This page provides online resources to assist users in carrying out web-based research on Indonesia and East Timor. Suggestions for additional links are always welcome!

Edited by Elizabeth Coville (ecoville@gmail.com)

What's Up on the Web:

A fortnightly update on items of special interest to researchers on Indonesia and East Timor and accessible through links on this page.

# 14 - So much searching, so little time

Every so often I am struck in funny little ways by the changes wrought by information technology. Did you know that Google has an archive of all its holiday logos?

Speaking of archives, there is one on the website of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies or KITLV.  Go to the left sidebar under Our Services and click on Catalogues.  Then click on the last line, Excerpta Indonesica.  It is easily searchable and key terms specifically-related to are provided in the Thesaurus. Searching like this brings up abstracts in English of periodical articles and book chapters in various languages in the fields of the social sciences and humanities.

A technique for finding information from a broader range of sources is clustering searches.  See "Finally Clusters" dated March 3, 2006, so scroll way down.  The two options are Ask and Clusty. I have only just begun to explore this phenomenon.  As an experiment, I started with the pre-set one from the right sidebar of Simplicity under Searchrolls Plus called Sulawesi and then tried focusing it in various ways.  On the top you are given easy ways of narrowing the search using the categories news, images, wikipedia, blogs, and other.  What's new about this clustering approach is the fact that the results are grouped into categories for you.  I don't fully understand how the clusters are created, but between search terms, which you choose, and the cluster subjects, which are chosen for you, you can do some pretty effective and creative searching.

I want to end this update with a quick visit to Indopedia to see what's new there this week.  If you want to check out the latest additions, you can click here .

So, this holiday week in the U.S., take a moment to think about how much has changed in the world of the web since the first Google holiday logos  seven years ago.

Posted on Nov 17, 2006