Internet research textbook

[Catherine Cox]

>We are offering an Internet Research course next semester.  We were
>planning on using The Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research (late
>1996 pub. date) as the textbook but I was wondering if anyone has used
>any other print source for a similar course that is more current?
>
>*************************************************
>Alan Bogage
>Carroll Community College
>1601 Washington Rd.
>Westminster, Md. 21157
>*************************************************

Depending on the specifics of the course, I have two different books that I
used. My pick for a one-unit, community college course in Using the
Internet for Research I'm teaching this semester was _The Research Paper
and the World Wide Web_, by Dawn Rodrigues (Prentice-Hall, 1997).  I chose
it for a couple of specific reasons: relatively low price (the students pay
about $20 for it) and besides covering the basics of using the internet it
also includes some fundamentals of the research process...notecards (print
and electronic), how to cite internet sources in bibliographies, etc.   For
the level of student I'm working with in that class, those were both key
considerations.

However, if you're teaching in a four-year college or university, or if the
class is longer (say, 3 units or so) and allows you scope for more than the
bare bones, my first choice would be the new book by Ernest Ackerman.  It
was just published in December 1997 by Franklin Beedle, and the title is
something like Using the World Wide Web for Research.  It's very
well-designed, the assignments are well thought out, the examples are
clear, and overall I like it better than any of the other recent books on
internet research I've seen.

Catherine Cox
Librarian
Universty of San Francisco
  South Bay Regional Campus
coxc at usfca.edu