Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents
Lists & Rankings
+ Books: Top 50 Bestsellers of 2003 (Amazon.Com) ||| Additional Amazon Lists
+ Books: Top 100 Bestsellers of 2003 (Barnes & Noble.Com) |||| Additional B&N Lists are Listed on Right-Side of Page
+ Books: The Best Sellers of 2003 [Canada] (The Globe and Mail) ||| Lists also Available via Amazon.Ca
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+ Movies: Box Office Grosses [United States] 2003 (BoxofficeMojo.Com) ||| All Time Box Office Worldwide Grosses
+ CDs: 100 Top-Selling of 2003 (Amazon.Com)
+ DVDs: 100 Top-Selling of 2003 (Amazon.Com)
+ Video: 100 Top-Selling of 2003 (Amazon.Com)
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+ Top Albums of 2003 (Billboard)
+ Top Singles of 2003 (Billboard)
+ Additional Billboard Charts
+ ARIA End of Year Charts [Australia]
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+ 2003 Year End Top 20 Tours (Pollstar)
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+ News: Most Read Stories on BBC News
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+ Top 10 Space Science Images (Space.Com)
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+ Lake Superior State University Banished Words List
From the site, “Hardly looking ‘metrosexual,’ a ’shocked and awed’ Lake Superior State University Word Banishment selection committee emerged from its spider hole with its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. LSSU has been compiling the list since 1976, choosing from nominations sent from around the world. This year, words and phrases were pulled from more than 5,000 nominations - a record. Most were sent through the school’s website. Word-watchers pull nominations throughout the year from everyday speech, as well as from the news, fields of education, technology, advertising, politics, and more. A committee gathers the entries and chooses the best in December. The list is released on New Year’s Day.”
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See Also: Price’s List of Lists (via SpecialIssues.Com)

Total Information Awareness Program
Privacy–United States
Source: Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense
Full Text Report, Total Information Awareness Program
See Also: DARPA ignored privacy concerns (via FCW)

Information Retrieval
Web Search
Compilation: Recently Awarded Search-Related Patents and Patent Applications, December 2003
I’ve compiled the November list of just-awarded or published search patents from the USPTO. This list is not comprehensive. Companies awarded patents include Google, IBM, and Phillips.

Professional Reading Shelf (2 Items)
Instant Messaging
Source: ACM Queue
Beyond Instant Messaging
From the article, “The recent rise in popularity of IM (instant messaging) has driven the development of platforms and the emergence of standards to support IM. Especially as the use of IM has migrated from online socializing at home to business settings, there is a need to provide robust platforms with the interfaces that business customers use to integrate with other work applications.”
See Also: Social Networking Vendors Aim for the Enterprise (via eWeek)
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Academic Libraries
Source: Association of Research Libraries
Now Available:
1) ARL Preservation Statistics 2001-02 (PDF, 59 pages)
2) ARL Supplementary Statistics 2001-02 (PDF, 41 pages)

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Employment–Canada–Lists & Rankings
Source: The Globe and Mail/Hewitt
Just Released, The Best Employers in Canada, 2004
See Also: Story in The Globe and Mail
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Amusement Industry–United States–Directory
Source: Consumer Product Safety Commission
Full Text, Directory of State Amusement Ride Safety Officials
“This Directory identifies the individual state offices dedicated to ride safety to encourage communication among the states and the federal government…. We also include contacts for various amusement ride industry organizations and associations, whose interests include ride safety.”

Briefly
Watch those Reference Books: FBI Issues Alert Against Almanac Carriers
Source: AP, via IHT
From the article, “The FBI is warning police nationwide to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning.”
See Also: Almanac Publishers Respond To FBI Bulletin (via AP)

Web Search–Yahoo
Just Released, Top Yahoo Searches 2003
Also includes the five most common misspellings of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
See Also: Lycos Announces Its List of the Most Popular Search Terms of 2003

Ready Reference
Source: InfoPlease.Com
Just Published, 2003 Year in Review
A handy compilation of facts. Reviews are also available for 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, and 1998 are also available.
See Also: 2003 Month-By-Month

Web Search–Google
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Google chief coy on IPO rumors
From the article, “Search engine Google’s Chief Executive Eric Schmidt shook his head in wonderment. Almost like clockwork, he noted, the U.S. economy always expands rapidly when headed into a presidential election year. Schmidt was responding to the buzz circling Silicon Valley about an imminent return to strong economic growth — and what it means for Google and other start-ups. Schmidt, wearing his habitual quirky grin, declined to say what it meant for Google’s allegedly pending initial public offering. The IPO is widely expected to take place next year, and guesstimates have the value of the company at more than $15 billion.”
See Also: Is Google good for you? (via BBC News)
BBC Commentator Bill Thompson writes, “In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it. Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by multiple blog links and can be manipulated by unscrupulous advertisers, doesn’t stop me typing search terms into my toolbar and feasting on the results. What’s worse, I’ve let both of my children believe that ’search the web’ and ‘Google’ are roughly synonymous, even though I teach my journalism students at City University that they should never rely on a single source, online or off. How has it come to this? Perhaps it is simply that Google has become the Coke of the web. Sweet, available everywhere, and the first choice of the consumer. Well part of the reason, obviously, is that I’m as lazy as most other web users, and having found something that sort of works, at a URL that I can easily remember, I stick with it.” I agree with just about everything Mr. Thompson has to say in the column about except his point that Google needs to be regulated by the government. If you don’t like Google, it doesn’t work for you, or you want to see what else is available, plenty of other good general web engines and many wonderful specialized database resources exist. Also, taking a little time time to learn how to fully exploit a few key resources (including Google) can make your online research much more productive. Of course, it’s also important to remember that it’s not all on the open web. Bottom Line? A little education goes a long way.

Information Industry–FAST Search & Transfer
Wireless Searching
FAST Search & Transfer Will Power Vodafone’s Mobile Search
From the announcement, “The new search facility on Vodafone live! enables customers to use their mobile handsets to search across an extensive portfolio of content and an index of worldwide WAP content using a hosted installation of FAST Data Search. This enables Vodafone to quickly connect its customers to relevant services within the Vodafone live! offering, as well as to the mobile Internet. The service is already live in Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, with the UK scheduled for early next year.”

Information Industry–FAST Search & Transfer
Wireless Searching
FAST Search & Transfer Will Power Vodafone’s Mobile Search
From the announcement, “The new search facility on Vodafone live! enables customers to use their mobile handsets to search across an extensive portfolio of content and an index of worldwide WAP content using a hosted installation of FAST Data Search. This enables Vodafone to quickly connect its customers to relevant services within the Vodafone live! offering, as well as to the mobile Internet. The service is already live in Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, with the UK scheduled for early next year.”

Uniform Resource Indicators
Source: OCLC Research
OCLC hosts �info� URI registry
From the announcement, “The recently proposed ‘info’ URI scheme enables the URI referencing of selected categories of legacy information-asset identifiers. OCLC Research has developed, and is hosting, NISO�s ‘info’ URI registry, built on an enhanced OAI-PMH 2.0 repository.” The OCLC announcement also provides several links with background info about URI’s.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (2 Items)
Employment–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
Full Text, Census 2000 Special Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tabulation
Summary/Highlights ||| Full Text
From the announcement, “How many New York City taxi drivers and chauffeurs live in Jersey City, N.J.? What do they earn, how old are they and what is their gender and race? And how about geological and petroleum technicians living in Arlington, Texas, who work in Dallas? The answers can be found in the Census 2000 Special Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tabulation released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.”

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Population–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
News Brief, Projection of U.S. Population on January 1, 2004

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents
Children–United States–Statistics
Source: Annie E. Casey Foundation
KIDS COUNT Census Data Online
Demographic data regarding children and their families, for states, counties, cities, metro areas, and Congressional districts. Topics include age, sex, race and ethnicity, and living arrangements. Based on Census 2000 short form data (Description from EconData.Net). You can also “create a ranking table from one of over 21 population indicators. Use the “Quick Rank” feature to easily rank all geographic areas of one type (i.e., all states, all congressional districts, etc.) or use the “Custom Ranking” feature to choose your own geographic areas.” Raw data can also be downloaded for offline use.

Public Libraries
Source: Denver Post
Library books play second fiddle to videos, CDs
From the article, “The good news for movie fans is that their local library looks more and more like a Blockbuster. The ominous news for book fans is the same: As budget-squeezed public libraries rush to buy DVDs for an insatiable public, branches must act more like multimedia centers and less like temples of the printed page…And while they run to keep up with customers flooded with cheap new DVD players this Christmas, Jefferson County [Colorado] libraries already have their eye on the next big thing: Song and video downloads, without a hard copy, that may have consumers walking into a branch asking where they can plug in their MP3 player…’So many of us are attached to the text, and the paper, and the binding. It’s so tactile,’ said Beth Elder, senior collection specialist for Denver Public Library. ‘But many of our customers are leaving text behind.” The article also contains a statistical chart.