Using portals
A portal is, at its most general, a website which offers grouped links leading to information. General purpose portals, such as www.msn.co.uk or www.wanadoo.co.uk, are often used as home pages by users and have links to life style sites. These sorts of general portals are rarely of use in answering information enquiries.
Some more specialised portals are tailored to be used say, to provide a child friendly web experience (eg: www.zeeks.com), as they give relative safety from inappropriate material. Other specialised portals focus on particular topic areas and it is these which can save you time in answering reference enquiries.
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Familiarise yourself with some of the portals which you can use in your information searching. Go to each portal listed below and get a feel for the information you could access through it. DirectGov at http://www.direct.gov.uk/Homepage/fs/en Wine.Com at http://www.wine.com/ Scottish Search at http://www.scottishsearch.com/ Irish Abroad at http://www.irishabroad.com/ Connects at http://www.connects.org.uk/ Wales on the Web (bilingual portal) at http://www.walesontheweb.org |
There are thousands of portals. With experience you will get to know a number of useful ones for sourcing specific information.
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