• It has an evaluative comment by the Oxlip team: it is important, when listing Internet resources, to use portals which evaluate the websites listed.
  
  

The European Studies Tutorial contains four sections:

• "Tour key Internet sites for European Studies"

  The fist step is to know a list of useful sites in one's subject; portals and gateways are a help for this (=sites which list important websites in a subject, frequently with an evaluative comment -- the equivalent of bibliographies in printed documentation)

• "Discover how to improve your Internet searching"

  Acquire search skills.
  The European studies tutorial distinguishes between different categories of search helps:

  • subject gateways (such as the present one), or "portals" -- see above
  • directories , lists of sites on the same principle, but of broader scope, covering numerous fields classified by subject
  • search engines , where you type keywords in a box so that the engine indexes all websites corresponding to your topic
    
    
    • The search engines have "advanced search" facilities which enable you to relate several terms with logical "Boolean operators" (named after the 19th c. logician Boole) ; e.g. searching for "Renaissance discoveries" means searching for "discoveries AND Renaissance": see special section of the course on the Boolean operators (on the homepage of the Ecole Doctorale, click on "Travaux de recherche").
      
      
• "Review the critical thinking required when using the Internet"

  An important step is to evaluate and select information:

  • "clues from URLs" (Uniform Resource Locator, the web address) -- the domain name indicates the source, and thus the reliability, of the website; e.g. <----.ac.uk> indicates it is a British university website, and therefore a reliable academic source; see, among the sites we are studying today, <www.ox.ac.uk> the University of Oxford.
    
    
  • a means of evaluating a website is to find out if it is recommended by academic websites (this is called "citation"); this chapter of the tutorial indicates how to find out the references to a website. The search engine Google has an advanced search facility which enables you to find the sites which point to a given website you are evaluating.

    There is a dual process:

    A website points to other websites:

    Several websites point to the site under consideration:

• "Reflect on how to use the Internet for studying, teaching or research"

  The tutorial has a "quiz" section where you can test what you have learnt It allows you to save references to other related websites in your "basket" for the duration of the session, e.g.

  http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/services/library/instruction/www/onlinecourse
  published by the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands

  The same sections are to be found in other tutorials in the same series, e.g. Geography.