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Thursday, April 22, 2010

Academic Index: A True Meta-Search Tool!

The Academic Index was created and is maintained by Dr. Michael Bell , former chair, Texas Association of School Librarians. The Academic Index is a true meta-search tool that includes results from mega-information databases that index only research-quality reference and information sources selected by professional librarians, educators, and educational and library consortia.

At the present time the Academic Index provides access to over 300,000 quality information web pages.
Some included sites are :
  • Virtual Learning Resources Center http://www.virtuallrc.com/ - 100,000+ pages recommended by professional librarians and teachers.
  • Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/  -Intute is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 123,700 records.
  • Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) http://www.thegateway.org/  - Sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Education, GEM is a Consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to (currently) 39,723 educational resources found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.
  • MagBot http://www.virtuallrc.com/magbot/  - a carefully selected database of freely accessible online periodical articles corresponding to important topics of interest to high school and community college students and teachers.
  • Internet Scout Project http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/index.php -Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin, an eclectic staff of academics and professionals have selected 16,969 research-quality Internet information sites.
  • MeL Internet http://www.mel.org/ -A division of the Michigan E-Library, MeL Internet makes available 20,000+ librarian recommended Internet sites.
As a meta-search engine, the Academic Index integrates into its search results only the first 1-2 pages returned from each site it searches. Because most sites rank search results as to relevance, this ensures that only the best (most relevant) information is returned to users.
I hope you enjoy using Academic Index.

Sincerely,
Dr. Michael Bell

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