Internet Training–Tutorials
Updated Site: Word From the UK, The TONIC Netskills Tutorial Has Been Updated
If you’re looking for a basic introduction to the Internet and Web to share with patrons or other new web users, TONIC (The Online Netskills Interactive Course), might be a possible solution. The entire tutorial has just undergone a major overhaul by the NetSkills group at the University of Newcastle. TONIC is available at no charge. You’ll need to create a login which is used if you want to return to the tutorial precisely where you left off. Each section begins with an list of objectives and concludes with a quiz. Topics are current and the text is full of examples to illustrate what is being discussed. Bottom Line: TONIC is a useful, educational, and an essential tool to know about. Make sure to take a look around when have you some time.

Professional Reading–Market Intelligence
Source: EContent
“Trust: Mining the Community Mind”
Sylvia Lacock Marino has written a very interesting article about how message board, Usenet, chat room, and other postings on the web are being used as real-time market research. From the article, “This new breed of reporting software and services is being provided by a handful of companies that crawl, spider, or index through communities, gathering content from a variety of sources�Usenet newsgroups, message boards, chat archives, customer-provided ratings and reviews. The postings from various sources are aggregated and analyzed using software that “reads” all of the postings and finds the themes or clusters. The general themes and clusters of information are packaged into reports and sold to companies as an adjunct to traditional market research, i.e. focus groups. Depending on the company, the practice and resulting service can be called a Corporate Intelligence Service, or a Brand Commentary Solution, or Consumer Insight and Forecasting.” The article also contains info on the primary players and tools in this arena. The article also mentions some of the legal considerations. A must read!

Info Industry–OCLC–FirstSearch
Source: OCLC
OCLC To Combine and Enhance ArticleFirst and ContentsFirst Databases
Here’s some news just in from OCLC. The following changes are set for implementation on Sunday, Oct 14th. From an OCLC press release, The OCLC ArticleFirst and OCLC ContentsFirst databases, which have been available to users of the OCLC FirstSearch service since 1992, will soon be combined and enhanced with bibliographic records from the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online database to provide a single, powerful serials content resource for libraries and their users…**The ContentsFirst database will be incorporated into ArticleFirst in order to give users the ability to browse journal tables of contents, as they can now in Electronic Collections Online. With the integration of these two databases, separate access to the ContentsFirst database will be discontinued in the FirstSearch Web and text-only interfaces.NOTE: LIBRARIES SHOULD REMOVE ALL EXISTING LINKS AND SCRIPTS TO THE CONTENTSFIRST DATABASE, SINCE THIS DATABASE WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE THROUGH THE FIRSTSEARCH WEB INTERFACE. Combining the databases will streamline the search process, eliminating the need to go to one database to view the contents of a journal and a different one to search for articles. **Bibliographic information from the Electronic Collections Online database will be added to ArticleFirst. If an Electronic Collections Online record duplicates a record present in the ArticleFirst database, the search automatically keeps only the Electronic Collections Online record, thus automatically removingd duplicates from the results set. Electronic Collections Online will remain as a separate database, as well, and will continue to offer the following options not available to ArticleFirst users: limit to subscription, limit to publisher collections, limit to subject collections, abstracts, and references.

Web Search–Yahoo
“Yahoo! Gets Friendly With Improved Search”
Kevin Elliot offers a comprehensive review of Yahoo’s recent organizational changes. Let me add one more fact to be aware of when searching Yahoo. Kevin writes, “Finally, if you happen to search a term that doesn’t turn up many results from the Yahoo directory (my test query for this was “moroccan sports”), you will find a link to “Web Page Matches” which leads to search results from Google. If your search finds nothing at all in the Yahoo directory, your results will go straight to the Google results, 20 to a page.” This is correct. However, as we have mention before, this is not the same Google database one searches when searching via Google.Com. It’s much smaller. How much smaller? Google will not release any specific numbers.
Example 1:
A Search on Yahoo’s version of Google for the terms: Chicago Baseball Train Addison 730 Results.
The identical search via Google.Com 1,170 results.
Example 2:
A Search on Yahoo’s version of Google for the terms: “Royal Canadian Mounted Police” Toronto Ottawa 2,910 results.
The identical search via Google.Com 4,180 results.

New, Updated, & Newly Discovered Resources (3 Items)
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World News
Political News
The Atlantic Provides Access to The Hotline World Extra
The newest edition from The Hotline (available at no cost) summarizes World news from hundreds of different publications. A new edition is available daily at 1:30pm Eastern Time. The Hotline also publishes Hotline Scoop, also free. Information about the subscription edition of The Hotline is available via the National Journal site. This is top quality material from a well known and often quoted publication.
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Full-Text
Race–United States
Demographics–United States
Source: U.S. Census
General Demographic Characteristics by Race for the United States: 2000
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Campaign Finance–United States
Source: Center for Responsive Politics
Updated Site: CRP Updates With 2001-2002 Campaign Finance Data
You will find the new links at the top of the page. From the CRP news release, “Summary figures for the first half of 2001–including overall total amount raised, total amount spent and cash-on-hand by federal elected officials and parties–have been available for some time, but OpenSecrets.org now lists detailed breakdowns of
contributions to every member of Congress, including Top industries; Top contributors; Dollars raised by geographic area; and PAC contributions by economic industry and sector. You can also find info by member/candidate name and/or industry group

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