PHIL 385: Engineering Ethics

Free web resources search the open web, which is only a small percentage of all available content.

Provide open content often hard to locate original or know sources’ reliability

*AI/LLMs – very faulty at providing accurate original source information

Searches content that the library has access to either online or in print form. It searches the library catalog and hundreds of databases. Most online content in is behind a paywall (databases that the library subscribes to so patrons can access the content), but some is open access (free, publicly available).

Provide KNOWN/identifiable content and resources

Allow you to use natural language, so you can search with phrases or questions, instead of keywords or subject-specific discourse.

Many databases allow you to use natural language in a search, so you can search with a phrase or question. In the results, you will find subject headings, academic keywords, and develop language of your disciplines or fields of study for more relevant and refined information results.

Web searches rely on algorithms, which generally organize results based on commercial interests, producer-biases or popularity (how often the sites are visited), not relevance or accuracy.  Open AI tools / LLMs are designed to be predictive and responsive to your inputs, dependent on programmers decisions and parameters, then co-programmed with you, making them more difficult to filter and determine original sources of the information.

Filtering Tools: Library results are usually organized by relevance or recency, but users can choose to have results organized by date, author, or title. Library resources provide multiple filters that let you narrow and modify your search results. For example, you can limit results by content type, publication date, discipline, subject terms, database, and more.

Library resources always provide source information, citation tools, and multiple ways to access related information.

Open digital tool results are personalized for users based on a number of factors, including search history, location, browser type, and IP address. This means that two people conducting the same search in different locations might see different results. It also means the results of future searches you do might be influenced by your search history.

Library resources do not personalize results. Two users doing the exact same search in different locations will get the same results. Individual search histories are not recorded in the same way they are by commercial web tools, though you have options to save searches and receive alerts when additional resources are added on your topic or interest. 

Google offers an advanced search feature if you want to do a search with specific keywords and Boolean operators (OR, AND, NOT) (access “advanced search” under “settings”).

Library databases offer advanced search features if you want to do a search with specific keywords and Boolean operators (OR, AND, NOT).

Co-creating / co-programming with open commercial digital tools helps to reveal that we are ALL information resources, and therefore must evaluate ourselves as well as the information results.  (All information sources are biased – and that’s okay!)

Learning to use library search tools and strategies carry over to web search engines and tools like ChatGPT/LLMs so that you get more academic, scholarly, or reliable information from open commercial resources.

The more YOU know reliable information the better you can use the tools!