Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (5 Items)
Mergers and Acquistions–Statistics
Source: Bureau van Dijk
Full Text, M&A Synopsis
From the document, “…a quarterly review of mergers and acquisitions, private equity and IPOs. The review is written by Ed Mountifield using ZEPHYR, the comprehensive M&A database which is published by Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvD).” Numerous charts and rankings. 17 pages (pdf). Free. You can also find a few statistics on this web page.
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Technology–Lists & Rankings
Source: Technology Review
10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World
From the article, “Technology Review unveils its annual selection of hot new technologies about to affect our lives in revolutionary ways�and profiles the innovators behind them.”
The Ten Technologies:
Universal Translation
Synthetic Biology
Nanowires
Bayesian Machine Learning
T-Rays
Distributed Storage
RNA Interference
Power Grid Control
Microfluidic Optical Fibers
Personal Genomics
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Goverment Information–United States
Source: American Association of Law Librarians
Full Text, State-by-State Report on Permanent Public Access to Electronic Government Information
From the report, “The purpose of this study, generously funded by a grant from Aspen Legal Publishers, was to assess the level of permanent public access to electronic government information across all state governments. Members of the American Association of Law Libraries in each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico completed a comprehensive survey. The survey results reveal that no state is comprehensively addressing these challenges. Very few states have updated their statutes to explicitly incorporate electronic government information into their public access, Freedom of Information or depository laws.”
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Computer Security
Source: NIST
Just Released, Full Text, Computer Security Incident Handling Guide
From a GCN article, “The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published guidelines for responding to security breaches in government computer systems.”
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NASA
Source: NASA Ames Research Center
NASA Computational Sciences Division: Publications
Library of technical publications by NASA computational science researchers since 1999. Topics range from space- and aviation-specific (Mars Rovers: Past, Present and Future) to data/information management (Source Update Capture in Information Agents). Some reports are not available online but most are; extensive abstracts often available. Full text in PDF format.

Web Resources of the Week
Four items for your ready-reference shelf.
1) Music–GRAMMY Awards–Searchable Database
Source: NARAS
GRAMMY SEARCH
A searchable database of all GRAMMY winners (1956-Present). From the site, “…winners by name of the award recipient, by categories within a genre, by year, by title of work and/or by the artist performing the work. With the exception of the category field, which requires that you first select a genre, you may use as few or as many of the available search fields.” Latin GRAMMY winners are in a separate database. The 2004 GRAMMY Awards will be held on February 8th. Here’s a list of the nominees.
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2) Area Code–North America
Source: North American Numbering Plan Administration
Database of North American Area Codes
The North American Numbering Plan Administration manages the area code system.
+ Search or Browse Data
+ Printable Area Code Maps
+ Additional Resources
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3) Population–Database–United Kingdom
Source: National Statistics
Neighbourhood Statistics Database
+ Search by Name or Postal Code
+ Browse Detailed Statistics by Subject
+ Browse by Area Name
+ Select Areas via Interactive Map (England and Wales Only)
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4) Maps–United States
Source: National Atlas of the United States
Printable Maps of the United States
Most maps can be downloaded as either pdf or gif files.
+ Reference Maps of the United States (including time zones)
+ Outline Maps of the United States
+ Congressional Districts – 108th Congress
+ Presidential Elections – 1789-2000
+ Federal Lands and Indian Reservations

Information Industry–United States–Legislation
Database Bill Passes Congressional Committee
The legislation discussed in the article is often referred to as the “Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act.” From the article, “A congressional panel on Wednesday approved a proposal to curb database copying, ignoring the objections of technology companies that launched a last-minute lobbying campaign to kill the proposal. By a 16-7 vote, the House Judiciary committee approved an intellectual property bill that had been opposed by Amazon.com, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Yahoo and some Internet service provider associations. The proposal, backed by big database companies such as Reed Elsevier and Thomson, would extend to databases the same kind of protection that copyrighted works such as music, literature and movies currently enjoy. Its supporters say that such protection is necessary to stop rivals from extracting information from proprietary databases like Reed Elsevier’s LexisNexis service instead of going through the far more expensive process of compiling it themselves. Wednesday’s vote follows a 10-3 vote last October in a subcommittee…Now the measure likely will go to the House floor in preparation for a possible vote.”
See Also: Full Text of House Judiciary Announcement
See Also: Database-protection bill advances in Congress (via Reuters)
From the article, “The controversial measure must also clear the Energy and Commerce Committee before it can come up for a vote on the House floor, where its fate is uncertain. No similar bill has yet been introduced in the Senate…Lawmakers drafted a more narrowly focused version last year, and the committee narrowed it further to exempt universities and Internet providers from liability. ‘What we have here is a watered-down, compromise version,’ said North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble, a bill sponsor.”
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See Also: Opposition to the Discussion Draft, “Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act” (9/03)
A letter signed by AALL, ALA, ARL, and SLA.
See Also: Much More Background in Two ResourceShelf Posts from October, 2003
#1 ||| #2

Web Search
Three Articles in The New York Times
Three articles about search issues.
1) For a Fee, Wind Up Atop the Search Heap
Bob Tedeschi writes about people buying their own name as a keyword ad.
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2) Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites
Lisa Guernsey writes about new ways to keep track of your favorite web sites. A project mentioned in the article from the University of Washington was first noted on ResourceShelf last month. A link to the work of Microsoft’s Susan Dumais, also mentioned in the article, was posted here in November. By the way, my favorite tool for saving web content continues to be SurfSaver. Not only can it save a page (in many cases better than a bookmark) but it also indexes and allows you to search the full text of the material. Scopeware is another tool I use. It allows you to quickly search numerous file types across your entire hard drive.
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3) Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point
Tom McNichol writes about Google Bombing. The company maintains it’s just a fad. In the section of the article discussing engines other than Google, the author fails to mention that Teoma’s method for determining relevancy might make it less susceptible to bombing initiatives. Teoma’s algorithm is also used by Ask Jeeves.
See Also: More comments in this 1/6 post .
See Also: Learn More About What Teoma’s Algorithm in an Article About IBM’s Clever (via Scientific American)
Check out this “classic” article about web searching. Several of the ideas developed for IBM’s Clever are being utilized by Teoma.

Library Briefs (2 Items)
LoC [Library of Congress] Helps Rebuild Baghdad’s Library (via The Hill)
See Also: Full Text, Library of Congress Mission To Baghdad: Report on National Library and the House of Manuscripts
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Check it out: Libraries inside malls (via Seattle Post Intelligencer)
A report from King County, Washington.

Professional Reading Shelf
Scholarly Publishing
Source: C&RL News
Full Text, Electronic journal publication: A new library contribution to scholarly communication two years on
From the article, “The University of Arizona (UA) Library is now in its third calendar year of publishing the Journal of Insect Science (JIS). It remains among the very few libraries currently producing a scholarly journal.”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents
Consumer Issues–Lists & Rankings
Source: FTC
FTC Releases Top 10 Consumer Complaint Categories in 2003

Unstructured Data–Taxonomies
Source: FCW
Taxonomy Use Grows
From the article, “Federal agencies are increasingly likely to use and understand taxonomies, the system of data classification that goes hand in hand with Extensible Markup Language (XML) in organizing data, according to industry experts.”
See Also: Agency taxonomies are a tall order, experts say (via GCN)

Search Engine Roundup
In the past week several sites have mentioned new search tools. Join me in checking them out. Expect more about each resource in upcoming weeks.
+ Dipsie
Coming in 2004, Beta available in the near future.
+ Eurekster Overview (via Search Engine Watch) ||| Direct to Eurekster (Beta)
Social network searching, personalized results.
+ Meceoo Overview (via Pandia) ||| Direct to Meceoo (Beta)
Metasearch, “…allows searchers to define their own ‘exclusion list’. Hence they may ask the metasearch engine to exclude sites that includes specific terms in their domain name.”
+ Metrobot (via Search Day) ||| Direct to Metrobot
Local search. Graphic result pages (virtually browse a street).

Cool!
Price’s List of Lists Mentioned in Harvard Business School Newsletter
Special thanks and plenty of credit to Special Issues for doing a wonderful job of keeping the LOL current and useful.

Citation Analysis
Scholarly Publishing
Source: ISI
+ Management: High-Impact U.S. Universities, 1998-2002
+ Science in Scotland, 1998-2002
+ Journals Ranked by Impact: Criminology & Penology

Data Mining
Privacy
Source: CIO
You Are What You Watch
Targeted advertising (ads tied to your search terms) is a popular topic these days. So is data mining. For these reasons I thought this article might be of interest to some of you. From the article, “Americans are rushing to purchase digital personal video recorders (the best-known brand is TiVo) so they can zap those pesky TV commercials right out of their lives. The sales of TiVos alone have soared 73 percent (over the same period last year) in the last three months, and the television industry has good reason to fear that TiVo spells the demise of an advertising gravy train that made commercial programming profitable for so many decades. Fortunately (or unfortunately as the case may be), a technological solution is already on the horizon. And with it come several privacy issues that attend much of the latest personal technology. I�m talking here about the development of new data mining software that can profile TV viewers and deliver targeted advertising to viewers via their beloved TiVos.”
See Also: Full-Text (fee-based) article, Using data mining to profile TV viewers
This article is mentioned in the CIO story.
See Also: MSA-Jovio
A company doing work in profiling technology.

Industry Briefs
InfoUSA Introduces Subscription Plan Offering Unlimited Access to Credit Reports
$50 per month/per person.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (6 Items)
Digitization Projects–Lithuania
Parchments Digitization Project at Lithuanian Academy of Sciences Completed
From the announcement, “Nearly ten percent of the more than 1,400 parchments preserved at the Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius are now online and available thanks to a UNESCO project that was recently completed. The digital images of 121 parchments containing information of outstanding historical value cover the period from 1187 to 1500.”
See Also: Direct to the Parchments Digital Images Archive
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National Libraries–Malaysia
Digitization Projects
The National Library of Malaysia Launches the International Islamic Digital Library
A bit of background in an Access article. The library is home to both bibliographic and full text material.
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Entrepreneurship–Canada
Source: Ernst and Young
Full Text, Survey of Canadian Entrepreneurs
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Weather–United States
Source: NOAA
Recently Released, Climate of 2003: 2003 in Historical Perspective
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Health Information
Source: MEDLINEplus
New Compilation, MEDLINEplus: Rural Health Concerns
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Election 2004
New Hampshire Primary
Streaming Audio: New Hampshire Public Radio
Coverage of Tuesday’s primary election. The Exchange (airs at 9am EST) has featured interviews with several of the candidates. They are archived here.

Web Search–Google
You Might Be Missing Material: Backwards Link Searching (Link:) With Google
If you who use Google to find what pages are linking to a specific web page (often referred to as a backward link or a reverse link), you might find the following news of interest. Google might NOT be showing you all of the pages that link to a specific url. I’ve seen several reports about this issue on search engine optimization sites. Today, I confirmed this as fact with a Google spokesperson. The search engine optimization sites mention that pages only with a certain PageRank are visible. I asked Google to explain the specific criteria used to determine which pages are visible with a link: search. Unfortunately, the spokesperson told me that the company would not publicly release this information. )-: I know it’s not a good idea to assume. Nevertheless, most of the seo sites I’ve seen mention that lower-ranked sites (using Google’s ranking methodology) are not visible with a link: search. The problem is that these sites might have useful data, especially when determining what pages link to a particular site.
Example:
+ link:www.fincen.gov
Using ATW, http://www.cftc.gov/cftc/cftcaml.htm is found to link to www.fincen.gov. It was confirmed by viewing the page. A Google search reveals that it has been crawled. However, this page is not revealed when running a link: search with Google.
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The easiest way to minimize any problems this issue could cause is to use more than one web engine. Of course, this is something we’ve been saying for a long time. At this point, my favorite engine for this type of searching is AllTheWeb. I use it either as my primary backward link engine or I’ll run an ATW search at the same time I use Google.

AllTheWeb also has another advantage. ATW allows you to refine your reverse link searches. Here’s an example:
+ link:www.aiip.org
+ link:www.aiip.org
With AllTheWeb you can utilize additional syntax in your query string. For example, what .edu pages link to www.aiip.org?
The use of additional syntax with a Google backward link search is not available.

Librarians’ Index to the Internet
The Librarians’ Index to the Internet Makes RSS Feed Available For Its “What’s New This Week” Compilation
The “What’s New This Week” compilation is a one-stop list of all of the new entries added during the preceding week to the LII. The wonderfully written annotations are also included. You can also read “What’s New” on the web or via e-mail. Essential reading no matter what format you choose! The page/feed/site is updated on Thursday.
See Also: Direct link for LII RSS Feed
See Also: LII RSS Tutorial
See Also: More New This Week From the LII

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full-Text Documents (6 Items)
Education–Classification Schemes
Source: NCES
Just Released, The Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC)
From the site, “The Classification of Secondary School Courses (CSSC) provides a general inventory of courses taught nationwide at the secondary school level (grades 9 through 12). The basic unit of instruction in the CSSC is the individual COURSE. Vocational, academic, and general courses are offered for credit and included in this listing.”
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State of the Union Addresss–United States
Source: Clerk’s Office, United States House of Representatives
State of the Union Fact Sheet
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Banking Industry–United States
Source: FBI
Just Released, Financial Institution Fraud And Failure Report (Fiscal Year 2003)
52 pages (pdf).
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Investment Industry–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
Just Released, 2002 Service Annual Survey: Securities and Commodity Contracts Intermediation and Brokerage Services
Summary ||| Direct to Full Text
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Space Exploration–United States
Source: National Academy of Science
Full Text Reports from the National Academy of Science About Space Exploration and Space Policy
1) Issues and Opportunities Regarding the U.S. Space Program: A Summary Report of a Workshop on National Space Policy (2004)
2) New Frontiers in the Solar System: An Integrated Exploration Strategy (2003)
3) Safe Passage: Astronaut Care for Exploration Missions (2001)
4) The Human Exploration of Space (1997)
5) Safe on Mars: Precursor Measurements Necessary to Support Human Operations on the Martian Surface (2002)
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Books–Online Exhibits
Source: Lilly Library, Indiana University
4000 Years of Miniature Books
“Miniature books, most of which are less than three inches tall and some of which are smaller than a penny, have delighted readers for centuries…. More than 900 of the library’s 16,000 miniatures were on display in the Library’s Main Gallery from June 18 to September 15, 2001. This online exhibition pictures a selection of the miniatures displayed in the exhibition and reproduces the narrative text of the exhibition labels.”

Enterprise Information Briefs (4 Items)
New, Fee-Based Service Offers SEC EDGAR Filings via an RSS Feed
In addition to the information in the news release, you can view a sample feed and learn more here.
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EasyAsk Lands Contract With Warner Home Video
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Endeca Continues to Grow Its Customer Base
Note: Endeca’s technology powers the BookBrowser on the Barnes & Noble site.
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Virage to Participate in Video Analysis and Content Extraction Research Program Sponsored by the Advanced Research and Development Activity
Learn more about the project here.

Web Search–Yahoo
Overture’s Research Lab is Renamed, Hello to Yahoo Research!
In August, ResourceShelf reported that Overture’s Research Lab under the direction of Dr. Gary Flake had launched a web site. Today, the research lab was renamed Yahoo Research. Dr. Flake is still in charge. The YRL web site is full of interesting reading for those of you interested in the topic along with descriptions of major projects. Expect a ResourceShelf interview with Gary Flake in the next few weeks.
See Also: Direct to the Yahoo Research Labs Home Page
Content also available at: http://research.overture.com
See Also: A Brief Interview with Gary Flake (via NewsFactor)

and in other Yahoo News…
Tweaks at Yahoo News Alerts
The Virtual Chase on a few tweaks to Yahoo’s alert service. Note: At the moment, Yahoo News Alerts are not available for all 7000 sources that Yahoo News Search provides access to.
See Also: Early Beta Test: Changes and Tweaks at Yahoo News Search

Professional Reading Shelf (5 Items)
Open Access
A New Issue of “Open Access Now” Is Available
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Open Access
Presentations from the SPARC/ACRL Forum
The forum took place at the 2004 ALA Midwinter Meeting.
Presentations available (PowerPoint slides):
+ Who Pays for Open Access by Helen Doyle, Public Library of Science
+ Publishing by the Academic Library by Henry Hagedorn
+ Using the Library Budget to Drive Change by Joseph Branin

and while we’re on the topic of scholarly publishing…

Full Text, “Reed Elsevier Feels Resistance To Web Pricing” (via The Wall Street Journal)
From the article, “Reed’s ScienceDirect has been much-admired among big, old-line publishers for its innovative use of the Internet. But some university librarians are starting to rebel against Reed’s dominance by dropping subscriptions to its journals; some academic researchers are supporting alternative online publishers of academic research. The disgruntled faction is the thin edge of a wedge that in coming years could widen cracks in Reed’s vaunted online strategy.”
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See Also: Elsevier and NESLi2 conclude major new agreement to provide online science journals
From the announcement, “The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Elsevier, part of the Reed Elsevier Group, today announced the conclusion of a new agreement as part of NESLi2, the national electronic journals initiative for the higher education and research communities in the United Kingdom.”
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Information Industry
Selected Feature Articles from Research Information
+ Out with print, in with the PC
The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company will not have a single, traditional library by the end of this year. Peter Rees examines the challenges in creating an international, company-wide “virtual library”
+ Science makes money for Europe’s information companies
David Mort, Director of IRN Research, provides a snapshot of recent trends amongst leading STM information companies in Europe.
+ Extended expectations need extended services
The way scientific information was disseminated in print may hold lessons for the electronic age. Tom Wilkie examines the potential.