. Size of the collection	very large (millions of items) to immense (thousands of millions of items).	large (thousands of items) to very large (millions of items).	large (thousands of items).
11. Organisation of the collection	low organisation, amateurish to expert, haphazard.	high organisation, expert, standardised.	high organisation, expert, idiosyncratic.
12. Guides to information (1) contained by the collection itself	search engines; electronic directories.	databases; occasional advice from the librarians.	no formal guides exist.
13. Guides to information (2) contained by other collections and habitats	electronic directories of libraries and experts.	electronic directories of libraries and experts; occasional advice from the librarians.	verbal or written advice from experts.
14. Stability of the collection	unstable recorded information, fluctuating size of the collection; fluctuating and chaotic cross-references.	stable recorded information, growing collection; stable and systematic cross-references.	unstable recorded information, fluctuating size of the collection; fluctuating and idiosyncratic cross-references.
15. Quality of pointers to relevant sources	uneven accuracy; patchy coverage of online resources.	very high accuracy; complete coverage of analogue resources.	high accuracy; patchy coverage of analogue and human resources.
16. Quality of the recall of contents of the identified sources	exact recall.	exact recall.	approximate recall.
17. Quality of metadata, evaluation, commentaries, critique of the identified sources	uneven quality; patchy coverage.	uneven quality; patchy coverage.	high quality; patchy coverage.
18. Trustworthiness of the collection of resources	mix of untrustworthy and trustworthy.	trustworthy.	trustworthy.
19. Finding required information in the collection	simple to complex; very quick.	simple to complex; slow to quick.	simple; slow to quick.
20. Copying of information in the collection	digital format; very quick.	analogue format; slow.	biological format; slow.

7. APPENDIX - 2

Internet Hosts and Internet Users in 2007

Internet Hosts and Internet Users in the 12 selected countries, in 2007.

Country	Population	Hosts	Internet users	% Popul. online (penetration rate)
Canada	33,213,000	4,196,000	28,000,000	84.3%
US	303,825,000	282,000,000	223,000,000	73.4%
Japan	127,288,000	33,333,000	88,110,000	69.2%
UK	60,944,000	5,118,000	40,200,000	66.0%
Italy	58,145,000	4,117,000	32,000,000	55.0%
Australia	21,007,000	9,458,000	11,240,000	53.5%
Germany	82,370,000	16,494,000	42,500,000	51.6%
Czech Republic	10,221,000	1,668,000	4,400,000	43.0%
Poland	38,501,000	5,681,000	16,000,000	41.6%
Israel	7,112,000	671,000	2,000,000	28.1%
France	62,151,000	9,458,000	11,240,000	18.1%
India	1,147,996,000	2,306,000	80,000,000	7.0%

Src: CIA 2008.

Statistics shows that in India, which remains classed as a developing country, in 2007 up to 80m people (i.e. approx. 7% of the population) made regular use of the Internet. In the same year, in the heavily industrialized countries such as the UK, Japan, the USA and Canada, this percentage was 9-12 times higher. At the same time, in a mid-ranking country -- Poland -- some 16m people (i.e. over 40% of the population) used the Internet.

The number of installed internet computer hosts per country is also instructive. Clearly, each internet host (a computer which acts as a permanent node on the Net) needs to be set up and regularly maintained. If we assume the existence of at least one technician for every 10 networked computers, the pool of highly trained personnel in the mid-ranking countries becomes impressive indeed. The available data suggest that in 2007 there were over 0.5m people in Poland with professional skills in computer technology and communications (i.e. 1 specialist for approximately every 70 people).

8. APPENDIX - 3

Some Examples of Useful Online Resources

This appendix lists the nine basic types of Internet information sources. The list merely illustrates the range of available resources and is not (and could never be) comprehensive. The appendix also presents, in the form of a short enumeration, a handful of examples of the sources of online tools, which are handy in online data acquisition, data analyses, and data transformations. All web addresses were correct as of the time of the last update to this document.
For the latest version of this Appendix please see http://www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/e-anthropologist-appendix.html
To consult old, unavailable sources, please see The Internet Archive's 'WayBack Machine', http://www.archive.org

1. DATA BASES

Examples:

Bookstore Catalogues and Bibliographies

• Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com
  [Bibliographical details (and a tool for the purchase of books, DVDs, and over 1,000,000 electronic downloadable articles, documents and books on several topics, incl: Arts and Photography, Audiobooks, Biographies and Memoirs, History, Museums and Collections, Nonfiction, Professional and Technical, Reference, Religion and Spirituality, Science, Sports, Textbooks, Travel.]
• AbeBooks.com http://www.abebooks.com/
  [Search 13,500 booksellers selling 110 million books.]
• Bibliografia Etnografii Polskiej http://www.bep.uni.lodz.pl/index.php?id=1
  [Coverage: Polish Anthropological publications published in Poland and abroad during the years 1986-2005.]

Dictionaries

• An Advanced Learner's Arabic-English Dictionary http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:2002.02.0005
  [Digitised version of H. Anthony Salmon. An Advanced Learner's Arabic-English Dictionary. Beirut. Librairie du Liban. 1889.]
• Roget's Thesaurus http://thesaurus.reference.com
  [English language synonyms, antonyms, and cognate words.]

Directories of People

• NBR's AccessAsia database http://www.accessasia.org/database/quick/
  [A searchable database of experts on contemporary Asian affairs and policy-relevant issues.]
• AsiaSource AsiaExperts http://www.asiasource.org/experts/
  [A searchable database of experts on Asian culture, arts, history, and society.]
• International Directory of South Asia Scholars http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/southasia/cuvl/
  [IDSAS entries are submitted by the persons listed. The Directory is fully indexed, allowing readers to conduct a search by name or keyword (e.g. subject of interest, city or country, university or affiliation, etc.).]

Library/Museum/Archive Catalogues

• Australian and Overseas Libraries Gateway http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/libraries/
  [A free Web-based directory service with information about more than 6,300 Australian libraries, their collections and services.]
• Biblioteka Instytutu Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej (IEiAK), UW http://www.etnologia.uw.edu.pl/cgi-bin/makwww.exe
  [A catalogue of books and theses in the collection of the IEiAK Library.]
• The British Library http://www.bl.uk/
  [Holdings: 14 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 58 million patents, 3 million sound recordings. Search: British Library - 10,000 pages on the BL main website Online Gallery - 30,000 treasures from the BL collection Catalogue records - 14 million items in BL collections Journal articles - 9 million articles from 20,000 journals.]
• The Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/index.html
  [Basic Search (by Title or Author/Creator, Subject, Call number, LCCN, ISSN, or ISBN, Keywords), Guided Search, Search Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, Search Sound Online Catalog.]
• Pittt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/databases.html
  [The Museum has two separate catalogues dealing with the Anthropology and World Archaeology: one for all artefacts, and the other for historic field photograph collections.]

Telephone Directories

• Free White Pages - People Search - International Phone Books http://www.numberway.com
  [Searches international white pages and yellow pages phone books.]

2. SEARCH ENGINES

Examples:

Global Surface Web Search Engines (indices of online documents, images, moving images)

• Asian Studies WWW VL Search Engines http://www.ciolek.com/SearchEngines.html
  [Search engines useful to Asian studies.]
• CiteSeer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
  [Downloadable information from 767,558 scientific documents available on the Web.]
• Google.com http://www.google.com
  [Searches text contents of the Web as a whole.]
• Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/
  [A comprehensive search for blogs specialising in certain topics.]
• Google Image Search http://images.google.com.au/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
  [A comprehensive search for online images.]
• Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com
  [Contents of scholarly books, journal articles, conference proceedings and academic websites]
• The Internet Archive's 'WayBack Machine' http://www.archive.org/
  [In June 2008 the Internet Archive contained about 85 bln archived copies of WWW pages from mid-1996 onwards. The Internet Archive also stores: Moving Images, Texts, Audio, Software.]
• List of search engines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines
  [By content/topic (General, Geographical limited scope, Business, Legal, Medical, News, People), By information type (Forum, Blog, Multimedia, Email, Maps, Price, Question and answer), By category (Open source search engines, Social search engines, Metasearch engines, Visual search engines, Usenet), By provider (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask.com), Defunct search engines.]
• OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu
  [Contents of scholarly working papers and e-prints. In November 2008 OAIster provided access to 18,370,955 records from 1034 contributors.]
• Scirus http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/
  [The most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web. In November 2008 there were over 450 million scientific items indexed.]

Local Surface Web Search Engines (indices of online documents, images, moving images)

• The Asian Studies WWW Monitor Search engine http://coombs.anu.edu.au/asia-www-monitor.html#database
  [Details and contents of the many thousands of abstracts and web-resources reviews published by "The Asian Studies WWW Monitor" (ISSN 1329-9778) e-journal since April 1994 till now.]
• Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/
  [A wiki-based universal compendium of information. In late 2008 it comprised over 2,630,000 articles in English.]

Global Deep Web Search Engines (full text indices of online documents normally unaccessed and uncharted by the Surface Web search engines)

• CompletePlanet - The Deep Web Directory http://aip.completeplanet.com/
  [A search system for over 70,000 dynamic searchable databases. Finds databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by surface web search engines.]

Local Deep Web Search Engines

• Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org
• Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com
• Wielka Encyclopedia Powszechna PWN http://encyklopedia.pwn.pl

3. DIRECTORIES

Examples:

Gazetteers of Places

• From Afrosiab to Zucchabar: A Gazetteer of Georeferenced Nodes of Long-Distance Communication Routes http://www.ciolek.com/OWTRAD/gazetteer-00.html
  [Links to 12 gazetteers of use to historians: Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer, A Historical Gazetteer of Southeast Asia, DIGMAP Gazetteer [of Historical Placenames.], EarthSearch.net, FuzzyG: The Fuzzy Gazetteer, GEOnet Names Server, German Space Operations Center Gazetteer, Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, Maplandia.com - Google Maps World Gazetteer, SatelliteViews.net, Tageo.com GPS city index and satellite map, THDL Gazetteer of Tibet and the Himalayas, Worldwide Directory of Cities and Towns: Global Gazetteer.]
• Gazetteers of the World and Beyond http://www.nla.gov.au/map/worldgazetteers.html
  [A bibliography of online and offline gazetteers: World - General, World - Alphabetic, Out of This World (Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature), Gazetteers of Australia.]

Internet Guides (bibliographies of links)

• Asian Studies Online Bookshops - a register http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/AsiaPages/VLBookshops.html
  [Searchable catalogs of over 170 Asian Studies specialist bookshops and publishers.]
• Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVL-AsianStudies.html
  [A sub-section of the WWW VL, a specialist directory of Internet resources of use to Asian studies.]
• DOP - Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/
  [In Nov 2008 4,576,062 sites - 81,783 editors - over 590,000 categories.]
• eReference Resources http://www.referenceresources.info/
  [A site which monitors reference resources and sites on the Internet.]
• Yahoo.com http://www.yahoo.com
  [General purpose directory of Internet resources.]
• WWW Virtual Library http://vlib.org
  [A directory of Internet resources useful to a number of disciplines, including: Aboriginal Studies, African Studies, American Indians, Anthropology, Archaeology, Asian Studies, Buddhist Studies, Demography and Population Studies, Economics, Historical Auxiliary Sciences, Indigenous Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American Studies, Migration and Ethnic Relations, Pacific Studies, Psychology, Russian and East European Studies, Social Policy, Social Sciences, Sociology, Taoism, Tibetan Studies, Women's History, Women's Studies, and Zen Buddhism.]

Lists of web directories

• List of web directories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
  [General directories, Specialist directories, Defunct directories.]

4. REPOSITORIES

Examples:

Bibliographies

• Anthropological Bibliographies and Research Documents http://wings.buffalo.edu/anthropology/Documents
  [A collection of specialist bibliographies. From "Aboriginal Overkill and Native Burning" through "Environmental Archaeology Bibliography (EAB) database for the British Isles" to "The 'Looting Question' Bibliography" to "References on American Indian Use of Fire in Ecosystems." Some of these materials have been revised, updated and re-published within the AnthroGlobe's series of bibliographies.]
• The AnthroGlobe Bibliographies http://coombs.anu.edu.au/Biblio/biblio_index.html
  [A collection of specialist online bibliographies compiled by Editors of the AnthroGlobe electronic journal (ISSN 1481-3440). Bibliographies dealing with geographic areas: Brasil, Cook Islands, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia, Polynesian Outlier, Tonga. Bibliographies dealing with topics: Charmstones and other ritual objects, Chinese Uyghurs, Vietnam's Economic Transformation 1986-2000, Fieldwork, research methods and ethnography in sociocultural anthropology, Fishing Activities, Foraging Peoples, Quantification, The South Asian Diaspora and East Africa, Time, Tourism, Vanuatu Languages).]

Digitised Books

• Project Gutenberg - Fine Literature Digitally Re-Published http://www.promo.net/pg
  [By 2002 the Project had digitised and released over 6200 e-books.]
• Perseus Digital Library http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
  [Digitised authoritative texts: 'The Qur'an' (English, Arabic), Caesar, 'Gallic War' (English, Latin), Catullus, 'Carmina' (English, Latin), Cicero, 'In Catilinam I' (English, Latin), Virgil, 'Aeneid' (English, Latin), Herodotus, 'Histories' (English, Greek), Homer, 'Odyssey' (English, Greek), Plato, 'Republic' (English, Greek).]

Digitised Documents

• 20th-21st Century Zen People and their Teachings http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/ZenPages/ZenPeople.html
  [Links to archives with transcripts of 'teishos' (sermons) by contemporary Zen masters.]
• Silk Road Narratives: A Collection of Historical Texts http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/texts.html
  [Digitized historical sources dealing with the 'Silk Road' and its merchants and travellers (e.g. The Han Histories 206 BC - 220 AD, Faxian [Fa-Hsien] 399-414, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti's Merchant Handbook 14th c., The Tarikh-i-Rashidi by Mirza Muhammad Haidar 1546-47, Memoirs of Babur early 16th c., Anthony Jenkinson 1557-60, Richard Steel & John Crowther 1615-16, Journey of Benedict Go‘s early 17th c., Adam Olearius 1633-39, Jean Chardin 1660s-70s).]

Digitised Images and Documentary Photographs

• Asian and Pacific Studies - Historical Photographs http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLPages/AsianPages/Asian-Historical-Photographs.html
  [Historical photographs from: Afghanistan, Africa, Central Asia, Ceylon, China, Dutch East Indies, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Micronesia, Middle East, Molucca, Mongolia, Nepal, Pacific, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Silk Road, Singapore, South East Asia, Tibet, Turkistan, Vietnam.]
• Bajkowoye Cemetery, Kiev http://www.vgd.ru/CEMETRY/BAIKOVOE/fraim.htm
  [Over 220 photographs of old graves (1850s-1920s), including several Catholic graves with inscriptions in Polish.]
• The Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Related Art http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu
  [Nearly 300,000 original color slides and black and white and color photographs of art and architecture throughout Asia. Countries covered in the collection include India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar (Burma), China, and Japan. Works range from approximately 2500 BC to the present, and documentation includes contemporary religious activities in various parts of Asia.]

Digitised Maps

• Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/index.html
  [Online Maps of Current Interest, Online Maps of General Interest (The World, Africa, The Americas including United States, Canada and Mexico, Asia, Australia and the Pacific, Europe, The Middle East, Polar Regions and Oceans, Russia and the Former Soviet Republics, The United States including National Parks and Monuments), Historical Maps, Maps on Other Websites including: Country Maps, City Maps, State Maps, Historical Maps and Outline Maps, Cartographic Reference Resources.]
• The Ancient World Mapping Center - Free Maps For Students http://www.unc.edu/awmc/mapsforstudents.html
  [In November 2008 49 maps: incl. Aegaeum Mare, Ancient Greece and the Aegean, Ancient Italy, Byzantine Constantinople, Campaigns of Caesar, The Roman Empire's North and West in the 'Age of Crisis', Western Mediterranean in the Mid-Third Century.]
• Maps and Pictures of Europe http://www.euratlas.com/
  [Physical Atlas of Europe (Mountains, Rivers, Towns, Countries, Images, Explanation), Historical Atlas of the Ancient Orient, Periodical Historical Atlas of Europe (Europe 1, Europe 100, Europe 200, Europe 300, Europe 400, Europe 500, Europe 600, Europe 700, Europe 800, Europe 900, Europe 1000, Europe 1100, More...), Cartographies (Algeria 1837, Belgium 1777, Egypt 1715, Europe 1781, France 1783, Germany 1786, Germany 1852, Italy 1783, Maghreb 1783, Peutinger Map, More...), The Timeline in Pictures (20th Century to 11th Century, More...).]

Digitised Periodicals

• CEEOL - Central and Eastern European Online Library http://www.ceeol.com/
  [Over 340 searchable on-line humanities and social science journals from Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Over 70,500 articles. Access via subscribing libraries.]
• Project JSTOR http://www.jstor.org
  [Over 1200 searchable on-line scholarly journals. Access via subscribing libraries.]
• Project Muse http://muse.jhu.edu/muse.html
  [Humanities' searchable on-line journals.]

5. "FLOWING" WEBSITES

Examples:
• Dutch Portuguese Colonial History http://www.colonialvoyage.com
  [Dutch-Portuguese colonial history in Arabia Gulf, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Brazil, Taiwan, Ghana, Macao, Timor. It publishes photographs of colonial remains of forts and heritage, and maps.]
• Sanbo Kyodan: Harada-Yasutani School of Zen Buddhism http://www.ciolek.com/WWWVLPages/ZenPages/HaradaYasutani.html
  [Details of the ever-growing "spiritual genealogical tree" of a small, energetic and iconoclastic Zen Buddhist sect who is especially influential among the contemporary Zen centers in the US, Germany, Switzerland, Philippines, NZ and Australia.]

6. "FROZEN" WEBSITES

Examples:
• A Dictionary of Measures, Units and Conversions http://www.cleavebooks.co.uk/dictunit/dictunit1.htm
  [88KB document, edited (since 1995) by Frank Tapson, Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching, U. of Exeter, UK.]
• China Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS) http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/
  [A database of populated places and historical administrative units for the period of Chinese history between 222 BC and 1911 AD. CHGIS provides a base GIS platform for researchers to use in spatial analysis, temporal statistical modeling, and representation of selected historical units as digital maps.]
• The Seljuk Han in Anatolia http://www.turkishhan.org/homebase.htm
  [A register, study, maps and bibliography of the 11th-13th c. caravanserais (khans, hans) in Turkey.]
• South Seas - Voyaging and Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Pacific 1760-1800 http://southseas.nla.gov.au/index.html
  [Voyaging Accounts, Voyaging Maps, South Seas Companion, Cultural Atlas, Indigenous Histories, European Reactions, Reference Works, Research.]

7. COLLABORATIONS

Examples:

Blogs

• Antro DJ: Blog grupy warsztatowej Cyfrowa Etnografia - Uniwersytet Warszawski http://www.antro.dj.pl/
  [Topics in November 2008: Antro-blogosfera, Antropologia na Swiecie, Antropologia w Polsce, Antropologia Zaangazowana, Badania, Czasopisma Antropologiczne, Co Nam Daje BUW, Darmowe Materialy On-line, Google, Ksiazki, Materialy Edukacyjne, Ogloszenia, Wyszukiwanie Akademickie, Zarzadzanie Bibliografia, Zotero.]
• Blog - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
  [Types of blogs, Uses, Popularity, Relationship with the Mass Media, History of the blog technology, Studies of blogs and blogging, Links.]
• Blogger http://www.blogger.com/features
  [A high quality, free tool and free space on the Net for construction of professional blogs (i.e. collaborative web-based notebooks organised by the reverse chronology of entries - e.g. journals).]
• WeblogMatrix - Compare Them All http://www.weblogmatrix.org/
  [Technical details and a comparison of features of over 26 types of blog software.]

Wikis

• Wikidot http://www.wikidot.com
  [A high quality, free tool (and free space on the Net) for construction of professional wikis (i.e. collaborative web-based notebooks organised alphabetically, or by topic of entries - e.g. dictionaries, manuals).]
• WikiMatrix - Compare Them All http://www.wikimatrix.org/
  [Technical details and a comparison of features of over 110 types of wiki software.]

8. GATHERINGS

Examples:

Discussion Groups

• Google Groups http://groups.google.com
  [Contents of over 1 mln messages in Jan 2005.]
• Archivum.info http://archivum.info/
  [In November 2008 there were 45,478,894 archived messages extracted from 12,098 mailing lists and newsgroups.]

Information Bazaars

• Wikipedia: Reference - Desk Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk
  [A wiki-based Q&A gathering: Users leave questions on the reference desk and variously skilled Wikipedia volunteers work to help to find the requested information. Old questions/answers are archived daily.]

Mailing Lists

• CataList, the official catalog of LISTSERV lists http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html
  [Details of 52,218 public mailing lists operating in November 2008.]
• H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online http://www.h-net.org/
  [Approx 200 scholarly mailing lists plus their publicly accessible archives, including: HABSBURG, H-1960s, H-AfResearch, H-AfrArts, H-Africa, H-AfrLitCine, H-Afro-Am, H-AfrPol, H-AfrTeach, H-Albion, H-AmIndian, H-AmRel, H-Amstdy, H-ANZAU, H-Antisemitism, H-Appalachia, H-ArtHist, H-Asia, H-Atlantic, H-Bahai, H-Borderlands, H-Buddhism, H-Business, H-California, H-Canada, H-Caribbean, H-Catholic, H-Childhood, H-Citizenship, H-CivWar, H-Communal-Societies, H-Connecticut, H-Democracy, H-Demog, H-Diplo, H-Disability, H-EarlySlavic, H-Education, H-Empire, H-Energy, H-Environment, H-Ethnic, H-Eugenics, H-FedHist, H-Film, H-Florida, H-Folk, H-Francais, H-French-Colonial, H-Gender-MidEast, H-Genocide, H-German, H-Germanistik, H-Hausa, H-HistBibl, H-HistGeog, H-History-and-Theory, H-HistoryDay, H-Histsex, H-HOAC, H-Holocaust, H-HRE, H-Human-Rights, H-Ideas, H-Illinois, H-Indiana, H-Info, H-Iowa, H-Islamart, H-ItAm, H-Italy, H-Japan, H-Judaic, H-Kentucky, H-Labor, H-Labor-Arts, H-LatAm, H-Law, H-Levant, H-Louisiana, H-Low-Countries, H-Luso-Africa, H-Maritime, H-Maryland, H-Material-Culture, H-MedAnthro, H-Mediterranean, H-Memory, H-Mexico, H-Michigan, H-Mideast-Medieval, H-Mideast-Politics, H-Migration, H-Minerva, H-Museum, H-Nationalism, H-NEAsia, H-New-Jersey, H-NewEngland, H-NewMexico, H-Ohio, H-Oralhist, H-Peace, H-Pennsylvania, H-Pentecostalism, H-Pol, H-Polmeth, H-Portugal, H-PubAdmin, H-Public, H-Quilts, H-Radhist, H-Review, H-Rural, H-Russia, H-SA-Higher-Education, H-SAE, H-SAfrica, H-Scholar, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-SEASIA, H-Skand, H-Slavery, H-South, H-Southern-Industry, H-Southern-Lit, H-Southern-Music, H-Southern-Religion, H-Soyuz, H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Stained-Glass, H-State, H-Survey, H-Swahili, H-Teachpol, H-Tennessee, H-Texas, H-Travel, H-Turk, H-Urban, H-US-Japan, H-US1918-45, H-USA, H-Utopia, H-W-Civ, H-War, H-Water, H-West, H-West-Africa, H-Women, H-World.]
• OpenSubscriber http://www.opensubscriber.com/
  [Archives of public mailing lists and groups.]
• Tile.net http://tile.net/lists/
  [Directory of email discussion lists, and email alerts - listed by name, description, domain.]

9. FEEDS

Examples:

News Sites and Newsfeeds

• Anthropological blogs - Newsfeeds http://www.antropologi.info/feeds/anthropology/
  [Round-the-clock details of the latest entries & comments from approx. 50 anthropological blogs.]
• Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library - Newsfeeds http://coombs.anu.edu.au/WWWVLAsian/VLAsiaNewsfeeds.html
  [Live Asia-Pacific Newsfeeds: Asia-Pacific latest news, Terrorism, Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, Caucasus, Central Asia, China, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Japan, Korea, Kuweit, Laos, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, New Zealand, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Asia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, UAE, Vietnam, Yemen.]
• Google News http://news.google.com
  [News from over 4,500 sources: Top Stories, Recommended for you, World, Local News, U.S., Business, Sci/Tech, Entertainment, Sports, Health.]
• News about anthropologists and anthropology http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=anthropologist+OR+anthropologists+OR+anthropology
  [A subset of news extracted from Google News.]

Info/Alert/Update commercial services

• Deep Query Manager (DQM) http://www.brightplanet.com/deep-query-manager/dqm/deep-query-manager.html
  [Features: Access to over 70,000 specialty search engines and databases, custom search profiles, custom reports, supplied filters to further refine your searches, scheduled and automatically run recurring searches (once per day, once per week, etc.), comparison of results sets to identify new, modified, absent or unchanged results, and more.]

10. ADDENDUM - ONLINE RESEARCH TOOLS

In addition to being a space filled with digital information the Internet is also a rich repository of tools for data acquisition and data transformation.
Examples:

Tools - Data Collection

• CHNM Poll Builder http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/polls/
  [The Poll Builder from the Center for History and New Media provides a free, simple, one-step process to create polls for embedding in your Web pages. You can select the background color for the poll and have up to 5 possible responses.]
• Toolbox for Digital and Spatial Humanities http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/wiki/index.php?title=Toolbox_for_Digital_and_Spatial_Humanities
  [Aggregators, ArcGIS Tools, Extensions, and Plug-ins, Calculators, Cartograms, Cataloging, Collaboration, Comparison, Conferences and Calls for Papers, Document Management, Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis, Flow Mapping, Gazetteers, Georeferencing and Geocoding, Mapping, Network Analysis, Programming, Scrapers, Search, Sharing, Statistics: Spatial Analysis and Geostatistics, TED Presentations, Text Analysis, Tool Developers and Catalogers To Watch, Tutorials, Unit Converters, Visualization.]
• Web Online Surveys http://web-online-surveys.com/
  [Create questionnaires with point and click ease: an all in one service designed for people who are not computer experts and have the need to conduct online surveys by themselves.]

Tools - Translation into/from Foreign Languages

• Convert Chinese characters to Unicode http://www.pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html
  [This tool converts Chinese characters (including Japanese hiragana, katakana, and kanji; tonal Hanyu Pinyin; and Cyrillic script) into the universally legible (e.g. in Web documents) Unicode numerical character references (NCRs).]
• Google Translate http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en#
  [Language-to-language translations of samples of text and of complete web documents in: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.]

9. APPENDIX - 4

Effective Search Techniques - A Summary

There are nearly twenty proven methods of extracting extra information from recalcitrant search engines.

A. Judiciously choosing search terms

1. Use the well conceived and well defined search terms (words, keywords) and pay special attention to search advantages conferred by the use of unique (and thus easy to locate) personal names, dates, and values of the measurements (Ravia 2008b);

2. "You should always strive to use differentiating keywords when searching the web. Words that are commonly used will not help you much. [...] Try to use words which underline the peculiarity of your target." (Ravia 2008b)

3. Try not only the main search term but also all other related, alternative, variant/synonymous, and specialist terms. Harris (2000) points out that word searches work better if one uses his four step "FOREST LOG" development of fruitful search terms.

• First of all, according to Harris, use the FO or the range of key Forms and Formulas. These are various "Forms or variants of the words you are thinking of." For example, when searching for papers on "validity of testing" try also words "test", "testing", and "tests."
• Next, try using RE or Related terms, such as: "measurement, assessment, performance, criteria, judgment, evaluation, and so forth." (Harris 2000)
• Thirdly, use ST or Synonymous Terms. To generate ST search terms, follow a different branch of synonyms, ask yourself "What other words are synonymous or used in place of the word test? What about exam, examination, assessment, quiz, midterm?" (Harris 2000).
• Finally, there is also an additional technique, which invokes the LOG or the Ladder of Generalization - "The higher on the ladder, the more general or comprehensive the term, while the lower on the ladder, the more specific the term. [... I]f you do not get the results you want, move up or down the ladder of generalization and generate some more terms." (Harris 2000)
4. Take advantage of deliberate spelling mistakes to retrieve hitherto untapped target information (Ravia 2008b). For example, Google SE locates about 55,000,000 pages with the word "millennium", 21,500,000 web pages which contain the erroneous spelling "millenium", and 2,260,000 in which the keyword is misspelt even more badly: "milenium".

5. Remember to "phrase search" or "string search" instead of relying solely on "word search" (Harris 2000). To this end "[e]nclose terms in double quotation marks if you want to retrieve those exact terms in that exact sequence. This is one of the most useful ways to cut ballast out in order to find a specific target." (Ravia 2008b);

6. Use several search words simultaneously. For example a Google search for "'malinowski' 'trobriand' 'kula' 'boats'" locates 973 web pages, whereas "'malinowski' 'trobriand' 'kula' 'bracelets'" locates 912 partially different pages.

7. Alternate the levels of generality and specificity of your search terms. See the LOG technique mentioned earlier. The underlying aim is to find the target information, despite its multifarious guises (Harris 2000);

8. Try searches based on metaphors, synecdoches (e.g. pars pro toto, toto pro pars, pars pro pars, etc.) and other figures of speech (Ravia 2002b);

B. The use of the inbuilt search features of a search engine

9. Use Boolean searches (Cohen 2008a, Harris 2000, Ravia 2000a). For example, an Altavista search for "Anna" locates 731,000,000 results web pages (incl. those about Anna Kournikova and the American Nephrology Nurses' Association - ANNA). A search for "Zadrozynska" locates 133 web pages. "Anna AND Zadrozynska" locate 121 pages. "Anna AND Zadrozynska AND kultura" locates 34 pages.

10. Use the advanced features of search engines (Google 2008, Monash University Library 2004, Overture Services 2007). These special features may include, for instance, Altavista's searches in all of the 36 tracked languages or in only one of them, searches by time frame (anytime, last week, last two weeks, last month, last four months, last eight months, last year), or by specified date range, or by file type (any format; Adobe PDF (.pdf), HTML (.html, .htm), Microsoft Excel (.xls), Microsoft Power Point (.ppt), Microsoft Word (.doc), Text (.txt)); or by domains (such as .com, .gov, .edu, etc.) and by URLs (e.g. www.pinkkoala.com);

11. Use proximity searches, i.e. searches where one can specify the number of nonsearch words that can occur between two or more search words (Cohen 2008a, Ravia 2000a);

12. "Use peculiar strings and special keywords (a typical case on alta[vista] is -"domain:com" to avoid [retrieval of] commercial crap)." (Ravia 2000a)

C. The use of many different search engines

13. Use several different general purpose search engines (Ravia 2000a, Ravia 2008b). Here Ravia is adamant: "USE VARIOUS RESOURCES! Should I give only ONE advice, it would be this one. Even more important than 'keeping on track' [...]. Never, never, never overestimate your search tool of choice. EACH search engine, main, regional or local has its own quirks and its own blindness patterns ('shadows') [...] Thus you should NEVER 'stick' to a given search engine 'of choice'. Learn how much they differ and - even more important - understand how much their own results [change] over time!" (Ravia 2008b)

14. Use regional search engines, e.g. ones that separately gather information from Albania, Bangladesh, Chile... and Zambia (Ravia 2000a, Ravia 2000b). This is because "so-called 'regional' search engines are incredibly important for fetching 'less biased' info. As you may expect, russian, chinese, indian, japanese and 'you-name-them' collections of datas [sic] have a completely different 'cut' vis-a-vis the stuff you can find in the euroamerican world. (This is of course true for all sort of data: files, images, sounds, films, software... the well-known motto being 'always go ftp-fishing far from the copyright-obsessed euroamericans)'. Anyway there are huge differences (in quality, 'cut' and bias) between 'european' and 'american' data collections as well." (Ravia 2000b);

15. Use foreign language search engines, e.g. Virgilio, the Italian SE (http://ricerca.alice.it/), or SearchIndia, the Indian SE (http://www.searchindia.com/). Ravia notes here that "[t]he web is an Ocean of knowledge... about two centimeters deep. Finding rare snippets of information among tons of crap is getting more and more [difficult] because on a more and more 'commercial' web you are compelled to wade through a lot of noise to get to the signal. Most search engines DO NOT index the most interesting parts of the web: they index commercial over educational sites, 'popular' sites (read sites loved by the zombies) over relatively unknown sites and US sites over European sites... Well you should at least try to compensate this last disadvantage using search engines located outside the States." (Ravia 2000b);

16. Use topical, specialist search engines. "Microsearching (local searching) means taking advantage of a plethora of tools that the web offers, from the specific search engines that most homepages [sic] clusters have, to the webrings search engines, the maillists search engines and the 'local' search engines like AOL and hitbox." (Ravia 2000b);

D. Innovative approaches to harvesting useful data from the search results

17. Use a 'Yo-Yo' style of browsing while perusing numerous pages with the search results (Ravia 2002a);

18. When there are too few search results "drop off the least important concept(s) to broaden your subject." (Cohen 2008b);

19. Finally, use meta search engines (see Cohen 2008e, Ravia 2008d) which "simultaneously search multiple search engines. These are useful when: you have an obscure topic, you are not having luck finding anything when you search, your search is not complex, you want to retrieve a relatively small number of relevant results." (Cohen 2008b).

10. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Greg Young for his vigorous skepticism regarding my initial theoretical ideas, and to Olaf and Monika Ciolek for their thoughtful and thus ruthless advice on the subsequent iterations of this paper.

11. ENDNOTES

[1] One terabyte = 1 million megabytes. If we estimate one megabyte of text per book, then one terabyte of information corresponds to the volume of information contained by one million books. Since in late 2008 the biggest library in the world, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., held over 32 million cataloged books (Wikipedia 2008) therefore the entire book collection of the LoC contains approximately 32 terabytes of data. By the same token, the volume of information stored in the deep Web formats as described by Bergman (2001) was equal to that held by more than 230 Libraries of Congress.

[2] Scholarly research is a craft which, from a normative point of view, comprises at least twelve consecutive stages:

1. Orientation: the researcher orients himself, or herself within his field of expertise and formulates the overall raison d'etre, nature and scope of the research task (for discussion of this key stage see Meyer 2007).

2. Focussed preparation: this will include developing a list of questions to be asked of the located materials, and a list of legitimate answers. It will also involve ranking the importance of the various possible sources of information and choosing the most promising research methodology. Tasks to be completed are listed, together with their relative importance, and the time needed for their completion.

3. Information-seeking: this involves identifying, locating, and accessing relevant information.

4. Accessed-information screening: the investigator makes prima facie assessments of the sources' relevance and suitability. Some are bypassed and ignored, while others are flagged as deserving future attention and diligence. Ideally, the choices and decisions forming this stage of work are informed, and justifiable. Further, the researcher determines how much information to glean from a source: the most important nugget(s), or all useful data.

5. The first corrective feedback loop: the researcher quickly analyses the nature and content of the extracted material. This is done so that he can reformulate and refocus stages no. 1 and no. 2 in line with the accessed material, and refine/adjust his data-finding and data-extracting procedures, i.e. stages no. 3 and no. 4, accordingly.

6. Data tidying: it is the time for tidying up the materials harvested so far. Collected material is given a standard, neat and legible appearance. Fonts and their sizes are standardized. Excessive blank spaces are removed from the notes. Duplicates are removed. Cryptic annotations are written up and made plain. Researcher's typing errors are rectified. All collected raw materials are carefully matched with the directional pointers to their sources.

7. Data evaluation: judgments regarding the veracity, reliability, and accuracy of collected information are made.

8. The second feedback loop: in light of experience gleaned at 7, decisions are made with respect to the re-formulation, readjustment and further fine-tuning of stages 1 through 4.

9. Storage: acquired information is stored securely. If the research involves the use of computers the collected material is stored as a file on a hard disk, and as a backup on another drive, or a memory stick.

10. Reassessment: stored data is carefully checked and verified, and it is established which aspects remain uncertain or unclear. In addition, this is the time for filling in (or reconstructing) known gaps. This is also an important time for sorting and categorising the data; discovering possible corroborations as well as contradictions; determining the modal (i.e. most common) values; and the identification of any exceptions and outliers. Furthermore, this the time for discerning patterns - such as correlations, spatial and temporal distributions, clusters, and trends.

11. Judgment and Conclusions: the eleventh stage is reached when the researcher mulls over the patterns identified in stage ten, and discerns the overall narrative that the collected material suggests.

12. Writing: the researcher writes up the findings, cross-references them with the data on which they are based, and puts them in a universally accessible and readable format (say, in plain text, HTML, or XML) so that they can be shared (dispatched, retrieved, read, copied, re-formatted) with academic colleagues, media, or editors of research journals.

[3] All parts of the collected information are highly informative. For instance, even such a small detail like a file's extension becomes meaningful to a keen observer. It often suggests not only a purely formal or technical difference between a standard text file, graphic file, or GIS data file (e.g. filename.txt vs. filename.jpg vs. filename.kml), but it can also be indicative of the likely characteristics and significance of such files. Filename extensions can be regarded, in a sense, as one of the types of metadata pertaining to the material they lend a name to:
pdf - possibly indicative of documents with stable information.
txt - possibly indicative of documents with semi-valuable content: ones which are important enough to be placed online, but not important enough to be converted into a modern hypertext document.
doc - possibly indicative of complete Word documents with introductions, bodies, and conclusions.
htm, html, php - possibly indicative of frequently changing hypertext documents of standard value.
xml - possibly indicative of frequently changing but carefully structured hypertext documents of higher-than standard value.

[4] "Imagine yourself as a 'blade', cutting through million of useless 'pudding sites' to find the few 'rosinen' [sic] you are looking for. DO NOT GO ASTRAY! [...] you SHOULD NOT stop in order to read some fascinating info about [some other subject matter], even if you never saw anything as good elsewhere about this subject even if these [materials] could (eventually) be of some use, even if you are genuinely interested in that stuff. [...] For crying out loud: wake up! YOU ARE NOT searching for [X or Y or Z], you are searching for [A only and nothing else but A]! Write your task in big red letters on a yellow 'post-it' and stick it in the middle of your screen [...] This is more important than most newbies seekers believe. The problem is that surfing and browsing the internet is quite seductive. You continue to find tidbits of interest. In fact, no matter how accurate your query was, a significant percentage of the search results you will obtain will not correspond to what you were looking for." (Ravia 2004b)

[5] It is important to use the correct approach when asking people online for their advice and help with research. There seem to be twelve points worth remembering:
1. In your emails use a brief, well formed, informative subject line;
2. Send your questions to one person at a time, or to one online gathering at a time. Do not send a circular. Do not cross-post the same message to many mailing lists or discussion groups. If you have to approach several experts at the same time, take care to copy and send your query as one email at a time;
3. Introduce yourself. Be polite, brief and businesslike;
4. Pose a single, concise, and well delineated question at a time. The more questions you ask, and the more disorganised they are, the less likely you are to get favourable treatment;
5. If you have many questions, spread them over a sequence of days, or even better - weeks. Pose no more than 2 questions in quick succession one after another. Remember to do so, otherwise you will be resented by those whom you approach;
6. State the wider context of your question (e.g. "I am working on the historical geography of 17th c. Armenia...");
7. Show a good understanding of your research problem (and the fruits of your prior investigations). This means that you should not ask questions without having previously conducted your own serious preliminary investigations;
9. Indicate in your email query who you are, where you work, and your contact details. This greatly enhances your overall credibility and answer-worthiness;
10. Always courteously thank for the answer, any answer you get - detailed or not - as soon it reaches you;
11. Do not nag those who have failed to answer you;
12. Always fully acknowledge the help you got in the research paper you wrote. It is a good long-term strategy to remember to send paper's copy or its URL to those who aided you with advice and help.

These twelve points can be further summarised: (a) be brief; (b) be convincing; (c) pose well delineated questions; and (d) observe (Rinaldi 1998) the netiquette. Asking people is a very important and very seminal research technique. A highly experienced researcher advises: "... use FRIENDS. Each [information] seeker seeks in a different way. Each human being sees different (sets of) patterns when investigating the same amount of data. Conducting multiple human investigations on the same target will bring a considerable amount of 'freshness' to your original query. Individual approaches may completely determine the output of the search, often more than any other factor." (Ravia 2008c)

[6] For instance, Yale University promotes the development of their online South Asian Independence Movement Project [http://www.yale.edu/macmillan/southasia/saim/]. They do so with the following words:

"[...] Help Us Write History! Share your personal recollections, Share memorabilia, Fill gaps in the published record [...] The South Asian Studies Council (SASC) of the MacMillan Center for International And Area Studies at Yale has launched the SAIM research project to preserve the broadest historical record of the independence struggle in colonial South Asia involving people in today's nations of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. [....]."

Please note how skillfully the request for external input is formulated. It is not a perfunctory nod in the direction of readers. It is an action plan which clearly: (a) signals the scholarly seriousness and high social rank of the party asking for help; (b) creates the context and rationale for the solicited input; (c) defines who among the readers might be best equipped to assist the project; and finally, (d) defines the preferred scope and content of the input (i.e. personal recollections, memorabilia, provision of any missing details).

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