Christine,
> So, we thought we'd ask - how do you find such
> stuff, either in the context
> of supporting you in your work eg stuff on
> discrimination, legal, employment
> rights etc etc or in your research into any area of
> gay/bi/les. Do you use
> Alta Vista, Google, bubl, The Resource Discovery
> Network, Yahoo, or
> something else - and which have you found to be the
> bestest?!
A few months ago I started research in the area of
gender and sexuality perceptions and HIV. This is
ongoing; therefore, I have spent some time learning
how to find things of use on the web.
Comments on the services you listed (note: these are
my perceptions, from my experience, only):
Google (www.google.co.uk) produced good results on a
regular basis, though I don't know how it does it -
its seems to "know" what I want, which often appears
at the top of the listing. Having said that,
sometimes it can come back with pages and pages of
stuff of no use - I find that search terms have to be
refined to be as unambigous as possible (avoid use of
the word "gay" as a search term!!!!).
Altavista is not as good as Google, and I would use
this as a backup only. Occasionally I can strike gold
on it, but only occasionally.
I started to use BUBL (www.bubl.ac.uk) but it produced
alarmingly inaccurate details of some web sites. I was
not sure whether this was because whoever or whatever
summarised the web sites did not understand them, or
whether the web site descriptions were out of date -
either way, it was alarming that medical/health
resources were so inaccurately summarised. The BUBL
web site gave contact details for an information
officer so I fired off a few emails regarding the
problem, but never received a reply.
For finding health/medical web sites, I now use the
BIOME web site (biome.ac.uk). I wish I had used this
from the start of my research; I have always received
accurate results; and, resources are very well
summarised. You can browse subjects according to MeSH
keywords, which (if you are into things medical) is
excellent. Very highly recommended.
For non-medical resources in this area, especially
more academic and research oriented materials, I
suggest SOSIG (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/).
The section on the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality
at:
http://www.sosig.ac.uk/roads/subject-listing/World-cat/socgend.html
contains links and detailed summaries of a
considerable amount of good, relevant web sites. Very
highly recommended, and also evidently well-maintained
and updated. So useful to me it is the default (home)
page on my web browser.
Yahoo (www.yahoo.co.uk) seems to be very slow and not
well maintained. Maybe it is just me, but I either get
no useful resources or hundreds of "possibles", which
need wading through. However, a good starting point
for web sites you may find of use is:
http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/society_and_culture/sexuality/
So, of the services you mentioned, I would rank them
in order of preference/usefulness thus:
1) OMNI and SOSIG
2) Google
3) Yahoo
4) BUBL
5) Altavista
I hope that helps.
EMH
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