Intute … une autre forme d’autorité

“Despite the name, this interesting blog is written mostly in French, by Francois Laurent, who has had a long career in marketing and is a writer. Laurent believes that traditional marketing methods are outdated, and that a new consumer-led world has replaced them . Keywords for him in his approach are "curiosity" and "impertinence". In this blog, he explores the new world of consumerism and technology, writing about the EU, social networking, globalisation, Web 2.0, brands, society and so on”.    

Très sympa de découvrir cette présentation sur un site anglais … surtout quand ce dernier est le fruit de la collaboration entre 7 prestigieuses universités britanniques – Oxford, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, etc. Le projet couvre 4 grands domaines de recherche – Science and Technology ; Arts and Humanities ; Social Sciences ; Health and Life Sciences – et se concrétise autour d’un portail :

‘Intute is a free online service providing access to the very best web resources for education and research. All material is evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists to create the Intute database.

“With millions of resources available on the Internet, it is difficult to find relevant and appropriate material even if you have good search skills and use advanced search engines.

“Issues of trust, quality, and search skills are very real and significant concerns - particularly in a learning context. Academics, teachers, students and researchers are faced with a complex environment, with different routes into numerous different resources, different user interfaces, search mechanisms and authentication processes.

“The Intute database makes it possible to discover the best and most relevant resources in one easily accessible place. You can explore and discover trusted information, assured that it has been evaluated by specialists for its quality and relevance”.

A l’heure où la notion d’autorité se résume bien trop souvent au nombre de liens pointant sur un site ou sur un blog – merci Google ! – il m’est agréable de découvrir un tel portail où des chercheurs prennent le soin d’évaluer la qualité des sources à l’aune de critères plus académiques … sans tomber dans l’autre travers consistant à ne référencer que des sources académiques.

De même qu’il m’est agréable de faire partie des 19 sources françaises référencées !