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instructorinteractive syllabusweb searching toolkit

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Course
Homepage

Course Modules:

Online
Community

Background
Information

Basic
Web Searching

Managing
Resources

Advanced
Web Searching

Comprehensive
Web Search
Strategies

Course
Projects

Assessment

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Saving and Printing Webpages

A person conducting research in a library has several options for taking information back home with them. They can photocopy relevant pages from a book or journal, take notes, memorize the information or check the books out from the library.
Web searching offers several of those research options as well.

You can easily print the contents of a webpage. You can take notes or memorize important facts. You can download the webpages and save them to a hard disk or floppy disk for later reference. However, web searching offers one powerful option not found in a library. The web searcher can bookmark the website, leave the document and return to it at any time with the click of a button. Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson’s dreams have come true.

Well, most of the time… I’m sure that you have bookmarked a webpage only to return later and find that the webpage is no longer available or has been moved to another location on the web. This happens with annoying regularity on the web. Since there are no librarians around to make sure that all the documents are managed in an orderly fashion, chaos reigns.

You will have to decide how important the website that you have found is to your research. If you can’t do without it, it is best to print or save the webpage. However, these are digital resources and there are other options that might work better.

Printing a Web Page

You can print nearly anything that you find on the web. However, just clicking the Print button can sometimes have unexpected results. The web browser will attempt to print everything in the current browser window including all of the web site navigation buttons and links. This often results in a very cluttered page. The web page may also be much longer what what is visible on the screen. We have all had the experience of printing what we thought was a short one or two page article and seen dozens of pages stream out of the computer.

Your first step should always be to look around to see if a "printable" version of the page is available. Many web sites will include this feature as a courtesy to users. Typically this page will open in a new window with a header and/or footer and the relevant text. Printing this version of the page can save a lot of paper and ink/laser toner.

Windows users have a distinct advantage when it comes to printing. The Windows print dialog box offers a "Print Selection" option that prints only text that has been selected on the web page.

Mac users have the option of selecting and copying the text and pasting it into a word processor document and printing from that document. The TextEdit application is perfect for this purpose. Windows users may also want to consider using this option since it allows more control over what comes off the printer. You can add headers and comments and even copy and paste the URL (web address) to the page for future reference.

Save a Webpage or Website to Your Computer

There will be times when you want to save an entire web page or web site to your computer. This may be advantageous if you need access to a web page or web site and are not sure that you will have a reliable internet connection.

Most recent web browsers offer the Web Archive or Web Page, Complete format as one of the options in the File | Save As menu. Selecting this option will save the entire web page including all of the graphics and navigation features and is the preferred option for offline viewing. You can save the web page in the Text or HTML format which will only save the text. Be prepared to experiment a bit to see which format works best for you.

Be aware that viewing a Web Archive or Web Page, Complete file works best with same the web browser that was used to create the archive file. Sometimes a different web browser on a different computer will have difficulty opening and displaying the file.

Copy and Paste Text

As we mentioned above, copying and pasting text from a web page into a word processing document is a viable way to save text. Virtually any word processor will work for that purpose. Just select the text that you want to copy and click on Copy from the Edit menu of the web browser. Then open a word processor document, position the cursor where you want the text to be and select Paste from the Edit menu.

You can copy and paste text from multiple web pages into one word processing documents. This method of digital note taking is very effective. When you are finished, you can save the word processing document to your computer or send it to your own email address as an email attachment

Copy and Paste Graphics

You can also copy and paste graphics from a web page to a word processing document. You may have noticed that the graphics do not always automatically come along with text when you are copying and pasting. It is always better to specifically copy and paste graphics.

You will use a right mouse click shortcut to do this. Mac users hold down the Control key while you click. Right click or Control Click on the image that you want to copy and select Copy Image from the dialog box that appears. This will copy the image to your computer's clipboard (temporary memory).

Open a word processing document, position the cursor where you want the image to be displayed and select Paste from the Edit menu. The image will appear on the screen.

If you are using a full-featured word processor like Microsoft Word, you will be able to edit the image. Simple text editors can not typically do that.

Copyright, Fair Use, Plagiarism Issues

As educators, we need to continually aware of copyright, fair use and plagiarism issues and model ethical behavior in the classroom. You can find more information on these issues on the web.

The Educator's Guide to Copyright
and Fair Use: Education World

Copyright & Fair Use:
Stanford University Libraries


Downloading Files

You will sometimes run into files that must be downloaded to your computer before they can be viewed. This is often the case with documents that are archived in the .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) format if your web browser is not configured to display or automatically open reader software that can display the file. Just follow the instructions that appear in the little dialog box that appears on the screen.

The desktop is a good location to save these files as it is easier to trash them when you are finished reading the document. Of course, you could save the downloaded files if you wish.

Be very careful in downloading software to institutional computers (as well as to your personal computers). You will always want to scan any downloaded files with your anti-virus software to insure that you are not downloading a virus along with the software. Viruses can spread rapidly in a networked environment and you don't want to be the person who brought down the network by introducing a new virus. .

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Fresno Pacific University Continuing Education

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