ITS Technology Tips

When you open up your Web browser, you most likely begin surfing the Web by weeding through your bookmarks to find your favorite websites.  With iGoogle, you can easily customize an internet start page that will give you quick access to your Google resources such as Gmail, Google Search and Google Calendar as well as RSS feeds, news headlines, weather forecasts, and much more.  With a personalized iGoogle homepage, you can quickly access all of your favorites and a variety of web tools in one place. 

Getting Started

If you already have a Google account then all you need to do is sign in here.  If you don’t have one, creating an account will give you access to iGoogle and other Google tools such as Gmail, Google Documents and Google Reader.  When you set up your iGoogle start page, you can choose “gadgets,” which are interactive mini-applications that can display your new email, weather, personalized news and more.  You can arrange your gadgets by dragging and dropping them in any order you like on your page and you can customize the look of your page by choosing a Theme.  Your iGoogle page is a convenient tool to keep all of your favorite internet applications in hand.

In the newest version of Google Earth, users can explore the oceans, view 3D images of Mars and see how areas of the Earth have changed over time.  Google Earth is a free software program that enables users to search digital maps and view 3D satellite imagery.  

The new features are a significant upgrade to the program; here are a few examples from the Google Earth Web site: 

• Oceans  - In the new ocean layer, you can plunge all the way to the floor of the sea, view exclusive content from partners like BBC and National Geographic, and explore 3D shipwrecks like the Titanic.
• Mars - View 3D rover models and follow their tracks to see high-resolution 360-degree panoramas.
• Historical Imagery - View your neighborhood, home town, and other familiar places and see how they’ve changed over time. 
• Sky - View images of distant galaxies and nebulae from the Hubble Space Telescope, learn about the movement of the planets and the lifecycle of the stars, and more. 

For more information, take Google Earth’s Product Tour.   

Google Scholar is a free search service that offers the capability to search for scholarly literature across the Web. With Scholar, searchers are able to find peer-reviewed papers, abstracts, and citations from a variety of scholarly organizations such as academic publishers and universities.  Scholar provides the straightforward interface and convenience we’re accustomed to with a Google search. However, the added benefit is that Scholar enables searchers to search against only academic materials. Google has also worked with academic publishers to make some information that is generally protected by subscription barriers available in a Scholar search.  The advantage of this arrangement is that searchers can access abstracts and citation information from a diversity of resources.

While full text articles are occasionally available from Scholar, you may still need to access the complete resource from a library or publisher. In this case, you can take advantage of Loyola Libraries  to help locate the materials you find in a Scholar search. If you use Scholar through the Loyola Libraries web pages or from on-campus, you will get a link to the full text journals available from the LU Libraries.  Scholar can also be customized to link to Loyola holdings. Ask at the Lewis or Cudahy Libraries for assistance with this and other resources.

While it’s all too common to “Google it” to find any information imaginable, you may spend more sifting through endless results than you need to. Using Google Advanced Search not only helps you refine your search, you might come across some information that you wouldn’t normally find.

Advanced Search

You can access Google Advanced Search by clicking on the “Advanced Search” link on the Google home page. Note: If you’d like to search for images only, click on the “Images” tab on the Google home page then click on the “Advanced Image Search” link. Once you are ready to start your Advanced Search, keep in mind that you’ll only need to enter information into the fields you’d like to use. If you’d like to search for items with a particular file type, such as a PDF or Flash video file, try selecting a File Format. If you wish to narrow your results to only Government or Education sites, you can type .gov or .edu into the Domain field. For more tips on refining your search, visit Google Help: Advanced Search.

University Search

If you’d like to narrow your search to a specific school, a link for Google University Search is located at the bottom of the Advanced Search page. You can use the alphabetical index to locate your target school and then search for information within that institution only.