ENG 1020- Internet Research Project

Name of the tool: Scout Report Archives
Summery or description of the tool: The Scout Report Archives is a searchable and browseable database to over nine years’ worth of the Scout Report and subject-specific Scout Reports. It contains 25,788 critical annotations of carefully selected Internet sites and mailing lists.
Strengths: Scout Report Archives is extremely user friendly and has good speed. You will find of excellent help their advanced search as well as being able to browse through alphabetical categorizations.
Weaknesses: The only “weakness” that found in the Scout Report is that even though it has information about a lot of different subjects it only has a few of each.
Search engines, directories, and other applications searched: Scout Report Archives is part of the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library Project.
Operators: Boolean and mathematical operators. (AND); (+, -); (“…”).
Case Sensitivity: N/A
Stop Words: N/A
Advanced search functions: You can narrow your search to one or more of the following fields: Title, Creator, Publisher, Contributor, Classification, Subject, URL, Description, Language, Source, Coverage, site administrator's Email address, and date of publication.
Limits: N/A
Sorting: When browsing through the Library of Congress Subject Headings, it will sort out the subjects in alphabetical order. Once you select you topic, it will sort out the information in different relevant categorization for example if you search under “C” and click on “Cloning”, it will give you 4 different sub topics within that topic, such as “Cloning Ethics”, or “Cloning Laws”. As well as sorting the information in topics and subtopics, it will have a link to web pages relevant to this same topic.
Display: The results will be displayed in a descending order of relevance (most relevant items appear at the top of the results). Relevance is determined through a combination of word occurrence frequency and a weighted value of the metadata fields being searched. Word occurrence in the Title is the weighted the most heavily. Alternate Title, Creator, Publisher, Classification, and Contributor are in the next lower tier of weight values. Occurrence in the URL and Description are given the lowest weight values.
Help Function: It is under the name “Using the archives” located on the left side of the page. It is easy to find, and very self explanatory. It provides you with the necessary tools in order for you to successfully find the expected information.
Special Features: Internet Research Project is a non-profit organization, with the aim of providing useful and accurate academic information to students, researchers, and is open for all the public. It also participates in these five different projects: AMSER, CWIS, Access NSDL, Learning Languages.net, and ATE Central.