About Safari

Welcome to our Safari, a guided expedition through the information world. We hope that it will help you to feel more confident about finding, evaluating, and using information. These notes should help you get going:

Moving around
Safari is divided into seven sections, each covering a particular aspect of information skills. Within each section there is a series of topics to work through. You can either work through Safari from the beginning to the end, or focus on a particular area by using the Contents page to locate specific topics.

Use the section, topic, and page links to move through Safari. Links to the sections and the topics within them are in the menu on the left of the screen. Once in a topic, use the page links at the bottom of each page to move backwards and forwards.

Activities
Although the material in the first two sections of Safari is largely just for you to read and reflect upon, the later sections of Safari will require you to undertake some activities. For some of these you will need pen and paper. For others you will be directed to web pages and resources outside Safari and away from the OU. In Section Seven, activities in early topics will feed in to a final activity in Topic Five. We have designed some activities so that they open up within a new browser window. When you have finished these activities, close that browser window to return to the rest of Safari.

Passwords
You will sometimes need to use your Open University passwords to access some of the information resources we subscribe to on your behalf. If you are not an OU student you may need to use passwords provided by your home University. We regret that the OU help facilities are not able to assist with this and you must contact your own university direct.

Help
The "Help" link on each page within Safari will take you to some general guidance. If you cannot find an answer to your question, please contact a member of the OU Library's Helpdesk Team.

Technical details
Safari works best on PCs with Internet Explorer version 6.0 and above. The site is designed to display best in screen resolutions of 800 x 600 and higher. Safari was designed for use on a PC, but if you are using a Mac, try using Mozilla browsers as this will make some of the content accessible to you. Please note, however, that some activities will not work as intended.

Accessibility
We have tried to ensure that Safari is accessible to all of our users. You can change the text size within your browser. As you work through, you will notice some links to text versions of images, and text versions of activities. These are intended for people who are using screen reading software. Ignore these unless you need to use them. Please contact the Library Information Literacy team if you are having difficulty using Safari, or have any suggestions about how we can make it more accessible.