Research Strategy Guides

[David Novak]

An emerging opportunity in collection development is linking to research 
collections on the net. See the Farmington Community Library Ready Reference 
   http://metronet.lib.mi.us/fcl/readyref.html as an example.

Here is a description of our project, The Spire Project...


        Research Strategy and Resource Guidance

The Spire Project is a collection of serious research strategy guidance 
articles - compiled and overseen by Community Networking (Australia) but 
hosted at five sites, free shareware and an FAQ.

Existing articles cover topics like Country Profiles, UN Resources, 
Statistical Bureaux, Books, Professional Research Resources, and more. Each 
article describes a strategy, while linking and noting the important 
resources available. The "Locating Books" article, for example, links to the 
free Government Publication Databases: MOCAT, UKOP and AGIP.

The Spire Project is prepared as a .zip file ready for hosting on library 
websites, University department websites and workplace intranets. The 
process is simple and benefits your patrons with both faster access speeds 
and awareness to these resources. Hosting sites also benefit with the kudos 
for bringing such information to your patrons, as all Spire Sites are the 
same, and stand alone.

This is an improvement on the previous Information Research FAQ & 
Information Research Key. Visit  http://library.ccsu.ctstateu.edu/infokey  
or  http://cn.net.au  to see the result. 

David Novak
david at cn.net.au
Spire Project Team
Incl: http://cn.net.au