Some Elaboration on Consuming

Consuming:

                It can be tempting for the average student doing research to simply do a Google search, and take sources from the first few pages of the search results. Even a student using academic search engines may struggle to sort through several articles, let alone searching the many academic databases that are available. Library Research 2.0 tools can help students find information that has already been pointed out as valuable by other researchers, thus giving the student a spring-board to quickly decide what is current and what is important in their research area.

RSS Feeds

                A RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed allows you to stay current on a topic by displaying search results from selected websites.  This can be effective for an initial background search as well.

Social Bookmarking:

                The idea behind social bookmarking is that you are able to save, share, and manage internet links. This also provides a convenient way of searching for content, whether it is an initial, get-your-feet-wet search, or in the concluding stages of a research project.  Following is a list of free social bookmarking services, along with a short description. Unless otherwise indicated, these sites will allow you to search them without setting up an account.

• ·         BibSonomy (www.bibsonomy.org): Allows for bookmarking of both websites and publications, and will allow searching without getting an account.
• ·         Citeulike (http://www.citeulike.org): Specifically for scholarly references.
• ·         Delicious (http://www.delicious.com): Covers a wide variety of topics, scholarly and non-scholarly; organization of this site is by “stacks”, or topical bundles of links.
• ·         Digg (http://digg.com): Has both search capabilities, as well as general topic pages. Links indicate how many people have bookmarked them, giving a sort of rating system.
• ·         Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com): Strictly academic; allows downloading of PDF files, annotating of those files, and generating of citations and bibliographies.
• ·         Newsvine (http://www.newsvine.com): Includes news and many other topics pages; features a unique tool called “Conversation Tracker” that allows you to keep track of discussions you have taken part in as well as track discussions of Friends.
• ·         Reddit (http://www.reddit.com): Covers a variety of topics, has a ranking system that determines the order links appear on a webpage.
• ·         Zotero (http://www.zotero.org): Has the ability to collect bibliographic information from a given website, and provides the ability to organize online references. Currently, it stores the references on a specific computer or a portable storage device, and it does not have an easy way of sharing sources. This free research tool requires a log-in and download in order to use.