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URL: http://infomine.ucr.edu/

Proper Citation: INFOMINE: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections (RRID:SCR_008195)

Description: INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information. It is librarian built. Librarians from the University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, the University of Detroit - Mercy, and other universities and colleges have contributed to building INFOMINE.INFOMINE is a unique Web resource featuring well organized access to important university level research and educational tools on the Internet. A virtual library, INFOMINE is notable for its collection of annotated and indexed links. Information in INFOMINE is easy to find given the multiplicity of access points provided (ways of finding the information contained). It contains over 100,000 links (26,000 librarian created links and 75,000 plus robot/crawler created links). Substantive databases, electronic journals, guides to the Internet for most disciplines, textbooks and conference proceedings are among the many types of resources included. The life sciences INFOMINE alone, for example, provides interactive access to several hundred databases. Separate virtual collections or INFOMINEs exist in most major areas of university level research and educational interests. Click here to see the Database Content Information. It began in January of 1994 as a project of the Library of the University of California, Riverside. It was one of the first Web resources of any type offered by a Library. It was also one of the first Web-based, academic virtual libraries as well as one of the first to develop a system combining the advantages of the hypertext and multi-media capabilities of the Web with those of the organizational and retrieval functions of a database manager. We now include focused, automatic Internet crawling as well as automatic text extraction and metadata creation functions to assist our experts in content creation and users in searching. Many of INFOMINE''s important features and services, described below, remain unique among Internet resource collections. INFOMINE, as mentioned, provides a great number of access points, BROWSE (What''s New, Title, Table of Contents, Subject -- LCSH, Subject - LCC, Search -- Research Discipline, Key Word, Megatopics - Keyword in context, Title, Author, hyperlinked indexing) and SEARCH (Title, Subject -- LCSH, Key Word, Author, Description, Full-text), and LIMIT search (Resource Type, Resource Origin and Access) modes. Searching in fielded and full-text mode allows the user to quickly find high quality resources on the chosen subject(s). Nested, boolean searching capabilities are featured as is exact searching. Search results come back in the form of dynamically created Web pages. Results within these can be ranked by relevance to the search or alphabetically by title. Displays available include title only, regular display, long display and full display. Many of the displays feature indexing terms that are viewable and in hyperlink form and, when clicked upon, allow further broadening or narrowing of the search as desired. Noteworthy as well is that INFOMINE is augmenting its content with a large, second-tier collection of automatically selected and described resources that should complement its first-tier collection of expert created records and allow the user more detail in searching and a greater number of useful results. Finally, on the Advanced Search page, we have browsing indexes which cover all topics and more. These include: * Subjects -- LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings), Table of Contents (LCSH with titles filing under each heading), LCC (Library of Congress Classifications) and Research Disciplines * Keywords -- MegaTopics (keyphrases drawn from our title, subject, keyword and annotation fields) and standard Keywords * Other Indexes: Authors, Titles, Resource Types and What''s New Among the contributions of INFOMINE is the essential enrichment or value added service, as mentioned, of providing concise descriptive information (e.g., an annotation as well as in-depth indexing terminology including Library of Congress Subject Headings) for each record. This greatly helps users to quickly retrieve a focused results set, examine the relevance of individual records and then choose among them immediately prior to accessing thus saving considerable time. Librarian collection expertise and concerns regarding resource comprehensiveness, quality and general usefulness from an academic perspective guide all INFOMINE resource selection activities. Also a crucial behind-the-scenes contribution from INFOMINE is that we are addressing the challenge of better subject portal scaling (keeping up with the growth of important resources on the Internet) by semi-automating or automating a number of collection building tasks (e.g., identification of significant resources for collecting and developing metadata descriptions of these resources). This will help us save crucial resources and redirect them into creating a better and larger collection. In-depth description and indexing, careful selection, a considerable number of options in browsing/searching, and ample help in usage mean that faculty, students and staff can find important, relevant Internet resources quickly and easily via INFOMINE. Sponsors: INFOMINE is supported by the University of California, Riverside.

Synonyms: INFOMINE

Resource Type: data or information resource, portal, community building portal

Keywords: electronic journal, article, database, library, life science, mailing list, research, scientific literature databases and services, virtual, book