Web Search–AllTheWeb
AllTheWeb Indexing Excel Spreadsheets and Powerpoint Slides
It appears that AllTheWeb is now providing access to Excel and Powerpoint material. You can limit to these formats by using filetype:excel and filetype:powerpoint. ATW already provides access to Adobe Acrobat , MS Word, and Macromedia Flash material.

Briefly
“Georgia Plans an Utterly Virtual Encyclopedia” (via The NY Times)
See Also: Learn More via the Georgia Humanities Council

Resources, Tools and Full-Text Documents
Documents in the News
Terrorism–United States
Source: U.S. Congress/GPO
Full-Text (Public Report), Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001
–
Legal Resources
New, Legal Research in a Nutshell Links
“…websites discussed or mentioned in Morris L. Cohen & Kent C. Olson, Legal Research in a Nutshell, 8th ed.
This compilation is available at no charge to all web users.

Web Search–Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves Releases List of “Smart Answer” Shortcuts
In April Ask.Com went live with a new look and a few new features. One of them is called Smart Answers. This service offers you the chance to type in a word or two and get an answer directly on a search results page. For some searches cases a search box and direct link to specialized database is embedded directly into the results list. Since Smart Answers was introduced an official list of the keywords to activate Smart Answers was not available. Today, Ask.Com provided ResourceShelf with a complete list of Smart Answer triggers. In some cases you can save a few keystrokes by removing words like what, of, for, the, etc.
-Search Weather (beta)
What is the weather in Paris? (Note: Weather “city name” also works.)
-Search Pictures
Pictures of Mountains (Pictures mountains also works)
-Search News
News about George W. Bush
-
-Local search tools
-Zip code (beta)
90210
Zip code for Silver Spring
-Country maps tool
Map of Sri Lanka
-Driving directions tool
Driving directions
-
Popular content shortcuts:
-Baby names
Baby names
-Software downloads
Download Ad-Aware
-Movies
Movie times
Music downloads
Download MP3
-Song lyrics
Song lyrics
-Oscars
History of the Oscars
Who won best actor in 1997?
-Recipes
Recipes for soup
-
Reference tools
-Holidays
When is Labor Day?
-Capitals
What is the capital of South Africa?
What is the capital of Vermont?
-Translation tool
How do I say thank you in Spanish?
-Dictionary look-up tool
What does serendipity mean?
-Science fair
Science fair projects
-Thesaurus
Synonym (term)
Value of pi
Value of pi
-Acronyms and Abbreviations
What does NBA stand for?

Web Organization and Searching
Source: Research/Penn State
The Work of Lee Giles
Read about the important and interesting work of Lee Giles at Penn State University. From the article, Lee Giles is not much interested in surfing. Mining and extraction are terms more to his liking. Giles, the David Reese professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State, has devoted his career to finding better ways to get at information, to wring the most out of it, to marshal it efficiently. A few key passages follow. Make sure to read the entire article.
-
+ The Web exists as a distributed sort of information base, Giles says, with typical understatement. Un-regulated, decentralized, the work of tens of millions of disparate authors, and constantly growing at an ever-accelerating rate, the Web is no easy object to take the measure of. Yet characterizing the Web, understanding its parameters and its behavior, was the first thing Giles set about doing. Whats there, how it is connected, how it changes, who uses it, why they use it the more you know about these things, the more efficiently youre able to use it, he says.
-
+ In another study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and his co-authors challenge the widely held notion that the competition for attention on the Web is purely winner-take-all, i.e., that new sites on the Web are more likely to attach themselves to sites that already have many links, insuring that a small number of established sites will always receive a disproportionate share of Web traffic. While this preferential behavior does accurately describe the Web as a whole, Giles and his co-authors write, it varies significantly by the type of site considered. Thus, while a new newspaper or entertainment site might find it difficult competing with similar sites that are already popular, university sites and the pages of individual scientists exhibit a more egalitarian link growth. The behavior is more complicated than had been thought, Giles says.
-
+ But automatic engines have their limitations, too. For one thing, most current crawlers are unable to recognize spam, which in this context means unreliable information. In the unregulated environment of the Web, Giles says, people claiming to be what theyre not is an ongoing problem.
-
+ A more praccompletelytion [to completley personalized search tool], at least in the short term, is what Giles calls the niche search engine, designed specifically to meet the needs of a group of people with similar interests: employees of a company, say, or members of a profession. By limiting its crawling to a specific subject area, the niche engine can burrow deeper, providing more consistently useful information. A prime example is CiteSeer [aka ResearchIndex], a tool that Giles and Steve Lawrence created for the field of computer and information science. .
Note: We completely agree with Dr. Giles. Those of you who read ResourceShelf on a regular basis know that we try hard to provide info about useful specialized and ‘niche’ search tools.
—-
—-
See Also: eBizSearch
Another niche search tool that Giles has developed. It focuses on materials about electronic business. eBizSearch was a Resource of the Week when it was officially launched in January, 2003.
–
See Also: Direct to Lee Giles Home Page
Plenty of interesting reading here.

Online Archives
Source: USA Today
$4.95/Month or Access To Archives of 150 Magazines or Another Reason to Forget the Library
An article about KeepMedia.Com, a new company that Louis Borders is starting. This is the same Mr. Borders who began the chain of bookstores. According to the article, “When it launches later this month, consumers will be able to pay $4.95 a month for access to the archives of 150 publications. You can also get online content from the current issue of a magazine if you buy a print subscription to that magazine. KeepMedia and the publishers will split the revenue from the fees and subscriptions.” Once again a service that’s selling remotely accessible access to material (and much more of it) that public, academic, and other types of libraries are offering patrons for free. Yet it’s companies like KeepMedia and eLibrary that get the media coverage. Sad.
–
See Also: In a recent press announcement, Patrick Spain, CEO of Alacritude (they own eLibrary) had the following comments about KeepMedia. “The KeepMedia business model is flawed. I know because I bought a company � eLibrary � with the same business model and we are changing it as quickly as we can. By most accounts, we are a success. We have some 40,000 subscribers who access an archive of 17 million articles from consumer, business and industry publications. If we weren’t developing new products, we would be a nice, profitable little company with limited growth prospects. People, including us, who focus their long-term online business on selling a selection of content will fail. What people want is single point of access to all online content, whether free or paid, utilizing compelling tools to turn that content into useful and actionable answers for their personal or business needs.” I would like to know how many of eLibrary’s 40,000 subscribers are paying for content that they could get for free via a library.
—
See Also: PaidContent.Org Has More (this was the first story about the company)

-
See Also: Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about regarding libraries offering free remotely accessible access (no need to visit the library building) to thousands of publications and other high-quality databases might want to take a look at a few examples of these services. All you need is a library card for a particular library. Contact your library to find out what you have access to. Here are five examples: NY Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, King County (Washington) Public Library, Fairfax Cty (Virginia) Public Library, Hamilton (Ontario) Public Library. School, academic, and other types of libraries also provide these services. Make sure to ask them about what’s available!!!

Scholarly Publishing
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Another Article About The Public Library of Science
From the article, This venture, called the Public Library of Science, aims to revolutionize how research findings are made public, making studies easier to find and less expensive to read. Not some late-night scheme of lab geeks, the library is the brainchild of some of the nation’s most reputable scientists, funded by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Its chairman is Dr. Harold Varmus, former chief of the National Institutes of Health. Thirteen Nobel-winning scientists are among its board members and supporters. Frustrated by the system used by the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nature, Science and hundreds of other journals, the scientists are building the nation’s first peer-reviewed electronic science journals. The journals — one called PLoS Biology, the other PLoS Medicine — would be free, easily accessible and efficient, said co-founder Patrick O. Brown, Stanford University School of Medicine professor of biochemistry and a leading researcher in the field of genomics. “Progress is made in science because each new step is built on what was learned before. But much of it is inaccessible,” Brown said.

Information Industry–Vivisimo
Ten Biomed Journals or Publishing Groups Now Utilizing Vivisimo Clustering Technology
The Pittsburgh based company says, “ten top biomedical societies and presses have selected Viv�simo’s Clustering Engine to provide categorized search results at their journal websites, which are hosted by Stanford University’s HighWire Press. You’ll find a complete list of the ten journals/groups in the news release. You can use Vivisimo clustering technology to “meta” search several web engines and specialized databases.
See Also: Learn More About Vivisimo in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Article

Digitization Projects
Source: The Daily Texan
The University of Texas Makes Gutenberg Bible Available on Internet
From the article, “The University’s [U of Texas] Gutenberg Bible, one of five complete copies in the nation, is now available online, conveniently continuing the Bible’s legacy of making print accessible to the masses. “A technological revolution made this book possible, and now another technological revolution [digital scanning] is making this possible,” said Steve Wilson, the media coordinator for the Harry Ransom Center.” This link will take you directly to the Digital Gutenberg.
See Also: Direct to Read More About the Digitization Process
See Also: AP Story About the Project

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Labor–Statistics
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Full-Text, A Chartbook of International Labor Comparisons: United States, Europe, and Asia
Background Info ||| Direct to Full-Text Report
–
U.S. Senate–History
Digitized Material: S-1, A Recently Discovered Ledger
From the Senate site, Probably the oldest book of consecutive accounts kept by government officers,” noted an 1885 newspaper article, “is a time-worn volume kept in the office of General Anson G. McCook, secretary of the senate.” Marked S-1, this financial ledger records nearly a century of salary and mileage payments to senators, from 1790 to 1881. McCook, recognizing the ledger’s importance, had it restored and rebound in 1884. Future employees were not so careful. In the early 1960s, S-1 and nearly sixty other financial ledgers were stored in the basement of the Capitol, and then forgotten. Rediscovered in late 2002, this collection is a unique treasure of Senate history. S-1 has been digitized by the Library of Congress and is now available online.

Public Libraries
Source: The Times (N.W. Indiana)/Medill News Service
“Libraries plug in to digital age”
We always like pointing out mentions of libraries in the mainstream press. This brief article does a good job at highlighting some of the technology that many public libraries in the U.S. offer these days.
Key Quote from the article:
“It’s not about books. It’s not about print. It’s about having the information available to the public,” Frances Roehm, a Skokie (IL) librarian said.
Kudos Frances, well said!!!

Citation Analysis
Source: Institute for Scientific Information
* Top Ten Most-Cited Countries, 1993-2003
* Computer Science & Engineering: High-Impact U.S. Universities, 1998-2002

AskERIC
Source: EDUPAGE/The Chronicle of Higher Education
Group Works to Keep AskERIC Going
An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub req) is summarized in EDUPAGE. From the summary, “Researchers at Syracuse University are working to preserve the popular research tool AskERIC after the Department of Education decided to stop funding for the tool…ERIC now comprises 16 clearinghouses, though the Department of Education is working to combine them into a single database. Officials at the Department of Education said the new structure will make a service such as AskERIC unnecessary. Many long-time users and operators of AskERIC disagree, however, and are working to secure funding from Syracuse and other sources to maintain AskERIC in its current form.

Information Industry–ProQuest
ProQuest Launches New Version of Platform, Hello to PQNext
The announcement has a complete list of PQNext’s features.

Information Industry–LexisNexis
LexisNexis To Adopt Single Technology Platform
From the announcement, While immediate benefits of a global platform will be seen in all markets, the U.S., the company�s and the world�s largest information services market, will be the principal beneficiary of the technology. Customers who already use LexisNexis� most sophisticated flagship products will begin to see even more incremental product benefits – with enhanced functionality and more advanced taxonomy evolving from the global platform. In addition, the platform means an improved system that will allow rapid delivery of these enhancements, as well as new content, from LexisNexis companies and licensees outside the U.S.
See Also: FAST Signs Deal With LN

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (4 Items)
Science and Engineering–United States–Statistics
Source: National Science Foundation
Full-Text Report, Science and Engineering State Profiles: 2000-2001 (NSF 03-324)
This is a tabular listing of 52 one-page science and engineering (S&E) Profiles (including ones for D.C. and Puerto Rico) that summarize state-specific data on personnel and finances. Also included is a summary of all data variables’ totals of all 52 states.
–
Documents in the News
Space Shuttle Columbia Investigation
Source: NASA
Just Released, Mission Management Team Transcripts (Overview and Link)
Links to the transcripts are found on the NASA FOIA page. Released under Freedom of Information Act
–
Patriot Act
Source: U.S. DOJ, Inspector General
Full-Text Report, Report to Congress on Implementation of Section 1001 of the USA PATRIOT Act
–
Vietnam
Source: U.S. Department of State
Just Released, �Foreign Relations, 1964-1968, volume VII, Vietnam, September 1968-January 1969�
The volume is part of the Department�s ongoing program to make available the official documentary record of American foreign policy in the Foreign Relations series. Volume VII completes the coverage of the Johnson administration�s policies on the war; previous documentation on the 1964�August 1968 period was published in volumes I�VI in the 1964�1968 subseries.
Summary/Announcement ||| Direct to Full-Text ||| Other Volumes

Briefly
Ask Jeeves Names Berkowitz President
-
Meet Omid Kordestani, Google’s Senior VP of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations (via Time)
–
Cambridge Scientific and BioOne Announce Affiliation

Online Books
Source: NY Times
“Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books”
I wonder what the netLibrary folks have to say about this one? A few comments from ebrary are included at the end of the article. From the article, Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according to several publishing executives involved.”…Amazon is calling its program Look Inside the Book II, the publishers said. It would expand on a current program that lets shoppers read a table of contents, a first chapter or a few selected pages provided by the publishers of certain books. But Look Inside the Book II would let online browsers search by terms like “Caravaggio,” “sans-culottes,” or “Osama bin Laden,” and then see a list of books mentioning the term along with the sentence that contains it. Browsers could then choose to see several pages around that citation. But to see those pages Amazon would require users to register, and it plans to limit the amount of any single book a browser can view…But Google searches only Web sites, not the contents of books, and Amazon’s proposed archive might offer a more authoritative alternative source of information.

News Search–Google
Google Launches Advanced News Search Interface
This new advanced page allows you to limit by source (also available with source:), limit by region, limit where search terms are located (headline, url, body, limit by date), and limit by date (at this time June and July, 2003 only). Similar advanced news search features have been available at AltaVista News for some time. Also, AV offers many articles that were published beyond the one month limit at Google. AV’s crawler is constantly checking to see if these ‘older’ urls are still live. If the answer is yes, they are still searchable. Finally, if you’re interested in the most current news, I strongly suggest you take a look at NewsNow.

Digital Tracking
Copyright
Source: S.F. Chronicle
Learn About: BayTSP
From the article, BayTSP gathers information clients can use to protect their copyrights or trademarks. In effect, Ishikawa wants BayTSP to become a high-tech version of Pinkerton, the legendary detective agency that made its mark protecting presidents like Abraham Lincoln and chasing Wild West outlaws like Jesse James. “We’re like an Internet private detective,” said Ishikawa, 39, a native San Franciscan.
See Also: Learn More via the BayTSP Web Site