Note from Gary: Thanks to my friend and colleague SK for this post. RS and DocuTicker would, in three words, NOT BE POSSIBLE, without her amazing work and neverending work. The same goes for the rest of the Willco/ResourceShelf/DocuTicker team.

Resource of the Week: Gary Price’s “Best of ResourceShelf” Presentation
By Shirl Kennedy

We know that many of our readers have had the privilege of hearing Gary speak, live and in person, at professional conferences, etc. (To those of us who try and keep up with his schedule, we are convinced that Gary is always speaking somewhere — 7/24/365. And yet he continues to post regularly to both of our weblogs. Go figure.)

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to hear Gary — ever, or lately — we bring you his presentation, with links, from last week’s Computers in Libraries conference in Arlington, VA. Typically, Gary speaks to a packed house and loves to work in his opinions as he moves through a presentation. Everyone walks away with a whole bunch of new online resources they can’t wait to try and share. He also draws attention to “old friends” — resources we’ve known about but may not have visited in awhile…and now they are offering new features that are worth a fresh look.

Each of Gary’s presentations is unique. While he might begin with a base set of resources, the selection of resources is constantly being modified. Plus, his commentary and opinions — which most of us know are “the meat” of any presentation — are focused on the audience he is addressing.

With that in mind, here are some highlights from his recent presentation:

+ Citizendium: the Citizen’s Compendium
This alternative to Wikipedia, was started by Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s founders. It “aims to improve on that model by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.”

+ NewspaperARCHIVE.com

NewspaperARCHIVE.com, the largest historical newspaper database online, contains tens of millions of newspaper pages from 1759 to present. Every newspaper in the archive is fully searchable by keyword and date, making it easy for you to quickly explore historical content.

While this is a subscription service, it offers free access to public libraries and K-12 schools (PDF; 58 KB). And it makes available many special collections for free. As of this week, the database contains 63.6 million pages from newspapers in 676 cities, spanning 240 years — with a total of 2,577 titles. It is owned by Heritage Microfilm of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

+ U.S. Commercial Service’s Market Research Library
Included here are the valuable, up-to-date Country Commercial Guides. Free registration is required.

+ Farecast
Here is a travel search engine that not only helps you find cheap flights, but also offers predictions that help you decide whether to pull the trigger and buy now…or wait it out because the fare might be coming down in the near future. You can even see graphs depicting probable fares for the next 30 days. Very cool.

+ Two job search aggregators — Indeed and SimplyHired. Why go hopping around to a bunch of different job boards when you can take advantage of one-stop shopping?

+ PortableApps.com
Most of us have jump drivers or portable hard drives. If you’re on the move without your own computer, try the free Portable Apps Suite, which includes “a web browser, email client, office suite, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client, antivirus, sudoku game, backup utility and integrated menu, all preconfigured to work portably.”

+ HTTrack Website Copier

It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site’s relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the “mirrored” website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online.

Free, of course.

If you know anything about Gary (or are one of our regular readers), you won’t be surprised that his presentation also contains plenty of pointers to interesting/useful geographic, multimedia, and mobile search resources. You’ll find a number of links to Web 2.0 tools that are worth a look, And, because Gary is Director of Online Information Resources for Ask.com, he often but not always includes an up-close-and-personal tour of some of that search engine’s unique features.

A personal note: Gary is getting married on May 6. The entire ResourceShelf team is eagerly waiting to find out if he will manage to keep posting during his honeymoon. Frankly, we think he should refrain. After all, we’ll all still be here, bringing you new and interesting material, day after day.

Oh, by the way…links to many 2007 Computers in Libraries presentations will eventually be available here.