My Favourite Tipples from an academic librarian in India
Jinfo Blog

By Arjun Sanyal

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Arjun Sanyal, an assistant librarian at the Central University of Himachal Pradesh in the Himalayas, India. He picks his go-to resources in the fields of science, as well as open access and tools for search.

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As an academic librarian, it's been my experience that students, research scholars and faculty need to know about the latest developments in their fields. So it is incumbent upon library professionals like me to not only provide them with the right information sources but also to constantly refine our own information skills. Given that I handle the fulfilment of reference queries, here are the go-to sources I find really helpful.

• Science.gov: A pretty utilitarian tool to access information on US scientific research, as is evident from its strapline "Your gateway to US Federal Science". It's an academic search engine that helps users search more than 60 databases, 2,200 websites and 200 million web pages containing authentic information related to scientific research funded by the US government.

• ScienceResearch.com: An open access, deep-web search engine underpinned by the concept of "federated search technology". It provides the user with high-quality search results by delving into other well-known search engines and culling the results in a systematic manner.

• Goofram: Basically, this search engine is a blend of Google and Wolfram Alpha functionalities - pretty cool stuff for fulfilling the information needs of geeks. I use it often to help students of library and information science.

• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE): One of the biggest search engines for accessing academic resources, it provides access to more than 100 million resources from over 5,000 sources. About half of the resources are open access. The most important thing about BASE is that the resources are very carefully culled from select document servers that comply with high standards of academic quality.

For fun:

• Tastedive.com: A recommendation engine, it gives you a glimpse of the latest music, books, TV shows, authors and games, as well as people with similar interests. There is a login facility whereby you get instant suggestions from the recommendation engine by typing in your choices. If you are intrigued to know where I learn about the latest Hollywood releases, this is the place for you.

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• I immensely enjoyed Robin Neidorf's article entitled, "Jinfo information team research (part 2- rethinking the role of information teams)", given that the challenge of today's corporate information resource centres is to constantly reinvent themselves to provide the right information to the right user at the right time in the right format. This has become all the more of a necessity given that there's now a plethora of information resources to choose from.

Contribute your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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