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Web based research made easy

Doing research with the Net has overwhelming potential and the process can be made efficient by choosing appropriate tools/services ( http://www.hindu.com/2006/11/27/stories/ 2006112700351600.htm).

This week NetSpeak presents a few more tools/services, towards making web-based research easier.

A researcher needs to organise her/his book collection for easy/efficient access.

As described in the past (http://www.hinduonnet. com/thehindu/biz/2002/04/29/stories/2002042900020 200.htm), programs like ‘Readerware’ could be used to generate an electronic book catalogue. In this regard, you may try out LibraryThing (http://www.librarything. com), an on-line book cataloging application.

After creating an account (free for up to 200 books) with the service, you can start adding the details of your books.

If you are averse to enter the data, you can just enter the book’s ISBN number and LibrayThing will automatically fill up the fields with relevant data. In case you have a barcode reader, you can even input the ISBN number directly to the appropriate input field by scanning the book’s barcode. You can add a book data by entering a part of the title or author name in the search box as well. LibraryThing searches freely accessible online book databases (like Amazon and ‘Library of congress’) and pulls out the relevant data from them. Once the data is entered, you can provide relevant tag(s) to the book and edit each of the fields anytime.

Like other modern on-line applications, LibraryThing also has a social angle. The service lets you share your books library with others (of course, you can keep it private as well).

In addition, LibraryThing provides a widget that enables you to embed your LibraryThing library on to your blog or site.

This helps you easily update your blog readers with the kind of books you read/possess.

Apart from mainstream search services, a researcher should make use of specialised search services. Worldcat (http://worldcat.org/), the online service that holds data on the collections available across various libraries worldwide, is another such service worth a look. In addition to books, here you can find research articles and e-books.

A researcher may come across web pages with data displayed in table format. While going through the table you may wish to view the same in alternative formats. For instance, you may want the table to be viewed sorted according to a specific column in real-time. Apart from viewing the table in different ways, you may be keen to import it to some other program (like a worksheet software) for further processing. But, if you simply copy and paste it on to a program like Excel, it will not work.

For such requirements, you may find the Firefox/Flock extension, Table Tools (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637), very appropriate.

Once the extension is installed, to get the table sorted according to a column, right-click on it, access the ‘Sort Table column.’ menu and select the appropriate option (or use the keyboard shortcut - Ctrl + Alt + click).

And to copy the data so that it can be processed further, right-click on the table, access the menu ‘Other Table Operations…’ and select the relevant option (or Ctrl+click+Q).

In this regard, you may also try the extension ‘Copy2Clipborad’ (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ addon/1852).

To copy the table, right-click on the table, select the option ‘Copy the whole table’.

Often, we come across web pages with several useful links.

Rather than copying each of the links separately, if we can copy all of them with a mouse click, lots of time can be saved.

For this, install the ’Copy Links’ extension available here: https://addons.mozilla.org/ en-US/firefox/addon /605.

He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com

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