Webworlds - Intute - This, That and the Other

IN JANUARY, when University of Brighton lecturer, Professor Tara Brabazon, banned her students from using Wikipedia and Google – “white bread for the mind” as she put it – it was picked up by the national media, and sparked a lively debate.

Intute: takes you to the internet’s best resources

According to Brabazon, Googling is a substitute for using your brain, and makes for mediocre and banal work. Students need, she says, to get back to the library and start reading books (– have they stopped? –) and “bring back the important values of research and analysis”.

Even those of us not ready to give up surfing – and who value the accessibility of the net and the ‘up-to-date-ness’ of online materials – might agree that much of what comes up on Google is lightweight stuff.

The problem is that finding good-quality sources can often mean clicking on a whole series of unnecessary links before you get there. Fortunately, there is an alternative.

Intute, the online service hosted by University of Manchester, has now launched its own search engine, adding thousands of documents to its database of web resources.

All the links are selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists – an “army of PhD students” according its website – so you can be much more confident that the materials are trustworthy, accurate, and relevant to your subject area. Researchers are now also able to automatically access research papers from research databases within universities and other institutions.

To see the difference between Intute and the Google monster, all you have to do is enter a likely search term. We chose ‘English Civil War’ as a random example. Google’s results page one throws up – guess what – Wikipedia, as its top web page. The site offers a decent potted history of the period, and as an encyclopedia entry it’s perfectly respectable. After that on Google comes Easyweb’s English Civil Wars site – another fairly undemanding introduction. The next down is the OU / BBC’s excellent Civil War website, attractively laid out and including video presentations by Tristram Hunt, and perhaps the best general introduction to the subject online. The list continues down, taking in re-enactment societies, more and more general histories, and red herrings (The Clash on YouTube).

If all you need is a primer, then Google will take you there – as numbers of hits determine ranking, inevitably, generalist non-academic sites rise to the top. But for students seeking source material for essays, Google’s searches are clumsy and wasteful of time and energy.

Searching on Intute is like being taken on a guided tour of the most precious items in a collection.

Searching on Intute, by contrast, is like being taken on a guided tour of the most precious items in a collection. Each of the 33 sites listed under ‘English Civil War’ (contrast Google’s 5,460,000 ‘results’) is described in meticulous critical detail by Intute’s compilers. As well as the best of the introductory sites (the OU / BBC website, for example, features prominently here as well), Intute points up rare online material – for example, a museum web page on traders’ tokens used during the Civil War – and guides you thoughtfully towards associated subjects that you might wish to return to during your researches: a reference guide to Protestant dissenters, for example.

Intute won’t write your essay for you, but it will save you large amounts of time – you can check the sites out through the compilers’ descriptions without having to visit them, and the chosen materials are only of the highest quality. There is also a whole range of easy-to-use filter options, to help narrow down your enquiry, plus an extensive catalogue of internet journals and resources, and links to Intute’s hugely successful Virtual Training Suite tutorials. If this search engine doesn’t give you what you need, the chances are it ain’t out there – you should do like Tara Brabazon says, and get down the library.

Intute is what the internet ought to be – at least while you’re trying to study rather than watch old Clash videos.