Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Site Profile: Research Resources for the Social Sciences This site was created and is maintained by Craig McKie of Carleton University; it is sponsored by the publisher McGraw-Hill Ryerson.  "This site started modestly in 1994 as a project in support of a graduate methods seminar at Carleton University in Ottawa. It has grown far past its origins and taken on a life of its own. Hopefully, it will be of continued use for some time and will be updated as new material becomes available and corrected whenever broken links are pointed out. Thanks to everybody for the help, encouragement and use; and also to McGraw-Hill Ryerson for providing the new site and support."  Use the subjects/topics map to orient to the site; use the search function to find specific resources. Subjects covered range from Anthropology to Economics to Psychology to Women's Studies, with others in between. Because the links listed under each subject are not alphabetized it is necessary to scroll through each list to examine everything that is available in a subject area. The site includes a multitude of valuable resources but could benefit greatly from a different display of the collection, such as making use of the Scout Portal Toolkit (http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/SPT/) or other portal software. Portal software could convert the site from a bookmarks collection to a full library collection with uniform resource descriptions, tagging, browsing capabilities, and other helpful organizational features that would aid users in finding and evaluating materials of interest. ____JH   2:33:06 PM    COMMENT []