por High Beam Research was an academic search engine famous for having a reliable and specialized database on different topics. It was used mostly by professionals and students from Latin America and Europe.
It was a virtual library where, after paying a fee, you could have access to quotes from books, specialized or academic journals, research, transcripts of radio and television programs. Some of its most prominent sources were newspapers independent, Washington Post and Mirror.
It was owned by the educational publisher Gael and subsidized by the teaching content company Cengage. It has been running since 2002 and closed in 2018. Today part of its archive is in the Questia Online Library and is still used for academic research.
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History
Search engines began to be used in the early 90s, given the need to organize the information accumulated on the Internet. As more emerged, they were classified and this is how browsers dedicated only to academic material arrived in the online world.
Shortly after this research methodology was used, Highbeam Research was born in the network of networks.
It was launched as a teaching and learning search engine in 2002, at the time when entrepreneur Patrick J. Spain sold the American business research company Hoover’s and bought eLibrary along with Encyclopedia.com.
Acquiring the signatures gave him access to approximately 1,200 archives of publications that were not freely available on the Internet, he launched the project of making all this material into a search engine and launched it online.
Over time, Patrick J. Spain acquired more content for Highbeam Research. In 2003 the database had approximately 2,600 publishers, later in 2005 the number rose to 3,500. One of the most significant achievements was in 2006, when they incorporated archives from Oxford University Press, Knight Ridder, and The Washington Post.
Two years later Highbeam Research was taken over by the Gale company and in 2018 they were partners in the Womensforum online community site for women.
After 16 years on the internet, at the end of 2018 they announced that they were closing and all their content became part of Questia, an online library used by more than 500,000 students around the world.
By adding its content to Questia, today this virtual education space has about 94 thousand books, in addition to 14 million articles. All selected by librarians and carefully reviewed by teachers.
Characteristics
Highbeam Research was a virtual library characterized by using various search parameters to return results on specific topics. To request information you could explore by:
– Name of the author of the book.
– Title of the publication.
– Year the content was made public.
– Specific topic.
The web page had an intuitive design, at the top a search engine that just typing a keyword yields results. You could also access the content by sections, everything was categorized to obtain more specific and detailed information.
One of the distinctive aspects of the online library is that from it one had access to newspapers from different countries. It worked like an international news search engine and they could be organized by their relevance, date of publication and by the number of visits they received.
They also had hundreds of publications in specialized magazines on topics such as:
– Medicine
– Nursing
– Sport
– Technology
– Hobbies
– Policy
– Finance
– Consulting
– Trips
In other of his publications, almanacs, dictionaries, thesauri and reference works from important universities around the world stood out.
From this portal, students and professionals could follow up on news, research and trends on any subject with the security of having certified information.
How did it work?
Highbeam Research operated on the premise of Internet search engines: organizing and distributing topic-specific information on the web.
Its interface offered the texts in textual form, classified the results of a search by relevance, year of publication, a specific subject, browsing histories, author’s name, as well as a phrase or keyword.
All the information was on their network and did not redirect to other pages because they had their own content file. Even the news published in digital newspapers were read from its own interface, and in this case, it offered readers to continue exploring other publications related to their initial search.
Advantages
For the student and professional community in Latin America and Europe, HighBeam Research represented a simple way to find information for preparing classes, papers, exams, theses. Some of the advantages were:
– Had content in different formats, such as PDF
– They kept a permanent update of the information. They were constantly growing.
– It guaranteed the veracity of the sources, therefore the contents were reliable
– It allowed access to almost any type of publication, not only books, newspapers and magazines, it also had theses and research.
– They respected copyright by attributing each content to its primary origin and thus enforcing the Intellectual Property Law.
– Currently working in Questia allows you to filter the search to its primary origin and even do article reviews.
– Today, through Questia, a large part of the material is handled by personnel with extensive experience.
Disadvantages
Highbeam Research was a very complete virtual library and although thousands of people used it monthly, it had some disadvantages such as:
– Among its policies, it requested a previous payment to be able to access the complete publications. Today the free material on the internet is a great competition for this type of pages.
– They had too much information that was sometimes not well categorized and made content analysis difficult. If there were no detailed and hierarchical results, the reader could lose valuable information because they were not willing to analyze all the material.
References
Dr Niall O Dochartaigh (2007) Internet Research Skills
Questia Library online. A Note for Former High Beam Users. Taken from questia.com
Luis Ángel Fernández (2016) Living history of the internet
«Patrick Spain, founder of HighBeam» (2014). Taken from internetnews.com
Gale acquires HighBeam Research (2012) Taken from archive.org