Resources of the Week
Two different items for you this week.
Maps–International
Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
ReliefWeb Map Centre
If you’ve been keeping up with ResourceShelf for any length of time, you’re probably aware that we have a thing for online maps here. ReliefWeb, OCHA’s “global network for humanitarian information on complex emergencies and natural disasters,” was established as a one-stop information hub for “timely and reliable information during crises.” And sometimes, a map can convey as much or more information than a written document…or provide supplementary information.

You can access maps via a sensitive map or else use the two dropdown menus — one allows you to select maps by country and another which permits selection of maps by emergency. When you select a country — let’s use Iraq again, since there is high interest in the situation there — you are presented with a listing of maps in reverse chronological order, from newest through oldest. Links at the top allow you to view the maps:
+ By type — either reference (standard geographic maps) or thematic (specific emergency, incident or disaster)
+ By source — according to the agency/organization which prouduced the maps
+ By keyword — e.g., food, health, landmines, natural resources, weather and climate, etc.
Each map is dated and includes a brief description as to its format and file size. There’s also a link that will take you to related documents found elsewhere on the ReliefWeb site.

You can search for maps via a form that allows you to type in a title or specify criteria — region, country, source, data type, date — by using dropdown menus.

The Map Centre is updated continually. You can take a look at the newest additions by clicking the “Latest Maps” link at the top of the right navigation column, under the dropdown menu. Under that, there’s a selection of links to current “featured” maps. If you’d like to keep track of newly added maps, you can subscribe to an e-mail update; choose to receive it weekly or monthly.

+++

Studs Terkel–Multimedia Resources
Source: Chicago Historical Society
Studs Terkel: Conversations with America
Studs Terkel, the venerable Chicago-based author and radio personality, has produced an awesome body of work in his 90-plus years on this planet. The breadth of his subject matter comprises a comprehensive history of the 20th Century. This website makes available a significant amount of recorded material from Terkel’s radio programs, books and interviews, organized into seven galleries:
+ The Studs Terkel Program (WFMT radio program in Chicago)
+ Division Street: America (twentieth century urban life in and around Chicago)
+ Hard Times (The Great Depression)
+ The Good War (World War II)
+ Race (interviews with people about their views on race)
+ Talking to Myself (Terkel on his own life)
+ Greatest Hits (particularly memorable moments from Terkel’s radio program)

You can search the audio materials archived here. Detailed biographical information about Terkel is available. You will need the free RealPlayer to listen to the audio material and Flash to access portions of the website. Both may downloaded from this page.

The site is part of Historical Voices, a “searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century,” funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Libraries–PATRIOT Act
Source: ALA Washington Office Newsletter
Court Decision on PATRIOT Act May Affect Libraries
From the ALA newsletter, “September 29th marked an important victory for civil liberties when the federal district court judge in the southern district of New York struck down Section 505 of the Patriot Act which permitted the FBI unchecked
authority to obtain subscriber information, toll billing records and other transactional records from electronic communications service providers ‘without any judicial oversight or opportunity for challenge’…Since many libraries may be “electronic service providers” if they provide public access to the Internet, libraries are among the entities that may benefit from this ruling.”

Web Search Briefs
Say Hello to Clusty.com From Vivisimo
Vivisimo, the Pittsburgh based meta search and clustering company, has just launched Clusty.com, a new site offering several search and clustering tools and options (including a meta search of the blogosphere) unavailable from the Vivisimo.com site. Chris Sherman and some person by the name of Gary Price (-: offer up an overview and comments on the SearchDay site.
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GoHook Offers Access to PDF Content (via SEW Blog)
For your “search tools in development” file.

Professional Reading Shelf
Digital Preservation
Source: The New York Times
Grants Will Preserve Paperless Bits of History
“The Library of Congress is giving $15 million to eight institutions to preserve a range of electronic material, including Web sites relating to the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, digital maps, sound recordings and decades’ worth of social science data. The grants, to be announced today, are part of a $100 million multiyear program, established by Congress and administered by the library, aimed at archiving resources that are increasingly born digital — that is, as a Web site or an electronic database.”
See Also: Library Of Congress Announces Awards Of $15 Million To Begin Building A Network Of Partners For Digital Preservation
See Also: Direct to the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP) Web Site
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Digital Libraries
Source: ECDL
Papers from the European Digital Library Conferences are Now Online
The conference took place from September 12-17th at the University of Bath. Here are just a couple of that papers that I plan to take a look at:
+ Libraries, digital libraries, and digital library research
+ Evaluation of an Information System in an Information Seeking Process
+ Fiction Electronic Books: a Usability Study
+ DSpace: a Year in the Life of an Open Source Digital Repository System
+ Sound Footings: Building a National Digital Library of Australian Music
+ Towards Topic Driven Access to Full Text Documents
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Union Catalogs
Source: Library World Records
International Union Catalogs
“At present hundreds of huge union catalogs, library network catalogs and consortium catalogs (all based on the Z39.50 networking protocol) are ongoing projects around the world, and most of them, notably those in Europe and North America are up and running. Electronic union catalogs are very valuable not just for catalogers but library users, researchers, lecturers, teachers, booksellers etc…. As long as the union catalogs being submitted, are in electronic format such as CD-ROM access or Internet access, and provide access to at least 5 large libraries, all URls sent will be added to this web page. The libraries in the union catalog can be part of a town, city, county, region, consortium, state, province or country, etc.”
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Archivists
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Meet Anna Mancini, Company Archivist at Hewlett Packard
For your “cool job” file. From the article, “‘I feel like I won the lottery,’ Mancini says. ‘It really is a once-in-a-career, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”’
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Open Access
Source: College & Research Libraries (via E-LIS archive)
Do Open Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?
From the abstract, “hile many authors believe that their work has a greater research impact if it is freely available, studies to demonstrate that impact are few. This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access?philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics?to see if they have a greater impact, as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database, if their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact. Shedding light on this category of open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are both adopting open access practices and being rewarded for it.”
Abstract ||| Direct to Full Text

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Presidential Debates–United States
Presidential Debates-United States
Selected Presidential Debate Resources
+ Text Transcripts of All Debates (1960-2000)
+ C-SPAN Offers Online Streaming Video of the 2000 Presidential Debates
+ Bush/Kerry Memorandum of Understanding on Debates
+ Text of Commission on Presidential Debates Sept. 15, 2004 letter to the Campaigns’ Lead Debate Negotiators
+ Information About Debate Moderators and Format
+ Formats for 2004 Debates
+ Presidential Debate 2004 at the University of Miami
+ Presidential Debate 2004 at Arizona State University
+ Presidential Debate 2004 at Washington University
+ Vice Presidential Debate 2004 at Case Western Reserve University
+ The Great Debate: The History of Presidential Debates
+ Presidential Debate History (Resources for Educators)
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United States–History
Russia–History
Source: Library of Congress
Expanded Content, “Meeting of Frontiers” Web Site
From the announcement, “Meeting of Frontiers” is a bilingual, English-Russian collaborative project that chronicles the parallel experiences of the United States and Russia in exploring, developing and settling their frontiers, and the meeting of those frontiers in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. It features rare books, maps, manuscripts, photographs, sheet music and other materials from libraries in the United States and Russia, and is widely used in schools and libraries throughout the United States and Russia. The latest expansion includes 24 collections from 14 different libraries and archives in Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Krasnoiarsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, and other Siberian cities, as well as additional collections from the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg, the Russian State Library in Moscow, and the Library of Congress. Digitization of materials in Siberia was undertaken by a mobile scanning team based in Novosibirsk that worked in cooperation with the Library of Congress to identify rare materials of special interest to American and Russian scholars, teachers, and students.”
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Employment–United States–Statistics
Source: BLS
Just Released, Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2003

What’s a DocuTicker?
Docuticker is a new daily update from the ResourceShelf team with direct links to new reports from government agencies, ngo’s, think tanks, and other groups.

Professional Reading Shelf
Maps
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Interview: David Rumsey made a living in real estate. Then he charted his future to match his passion: maps.
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Public Libraries–Internet Filtering
Source: The Arizona Republic
Asking library filters to do the impossible
“It was for the benefit of taxpayers and, of course, for the children. That’s why, in my duties as a journalist, I had to peer in closer to verify what I was seeing: A picture of a topless Carmen Electra on a Phoenix library’s computer screen.” The columnist finds that filters don’t always block pornography. And we, as information professionals, are shocked-just-shocked.
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Public Libraries
Source: San Jose Mercury News
S.J. library computers snarled by worm, virus
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Collection Development
National Library of Medicine
Source: NLM
Collection Development Manual of the National Library of Medicine

Information Industry–LexisNexis
Source: Marketwatch.com
LexisNexis Awarded $35 Million U.S. Government Contract
The seven-year $35 million contract will have LN providing the U.S. Department of Justice with “specifically-tailored research and information services.”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
R&D
Source: R&D Magazine
The 42nd Annual R&D 100 Awards
The most, “technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace.”
See Also: Searchable Database of Past Award Winners
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Government–Canada–Databases
Source: Library and Archives Canada
Cabinet Conclusions
From the site: “This research tool provides access to the Cabinet Conclusions which summarize the discussions that took place at the meetings of the Federal Cabinet. They document decision-making at the highest level of the Canadian government and offer researchers a glimpse into Canadian politics for the years 1944 to 1973. The tool provides a unique look into the policies and processes of Cabinet as it is possible to search on one topic and retrieve results from all years of the Conclusions.”
+ Access the database
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Foreign Relations–United States
Source: U.S. Dept of State
Just Released, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Volume XXXI, South and Central America; Mexico.
Publication Announcement ||| Summary ||| Full Text
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Gubernatorial Elections
Source: Governing.com
2004 Governor’s Election Guide
+ Full coverage of the 11 Governor’s elections- includes profiles, news, and poll data.
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Congressional Research Service
Source: CRS (via Federation of American Scientists)
New/Recently Updated Congressional Research Service Reports
+ Nuclear Terrorism: A Brief Review of Threats and Responses
+ Requirements for Linguists in Government Agencies, September
+ Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques under the Geneva Conventions
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Internet Filtering
Source: Open Net Initiative
Just Released, Full Text Paper, A Starting Point: Legal Implications of Internet Filtering
“In this paper, the Open Net Initiative (ONI) considers some of the legal implications of controlling access to Internet content through filtering. ONI — a research partnership of the Berkman Center, University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and the University of Cambridge — documents Internet filtering by collecting empirical data about the parties who censor web traffic and the types of sites blocked in different countries. This paper considers the legal ramifications of this data.”

Search Briefs
+ Learn About IBM’s Research “Marvel” Video Search Technology (via Search Engine Watch Blog)

Briefly
+ Dialog Now Offering Streaming Real-Time News Through Enhanced Dialog NewsEdge Service
+ Swets Launches SwetsWise Linker

Web Browsers–Opera
Create Presentations with New Online Tool From Opera
We’ve used the Opera web browser (it’s free) for years. If you’ve never downloaded and checked out this wonderful browser that’s full of features, it’s MORE THAN worth a look. Opera can not only be used as a web browser but also as tool to create and view “slide” presentations. About four years ago the company created Opera Show as, “an alternative to Microsoft’s PowerPoint.” Creating a “show” required you to download software and have some HTML coding skills. Yesterday, Opera launched a web-based Opera Show Generator that allows you to create presentations without having to download any software and have knowledge of HTML. There is no charge to access and use the Opera Show Generator. Opera continues to innovate and impress!

World Wide Web
Semantic Web
An Interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee
“Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR [Technology Review] how his 15 years of work on the “Semantic Web” are finally paying off.”

Professional Reading Shelf
Copyright–United States
Source: YourCallRadio.org/KALW Radio(San Francisco)
Internet Radio Show on Copyright: Lawrence Lessig (Real Audio)
The interview with took Professor Lawrence Lessig took place on Monday.
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Library Technology
THIS WEEK ONLY: Free Access to Three Recent Issues of Library Hi-Tech
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Document Delivery
Source: ARL
ARL Study Confirms Effectiveness of User-Initiated ILL/DD Services
“User-initiated interlibrary loan (ILL) and document delivery (DD) operations provide better service than mediated ILL/DD services. In most cases, user-initiated services have lower unit costs, higher fill rates, and faster turnaround times than mediated services. These are some of the major findings of a two-year study of ILL/DD services in 72 North American research, college, and government libraries conducted by Mary E. Jackson of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The findings are reported in Assessing ILL/DD Services: New Cost-Effective Alternatives, forthcoming from ARL publications.”
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Librarians–Scotland
Source: News Scotsman
It Skills Pushing Up Law Librarians’ Pay
From the article: “The recent growth in information technology has helped push salaries for law librarians at major firms up by nearly a third, according to a new survey. Some of them can even command salaries of �100,000 a year — with a 30% annual bonus on top. The expansion of knowledge management systems and techniques has also moved law librarians towards the top in their firms, as their research and associated skills have grown in importance in an increasingly competitive legal world, according to the survey, by leading law publishing firm Sweet and Maxwell.”
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Internet–Broken Links
Source: BBC
Web tool may banish broken links
From the article: “Peridot, developed by UK intern students at IBM, scans company weblinks and replaces outdated information with other relevant documents and links. It works by automatically mapping and storing key features of webpages, so it can detect significant content changes.”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Canada–Academic Resources
Source: St. Francis Xavier University
Canadian Studies: A Guide to the Sources
“This bibliographic essay originally appeared as ‘Canadian Studies: A Core Collection,’ CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries 35 (September 1997): 71-84, and since June 1999 has been regularly updated for the International Council for Canadian Studies World Wide Web Service.”
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Advertising–United States–Lists & Rankings
Source: Arbitron
Recently Released, Population Rankings (Radio Markets), Fall 2004 (Red Book)
“To understand the impact of the Fall 2004 population estimates update on individual markets, a comparison of Fall 2004 and Fall 2003 data is available.”
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FBI
Source: Dept. of Justice/Inspector General
Just Released, The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Language Program — Translation of Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence Foreign Language Material (Unclassified/Redacted Executive Summary), Report No. 04-25, July 2004
A PDF version is also available.
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Health Information
Two New Topic Pages/Compilations from MEDLINEplus
Source: NLM
+ MedlinePlus: Hip Replacement
+ MedlinePlus: Knee Replacement
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Health Insurance–United States–Statistics
Source: Kaiser Family Foundation
Just Released, Latest Trends in Uninsured Population and Health Coverage