Resource of the Week
Elections–United States
Resources for Election 2002
Next Tuesday is Election Day here in the U.S. Here’s a small set of resources that I hope will be of value to you during the next week and after the election. I’ve also included a link to a wonderful calendar of election info from most countries that have them.
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Bios, Congressional Candidates and Gubernatorial Candidates (via Leadership Directories)
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Charts, State Election Laws (via ElectionLine and NCSL)
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Database, Candidate Finder (Search by Address, via Capwiz)
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Directory, Election 2002-Candidates and Race Info (via Capwiz)
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Directory, Elections 2002 (via Council of State Governments)
Lists of ballot initiatives by state, numerous chats from the The Book of the States, 2002.
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Directory, Election Statistics 1920-2002 (via Office of the Clerk, U.S. House)
“Since 1920, the Clerk of the House has collected and published the official vote counts for federal elections from the official sources among the various states and territories.”
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Directory, Guide to the Governors’ Races (via National Governors Association)
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Directory, State Election Offices (via NASED)
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Directory, Secretary Of State Offices (via NASS)
Many of these offices provide live vote counts.
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Directory, StateVote 2002 (Info/Resources on State Elections via NCSL)
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See Also: Calendar, ElectionGuide.Org
From the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES). A calendar with linked resources for just about every major election held around the globe. Material from 1998 though 2009.

Web Search–Google
Libraries
“Does Search Engine’s Power Threaten Web’s Independence”
Comments from various people on Google’s “power”. Earlier this week the News.Com’s Stefanie Olson contacted me and I’m happy to report that a sidebar includes a mention of librarians, remotely accessible databases, and some a few links to info pro compiled directories often mentioned on the VAS&ND.

Professional Reading Shelf
Information Credibility
Source: Consumer WebWatch/Stanford University
“How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility? Results from a Large Study” (Abstract)
From the abstract, “With more than 50 percent of the U.S. population having Internet access, the World Wide Web has become an important channel for providing information and services. As the Web becomes a part of people’s everyday lives-booking travel, finding health information, buying products � there is a growing need to help people figure out whether a Web site is credible or not: Can I trust the information on this site? Can I trust in the services this site describes?” Thanks to NFAIS for the tip.
See Also: Direct to Full-Text of the Report

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Small Business–United States–Lists & Rankings
Source: Inc.Com
Updated, The 2002 edition of the Inc. 500 is Now Available
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Recently Updated Congressional Research Service Reports
Source: Congressional Research Service
Afghanistan: Current Issues and U.S. Policy
CRS Issue Brief: Africa: U.S. Foreign Assistance Issues
CRS Issue Brief: Egypt-United States Relations
CRS Issue Brief: Palestinians and Middle East Peace: Issues for the United States
CRS Issue Brief: The Middle East Peace Talks
CRS Issue Brief: North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program
See Also: Additional CRS Reports Relating to International Issues

Telephone White Pages–United States–SuperPages.Com
Five Points of Info About the White Pages Database at SuperPages.Com
I was spending a few minutes looking at some of the services provided at MyWay.Com. The new portal offers telephone directory info provided via a direct link to Verizon’s SuperPages.Com. Since it’s always useful to know about several online telephone directory, here’s what I learned about SuperPages.Com.
1) The only required field is “last name”. Other searches will work for the entire U.S. without specifying city, state, or first name. Caveat, only one thousand records are available per search.
2) The asterisk(*) works as a wildcard. If you use them you will be asked (in most cases) to specify state and city.
3) Clicking the “More Info” link next to each entry will offer a “Find Neighbors” search.
4) Searching on a first name will also return matches on an initial. For example, searching John Doe will also return entries listed as J. Doe.
5) Content in this database is provided by Acxiom.

Web Search–AlltheWeb
AtW Adopts Standards, Will Post New “Skins” Tomorrow
From the announcement, “AtW is the first major search site to fully adopt XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). In doing so, AlltheWeb is now faster to load and can be displayed consistently across a wider range of Web browsers and browser platforms. FAST has also revealed several new �skins� for AlltheWeb, enabling millions of users to personalize the look and feel of AlltheWeb, while still obtaining the same quality, advanced search features of the site. To celebrate FAST�s XHTML and CSS compliance, and in an effort to showcase these new skins, FAST will be posting a special, commemorative Halloween skin on October 31st as AlltheWeb�s default page. Starting on October 31st, users wishing to choose from the new variety of skins available for AlltheWeb can do so by going to AlltheWeb�s skins gallery, located at (http://www.alltheweb.com/gallery).”

Information Industry–Reed Elsevier
Source: Forbes
Profile: Reed Elsevier
From the article, “Amid a media recession, Crispin Davis is coining money at Reed Elsevier. How did he pull that off? ” Also from the article, “James Neal, who as head of Columbia University’s libraries in New York is a big customer, gives Reed Elsevier top marks for creating user-friendly research products, but he also has a six-point gripe list with the company that includes price-gouging and concerns that scientific journals are increasingly being consolidated under one corporate banner. Britain’s Office of Fair Trading calculates that Reed Elsevier’s price increases since 1999 compounded at a 22% rate, versus 8% for the U.S. consumer price index.”

Information Industry–Reuters
Source: AP/ITWorld.Com
Criminal Complaint Filed Against Reuters
From the article, “Swedish information technology company Intentia International AB has filed a criminal complaint against Reuters Ltd. alleging that the U.K.-based news agency illegally obtained Intentia’s third quarter financial results by hacking the company’s corporate Web server. Reuters has denied the charge, according to a published report…”We are rejecting (Intentia’s) allegations completely. Information was accessed from company’s Web site and in the public domain. It wasn’t a private site. It wasn’t password protected. (The report) was on their public Internet site; it was published, and therefore we reported it,” said company spokeswoman Susan Allsop…Allsop confirmed that no link to the report was provided on the Intentia Web site. Citing the legal actions taken against the company, however, she refused to say how the file was located on the site. “The journalist located it on their site, but not using any illegal means. The journalist didn’t hack into their system. The report was on their site in an area where you would expect it to be. Anybody looking for it at that site would have found it,” Allsop said. The issue may come down to a dispute over what constitutes “private” content on a Web server that is accessible to the public. If the earnings report was posted ahead of time in a location that was accessible to the public and where previous quarterly earnings statements had been posted, a knowledgeable Web user could derive the URL (uniform resource locator) of the file and download it, even if no visible link to the file was provided on Intentia’s Web site.”
See Also: Intertia News Release #1 ||| #2
See Also: Read the Complete Reuters News Release

Web Search–Google
Source: Internet.Com
Google “Publicly Launches” Google Answers
From the article, “After six months of testing, Google this morning publicly launched a new paid search service to help users who don’t have the tech savvy or time to perform Web searches of their own.” As of 3:15pm today the site says beta on it.
See Also: “Information for Sale: My Experience With Google Answers” (via Searcher)
See Also: The Original VAS&ND Post About Google Answers
Includes Comments from a Google spokesperson, Scroll to the April 28th Postings.
See Also: Google As A Homework Helper?

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents
Energy–United States–Statistics
Source: EIA
Now Available, Annual Energy Review 2001
From the site, “U.S. energy history from 1949-2001 recorded in data tables and figures. Covers all major forms of energy (fossil fuels, nuclear electricity, and renewable energy) and total energy by key activity (e.g., production, consumption, trade, stocks, and prices).”

Professional Reading Shelf
Web Resources
A New Issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter (No. 98) is Now Available

Portals–My Way
A New Portal Launches: Hello to MyWay.Com
MyWay.Com is part of the Excite Network and touts “one the Internet’s most protective privacy policies and — most importantly — does not contain a single banner or pop-up advertisement throughout the entire site.” The search and directory portion of the site features Google content. All formats are available but unlike Google.Com, documents converted to html are listed as cached. Other portal features include free e-mail (5mb inbox), page personalization, toolbar, and more.
See Also: Read the My Way News Release
See Also: NY Times Article About MyWay.Com
Note: If you dive into the MyWay.Com site you might come across a “search glossary” page. The definition of Boolean includes the following sentence, “The Boolean words that will work with My Way search are: AND, NOT, OR, and NEAR.” This statement is not accurate. OR works (as it does at Google.Com) but AND, NOT, and NEAR are a no go. The only search engine to offer NEAR (10 words in either direction) is AltaVista. Thanks to Greg Notess for confirming. As I’ve said many times, Greg’s Search Engine Features Chart is THE place to go to find what each engine does and does not offer.

Online Industry–Micromedia ProQuest
Digitization Projects–Canada
New Content Added to Canadian Business and Current Affairs Database
From the announcement, “…33 new full text titles have been added to the production database, with an additional 4 more titles coming as issues are produced. This adds approximately 2,500 new 2002 full text records to the CBCA database.”
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and in Other News From Micromedia…
Now Available: Canada�s Heritage from 1844
From the announcement, “…represents the online digitized full-image version of the complete works of The Globe and Mail newspaper since its inception as The Globe in 1844. It is available on a subscription basis for libraries, businesses and institutions worldwide.”

Academic Libraries–United States
Source: LJ
“In Slumping Economy, Academic Libraries Face Crisis”
From the article, “Academic libraries in nearly every state are experiencing fiscal pain. Although legislators across the country profess their earnest desire to shield higher education as best they can, such massive shortfalls mean cuts are inevitable. “This is a budget crisis,” declared Helen Spalding, Associate Director of Libraries at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and President of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).”

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Health–Canada–Calendars
Source: Health Canada
New, Calendar of Health-Related Days – 2003
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Information Technology–Salary Surveys
Source: Computerworld
Now Available, 16th Annual Computerworld Salary Survey

Web Search–Alexa/Google
New Services from Alexa Search
On April 30th of this year the VAS&ND featured a lengthy review of Alexa’s version of the Google database. In recent months Alexa has added several new features. Here’s a brief list.
1) After you conduct a search (you’re searching the full Google database) a new section and link is provided to see who’s linking to the page. In other words, this section contains the same info you’d find by doing a reverse link (link:) search . The sites are listed at the bottom of the info page as “Other sites that link to…”. What’s useful is that this link: filters out links to itself (not available with Google.Com). However, Alexa will only list other “sites” that link to a specific url, not specific pages.
2) “You can see daily traffic rank history going back one year for every site on the web. The graphs are located on the site detail pages. Just click the link labeled “Trends” in the navigation menu (upper left side of the page.)”. These rankings come from Alexa’s research. Here’s a trends graph for FBI.Gov. The graphs contain info at the site level.
3) Although it’s been available for some time, don’t forget that every Alexa page (left column) contains a direct link (url specific) to The Wayback Machine. This can save you a few clicks if you need to check if archived material is available.
4) New For the Alexa Toolbar
A “new feature that allows toolbar users to customize the layout of the search results. You can can choose the number of site thumbnails to show [from zero to all], include traffic rankings in the search results, and more. Look for this feature in your Alexa Toolbar Options page.”

Fee-Based Content–eLibrary
Source: InfoToday NewsBreaks
“eLibrary Articles Now Included in Inktomi Search Results”
From the article, “Alacritude, LLC, the Chicago-based start-up that purchased eLibrary.com and Encyclopedia.com earlier this year, has announced that documents available from eLibrary will now be indexed by Inktomi and included in search results on portals that use the Inktomi search engine. Sites include MSN, About.com, Overture, LookSmart, HotBot, and others.”
See Also: Additional Comments Can Be Found in Last Tuesday’s Postings

Professional Reading Shelf
Libraries and Librarians
The November Issue of Walt Crawford’s Cites & Insights is Now Available

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents (4 Items)
Privacy in the Workplace–United States
Source: GAO
Full-Text Report, Employee Privacy: Computer-Use Monitoring Practices and Policies of Selected Companies
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Crime–United States–Statistics
Source: FBI
New, Full-Text Report, Crime in the United States – 2001
Summary ||| Direct to Full-Text
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Veterans–United States–Fast Facts
Source: U.S. Census
New, Fact Sheet: Veterans Day 2002
Fast facts about veterans in the U.S.
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Education–United Kingdom–Statistics
Source: National Statistics Office
Full-Text, Statistics of Education – Schools in England, 2002
See Also: Full-Text, Higher Education Statistics for the United Kingdom 2000/01

Information Visualization
Source: The NY Times
Learn About: Groxis
From the article, “…according to the Groxis designers, 84 percent of Web surfers go no further than the first page of document titles in searching for information. While that may be appropriate for some searches, other queries, like one for the phrase “exotic vacations,” may leave Web sites of interest deeply buried by search engines. The popular search engine Google uses ranking techniques to sort through thousands of possible Web pages displaying what are often the most desirable pages first. In contrast, Grokker builds a visual map of the general categories into which documents fall by using what computer software designers call metadata, which describes each Web page or document. The program currently works with the Northern Light search engine, the Amazon online catalog and as a tool for scanning a user’s own PC file collection.
See Also: Direct to the Groxis Web Site
The Preview Release is a $99.95 Download.
See Also: Antartica
A Canadian Company Doing Info Visualization Work
See Also, Demo: Antartica Visualization Technology Using the PubMed Database
See Also, Demo: SmartMoney’s Market Map
Visualize the Stock Market!
See Also, Various Info Visualization Demos (via Inxight)
Includes Best Buy catalog, AllRecipes.Com database.
Visually Browse the Open Directory Project