Wendy Wallace: A digital treasure trove of information is out there for the taking, but only if students have a means of discovering the way to find it – a search engine that is both academic and user-friendly.
Scores of academic search engines provide a heavyweight alternative to the commercial ones and work against what Brighton University’s professor of media- Tara Brabazon has termed “the Google effect” – a tendency towards mediocrity.
The challenge they face is to make themselves sufficiently user-friendly to attract and retain a generation of students reared on commercial search engines…
