Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Government–Terrorism
Source: CIA (via DocuTicker)
Unclassified Report to Congress on the Acquisition of Technology Relating to Weapons of Mass Destruction and Advanced Conventional Munitions, 1 July Through 31 December 2003
“At the DCI’s request, the DCI Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) drafted this report and coordinated it throughout the Intelligence Community (IC). As directed by Section 721, subsection (c) of the Act, it is unclassified. As such, the report does not present the details of the IC’s assessments of weapons of mass destruction and advanced conventional munitions programs that are available in other classified reports and briefings for the Congress.”
+ Read the report [PDF]
–
HIV/AIDS
Source: World Health Organization
Just Released, Report: AIDS Epidemic Update 2004
See Also: Number of women living with HIV increases in each region of the world
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Labour–Australia
Source: Dept. of Parliamentary Libraries, Australia
Research Brief: Labour market dynamics
–
Hate Crimes–United States
Source: FBI
Just released: Hate Crime Statistics | 2003
“Each year’s edition of Hate Crime Statistics presents data regarding incidents, offenses, victims, and offenders in reported crimes that were motivated in whole or in part by a bias against the victim’s perceived race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability.” (PDF file; very slow download afternoon of 11/24/04)

Creative Commons
Search Engines
Source: P2P
Updated Version (Beta) of Creative Commons Search Engine Now Available
We first mentioned the CC search engine (using the Nutch technology) in September. Also, access to the CC Search Engine is now included with the toolbar that ships with Firefox. From the news release, “The beta search engine indexes just under one million web pages, but Creative Commons says it expects to soon index the full five million pages currently carrying Creative Commons licenses.”
See Also: Direct to the CC Search Engine
See Also: CC Search Overview

Professional Reading Shelf
Preservation
Archives
Source: BL
10 million pound programme to save the world’s historical and cultural records
“Representatives from the international historical, conservation and diplomatic worlds gathered today at the British Library to mark the launch of the Endangered Archives Programme – a �10 million joint initiative between the British Library and the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund to help save the world’s endangered archives.”
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Libraries–Canada
Source: Canadian Library Association
CLA Response to Library and Archives Canada Paper
In response to Library and Archives Canada Paper entitled Directions for Library and Archives Canada
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Health Libraries–United Kingdom
Source: Kable’s Government Computing
Health service opens e-library
“A national library service, to be run by the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), is to provide the “knowledge” content for new systems such as the electronic patient record, it was announced on 17 November 2004.”
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Information Retrieval
Metadata
Source: FCW
EPA builds a better search
A keyword search in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Web pages used to yield a mishmash of results. Typing, say, “water quality” in the search engine might have returned links to high-level overviews of water quality issues or to documents that merely mentioned water quality. ‘The relevancy ranking of our search engine couldn’t really say, ‘Here’s a general thing about water quality that could get you started,’ said Richard Huffine, program manager for the EPA’s National Library Network. So EPA officials modified the search engine.”
–
Open Access
Source: E-LIS
Supporting and Enhancing Scholarship in the Digital Age : The Role of Open Access Institutional Repositories
“This paper examines the emerging trend of university-based institutional repositories (IRs) designed to capture the scholarly output of an institution and to maximize the research impact of this output. The relationship of this trend to the open access movement is discussed and challenges and opportunities for using IRs to promote new modes of scholarship are provided.”+
Read the paper [PDF]

Briefly
+ New Online Translation Tool: Welcome to the Babelplex
+ Paul Allen Invests in Eliyon Search Engine

Web Search–Google
Source: The Harvard Crimson
More Comments About Google Scholar
The Harvard Crimson offers a look at Google Scholar today. A couple of comments:
+”Cheryl M. LaGuardia, head of instructional services for Harvard College libraries, said that Scholar has the potential for success, but she sees some limitations. ‘I don’t think it will replace the resources available in the library,’ LaGuardia said. ‘It’s still got a long way to go, but there’s promise.’”
++ As we pointed out last week, we continue to find lots of material in Google Scholar that’s not “scholarly.” Be careful.
+”LaGuardia said current library resources, like JSTOR (a subscription service to which University affiliates are granted access), give users access to a wide range of free articles that users of Google Search have to pay for.”
++ LaGuardia is correct; we made a similar comment last week. Btw, I enjoyed seeing this quote from Google Scholar developer, Anurag Acharya, in Barbara Quint’s article yesterday: “So many people do not know that they have access through institutional subscriptions.” Yep. Once again, a clear example of why both library and database vendor marketing need to improve. People can’t use what they don’t know about.
+ We’ve read (even before the launch of Google Scholar) about fee-based database interfaces being difficult to use as compared to Google. In some cases, this might be accurate. However, databases from fee-based vendors have steadily improved in ease of use during the past few years — a necessary thing, considering how much more end-user searching is being done these days. We’ve often wondered if people who diss these tools (for this reason) have used them in the past few years. Are they as easy to use as Google? No, in many cases, they’re not. However, with a small (and we mean very small) amount of training, even a casual searcher will find that these potentially more powerful retrieval tools can save plenty of time and generate better results. Yes, a little learning can go a long. In many cases, the challenge is getting an audience.
++ We see a relationship here to the fact that many searchers do not want to use (or even look at) engines other than Google because they believe the interfaces are too complex. The last time we looked at Yahoo’s streamlined interface or Teoma, we felt they were just as straightforward as Google.
+ “Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser said he briefly used Scholar and was encouraged by what he saw. ‘It’s an incredibly useful source because it takes into account a number of sources,’ he said.”
++ This quote reads like a wake-up call for federated/metasearch technologies WHERE the library and librarians can create a single user interface to a variety of sources (open web, deep web, fee-based, and locally created info).
–
–
A couple of additional comments and clarifications about our Google Scholar post from last Thursday. Thanks for your interest. Also, we appreciate ResourceShelf’s Steven Cohen for his assistance in getting all of this together.
++ In our post last week we could have been clearer about searching Google Scholar with the author: syntax.
Steven writes, “While it is true that one can search the database by abbreviated author name (eg “Cohen S”), at this time there is only one syntax that Google Scholar has available — the “author” syntax. The folks at Google recommend that you only use the last name of the author when using that syntax (eg. author:cohen), as using it another way will come up with sometimes poor (that is, erratic) results (e.g., author:cohen j).”
+ About Google Scholar crawling the full text from certain publisher sites — here’s what a Google spokesperson told us today: “…where we have permission to crawl a doc we will do so, but will only show an abstract.”
+ Finally, Steven adds this comment:
++ GS needs to define “scholarly” better. For fun, I put my name into the database and the two links that relate to me were my book and a post to Library Juice made in 2001. Definitely not a scholarly post. More stringent rules should be in place before I would call it a scholarly engine. If anyone can put a PDF version of a paper they wrote in college online and GS picks it up as “scholarly,” there is something wrong. Librarians do a much better job at collection development.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Congressional Research Service Reports
New and Recently Updated Congressional Service Reports
Source: CRS (via FAS, FPC, and NLE)
+ Al Qaeda: Statements and Evolving Ideology
+ Guarding America: Security Guards and U.S. Critical Infrastructure Protection
+ Iraq’s Trade with the World: Data and Analysis
+ Oil and Gas Exploration and Development on Public Lands
–
Hate Crimes–United States–Statistics
Source: FBI
Hate Crime Statistics, 2003
Thanks to S.B. for the news tip.
–
Crime–United States–Lists & Rankings
Source: Morgan Quitno Press
New, America’s Safest and Most Dangerous Cities
The rankings are discussed in an AP story.
–
Health–United States–Statistics
Source: CDC
New Fact Sheet, U.S. Cancer Statistics: 2001 Incidence and Mortality
See Also: United States Cancer Statistics: 2001 Incidence and Mortality Report
–
Elections–Canada–Statistics
Source: Elections Canada
Now Available, Official Voting Results For 2004 General Election
Now Available On Web
–
Privacy
Source: Privacy International
New Edition, Full-Text, Privacy & Human Rights 2004
Includes country-by-country reports.

Briefly
+ Dialog NewsRoom Sources Top 10,000

Professional Reading Shelf
PubMed
Source: NLM
PubMed’s Automatic Term Mapping Enhanced
“PubMed optimizes searches using a process known as Automatic Term Mapping (ATM). ATM compares terms from the search query with lists of terms: MeSH (including UMLS mappings), journal titles, and author names. If a searcher’s query includes an untagged term that maps to a MeSH term, the term will be searched as the MeSH term as well as a Text Word.”
–
Public Libraries–United Kingdom
Source: Department for Culture, Media and Sport
New Report, Report to Parliament on Public Library Matters
“Public Library Matters is a DCMS report to parliament setting out an overview of the department’s policy for public libraries in England and progress towards achieving the ‘Framework for Future’ strategic vision for libraries.”
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Librarians–Careers
Source: Library Journal
Going Public
“Corporate librarians are finding public libraries quite attractive. One convert tells why.” Article by Kate Baker, former special librarian who is now a reference librarian at Piscataway Public Library, NJ.

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Holocaust–Databases
Yad Vashem Launches Online Database Of 3 Million Holocaust Victims’ Names
+ Facts About The Database
“Two-thirds of the names in the Database were obtained from the more than two million Pages of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem over the past 50 years, nearly all of which have now been digitized. Other names have been gleaned from additional computerized lists, including deportation, camp and ghetto records. With a click, users can view and print Pages of Testimony, or a screen containing a victim’s personal story, based on information from archival sources available in the Database. Each such ‘mini-biography’ further links to information about the particular victim, such as the places he/she lived and died, related historical events and more.”
See Also: Additional Background About the Database
–
Older Americans–Health
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Merck Institute of Aging & Health
The State of Aging and Health in America 2004 (PDF; 1.33 MB)
From press release: “The new report, which also features input from the Gerontological Society of America, says that despite the proven health benefits of physical activity, one-third of older adults are not taking part in any leisure-time physical activities. Additionally, two-thirds of older adults are not eating the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. And nearly one-fifth of older adults are obese, which is defined as at least 30 pounds above recommended weight.”
–
Civil Rights–United States
Source: TRAC (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse)/Syracuse University
New Report, Civil Rights Enforcement By Bush Administration Lags

Search Briefs
+ Narrowing the Search (via News.com)
Vivisimo’s CEO, Raul Valdes-Perez shares his thoughts on clustering vs. personalization. Greg Linden from Findory, news and web with personalized results offers a response to the Valdes-Perez article.
+ An Exceptionally “EEVL” Search Resource (via SearchDay)

National Archives–United States–Databases
Four New Resources Added to Access to Archival Databases Collection
+ Records of Awards and Decorations of Honor During the Vietnam Conflict, 10/1968 – 12/1972
The AWADS series contains information about 80,701 awards and decorations of honor processed by Headquarters, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and awarded to U.S. military officers, soldiers, and sailors, and to allied foreign military personnel. The records in this series are a subset of the U.S. awards and decorations received by personnel who served in Southeast Asia during the Vietnamese War.
++
+ Files from the Defense Contract Action Data System (DCADS), 7/1/1975 – 9/30/2002
The DCADS records describe the logistics activities of contracts for goods and services between the private sector and the military services and agencies of the Department of Defense. Department of Defense (DD) Forms DD 350 and DD 1057 are the sources of the data. There is a record for each contract with information derived from DD Form 350, the Individual Contracting Action Report. We have recently added DCADS data for FY 2001 and 2002.
++
+ Records About Wage Increases, 11/14/1971 – 4/30/1974
The Wage Case History File series contains data extracted from reports of wage increases and requests to increase wages from business establishments subject to wage controls. Each record corresponds to a report or request submitted by an establishment, and shows how the Cost of Living Council (CLC) categorized and responded to the submission. Each record contains the establishment’s case number and address, the name of the company to which the establishment belonged, the number of employees affected by the report or request, and information about the wages and benefits paid and requested.
++
+ Records of Corporate and Quarterly Financial Information on Thrift Institutions, 1984-1998
This Thrift Financial System series was created from financial reports (OTS Form 1313) filed by Savings and Loan Associations. The record types in AAD are B, C, D, and I1. Record types B, C, and D contain universe (corporate structure) information including business names and addresses. Financial data for 1984 -1988 and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quarters of 1989 are now accessible in AAD.

Professional Reading Shelf
Public Libraries–Special Collections
Source: The Birmingham News
Scrapbooks cover WWII until end
“Archival business is picking up at the Birmingham Public Library as World War II-era letters and scrapbooks are donated by families cleaning out attics, basements and closets. In many cases, people whose parents lived through the war years have sought out libraries and museums as repositories for treasured family mementos. It’s in hopes that a student researching World War II or someone writing a book will find an interesting quote or a piece of history in the letters.”
–
Academic Freedom
Source: Organization of American Historians
OAH Report on Academic Freedom
“Five major areas of concern have emerged in reports that have been brought to the committee’s attention to date.”
1. “…government surveillance of faculty members, students, visiting scholars, and libraries”
2. “…foreign historians, students, and researchers are now subject to interminable review if they apply for entry to the U.S. or for renewal of green cards”
3. “…the last two presidential administrations have made historians’ access to government documents increasingly difficult”
4. “…direct efforts by the federal administration and by foundations and web sites that support it to shape the content of teaching and research in directions favorable to its policies”
5. “…many K-12 teachers have been condemned by school boards, organized groups, and individual parents for the content of courses they teach, books they have assigned or recommended to students, and artwork or notices they have permitted students to post”

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Election Laws–Database
Source: UCLA School of Law/Pew Charitable Trusts
Campaign Disclosure Law Database
“The Campaign Disclosure Law Database contains statutes and regulations in 105 categories from 50 states, the District of Columbia and the FEC. Users can choose to view some or all categories in a single state, or to compare individual categories across two or more states. The database is current as of June 30, 2004. The entire database is available for download upon request.”
Read press release about this database.
–
Military Records
U.S. Marine Corps–Vietnam
Source: The Eureka Reporter
Vietnam Files Provide Marines Access To Their Records
“Thanks to Vietnam veteran David Prendergast, U.S. Marines who served in the Vietnam War can now access their records online. For years, Prendergast, a local attorney, has volunteered his spare time helping Vietnam veterans access their records so that they can establish their disability eligibility.”
See: The Vietnam Files
–
Disease–Australia
House of Commons Library, Australia
New Report, Critical, but stable: Australia’s capacity to respond to an infectious disease outbreak
–
Heating Fuel–United States–Statistics
Source: U.S. Census
Gas Most Popular Home Heating Fuel, Census Bureau Survey Shows
–
Nursing–Professional Organizations–Directory
Source: Nursing2004 (journal)
Guide to Nursing Organizations
Long list, with contact information (including URLs), of professional nursing associations in the United States and Canada.

Professional Reading Shelf
Public Libraries–Salinas, CA
Source: SFGate.com
Beleaguered Salinas plans to close its libraries: Officials slashing $8 million from annual city budget
“The life-size statue of author John Steinbeck that stands in front of this city’s main library wears an exasperated expression, and no wonder. This agricultural city of 150,000 is so broke that city officials plan to close all three of its libraries in January — an act that surely would try the patience of its most famous literary son. It would also make Salinas the biggest city west of the Mississippi, and possibly in the United States, with no public library.”
–
Bibliographic Instruction–Native Americans
Source: Sandy Hawes, Cannon Library, St. Leo University
Resources for Library Instruction to Native American College Students
“Here is an annotated bibliography of resources to help you understand the learning characteristics of Native American students in higher education and to do a better job of developing library instruction for this population.”
Download as Word document. (65 KB)

Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
Employment–Cities
Source: Milken Institute
Best Performing Cities: Where America’s Jobs Are Created and Sustained
From the press release: “The Milken Institute Best Performing Cities index ranks U.S. metropolitan areas based upon their economic performance and their ability to create, as well as keep, the greatest number of jobs in the nation.”
+ Read the report [PDF]
+ View the Index
–
Thanksgiving–Food Costs
Source: American Farm Bureau Federation
AFBF: Thanksgiving Dinner Remains Affordable
“In AFBF’s annual informal survey of the price of basic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table, the average cost of this year’s feast for 10 is $35.68, a 60-cent price decrease from last year’s survey average of $36.28.”
–
Television–United States–Lists & Rankings
Digital Video Recorders
Source: TiVo
TiVo Season Pass Hot 100

Briefly
+ Swets Embarks on Document Delivery Partnership with INIST-CNRS

Resource Discovery Network
New Specialized Search Tools for Engineering, Computing and Mathematics
Even though large web search companies (Google, Yahoo, Jeeves) continue to develop new and innovative search services and gain a majority of the press, it DOES NOT MEAN that other organizations (large and small) aren’t also doing great work developing new and useful search services (fee-based and free) and tools. In many cases, these tools are being built by info pros.

Yesterday, just hours after the launch of Google Scholar, ResourceShelf learned of several new “specialized” or what some like to call “verticals” that might be of interest.

UK-based librarian Roddy MacLeod, head of the “must see and use” EEVL (pronounced “evil”) directory of high-quality mathematics, engineering, and computing resources alerted us to some new ejournal search tools. Cool!

Oh, almost forgot, EEVL is a member of the Resource Discovery Network, a group of subject directories and gateways. Like we’ve said many times, RDN is an excellent illustration of the great work that info pros are doing. If you’ve never taken a look at what RDN offers, you should.

Now with the intro out of the way (-:, let’s talk about the new services.

EEVL is now making availabe FOUR specialized databases that provide access to full-text ejournal material. Here’s a rundown:

+ The Computing database searches the content of 60 freely available full-text ejournals in computing.

+ The math database searches the content of 28 freely available full-text ejournals in mathematics.

+ Engineering searches the content of 160 freely available full-text ejournals in engineering.

+ The last one searches the content of all 250 freely available full text ejournals in engineering, mathematics, and computing.

If you would like to review a listing of the publications available, it’s also available. Included in the mix are trade journals, house journals, and even some peer-reviewed journals.

Finally, we can’t mention Roddy MacLeod without pointing out that his work and dedication has been (and continues to be) an inspiration and motivator to the ResourceShelf and DocuTicker team.

See Also: On a somewhat related note, don’t foget that OAISTER is a wonderful, powerful, and free database containing scholarly material on the open web. Is some/all of this material in Yahoo and Google? The answer is yes. However, the native OAISTER interface offers many powerful search options not available from G and Y.

The Web
View a Presentation By Tim Berners-Lee at MIT
Just made available today is this archived webcast of the opening keynote at MIT’s Emerging Technologies Conference (Sept 2004) by Tim Berners-Lee.

At 3:47, Tim Berners-Lee begins.

At 38:25, Q&A begins, with Bob Metcalfe, Founder, 3Com Corporation, and General Partner, Polaris Venture Partners, moderating.

At 48:03 Metcalfe asks Berners-Lee, “What web browser do you use?”

Web Search–Google
More on Google Scholar
ResourceShelf is inviting a few “movers and shakers” in the library and online database worlds to share some thoughts about Google Scholar and what it means for our profession/industry. Look for them over the next few weeks. Comments will be announced on ResourceShelf and posted on ResourceShelfPLUS. We’ve just posted (on RSPLUS) a few comments by librarian and respected online research trainer, Rita Vine. Rita is the founder of Toronto-based, Search Portfolio.

Professional Reading Shelf
Libraries
Source: ARL
New Spec Kit (Exec. Summary Only): SSP285 Library Services in Non-Library Spaces, November 2004
Full report is fee-based. The exec summary (free) runs 14 pages.