The massive rise in undergraduate places in recent years has left many of the UK's academic libraries struggling to keep up with demand. Many library books are in short supply, and sometimes in a shocking state of disrepair, so online resources are now vital to practically every degree. Using the internet as a study aid will not replace books, but it will shorten the time it takes to acquire information.
A good starting point is the Encyclopædia Britannica, whose full text is available free at www.britannica.com. Although your university library will have copies of the old tome, searching online is much quicker, and it is updated regularly. For about £30 a year you can subscribe to www.eb.com, Britannica's enhanced service. This includes a web directory filtered by Britannica staff.
Similarly, a site such as the CIA's World Fact Book (www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook) can prove useful. With information from the net GDP of Guatemala to the legacy of the KGB in Peru, academic writing can be qualified with the most recent data.
True, not everything is on the web, and many things are still difficult to find. Beware relying too heavily on search engines where the order in which sites are presented is affected by factors other than academic utility or objectivity. While still useful tools, search engines seem to be struggling to keep up with the enormous growth of the web. According to research from science journal Nature, even the best search engine (www.northernlights.com) has only 16 per cent of the web in its database.
Still, with a handful of good sites, including major acade mic portals such as the Government's National Grid for Learning (www.ngfl.gov.uk), researching on the web is often more fruitful than not.
An absolute must is the American academic search directory at www.academicinfo.net. This holds thousands of links to academic sites and has an exhaustive list of digital libraries around the world. Like Britannia, Academic Info employs dozens of researchers and academics to trawl through the net. This means much of the dross that can clog up search engines has been filtered out. It is a bit like the Yahoo! of the academic world.
At the very least, these sites can speed up the organisation of study. Consider how easy it is to find text on the web, cut and paste it into a word processing document and then email it to either yourself or a friend. The alternative requires booking time on the library databases and catalogues, finding the book on the shelves (or not), queuing to borrow the book or reserving it and then laboriously photocopying or transcribing the required pages and typing the required quotes into an essay.
The web does not just beat many libraries on searchability and rare texts; it is excellent on contemporary debates too. The New York Review of Books is available at www.nybooks.com/nyrev and has a searchable archive going back to 1995. And the web boasts two great journals of its own in the form of www.salon.com and www.slate.com. Both contain a range of articles and essays on science, technology, politics and the arts.
Science is particularly well covered on the web. Details of the latest research and a set of reliable research tools are available. Sites such as Exoscience (http://exosci.com) publish regular bulletins on scientific issues and if you have access to email, Netsurfer Science (www.netsurf.com/nss), will deliver bulletins to your inbox.
The vast majority of content on the web is free, but a number of sites charge a pay-to-download fee or a subscription. If you cannot find what you need elsewhere, these sites could still save you time, and need not cost the earth if you club together with friends. Contentville.com launched in the US in June. It is full of magazine articles, transcripts, e-books and speeches. It claims to contain 'every dissertation written for a PhD degree in the US since 1861'. But it is not cheap. Magazine articles are sold for $2.95; a full dissertation (in electronic form) costs around $50. The similar Electronic Library (www.elibrary.com) offers a free 30-day trial.
But there is still more than enough for free on the web. The FT claims to offer more than 8.5 million articles from 3,000 publications, much of it free. And most newspaper websites now have fairly sophisticated search engines.
Other tools to save you time and improve your work include www.onelook.com, which searches more than 300 dictionaries at once. Roget's Thesaurus.com helps you find that very word.
The web is truly worldwide. If English is your only language, do not discount foreign language sites. Altavista's Babelfish software (http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com) will give a translation, albeit rudimentary, in six languages. So if you want to get ahead at university, avoid the scramble for library books and get to grips with the web.
