Our just-published article, Frequently Requested Statistics on Immigrants and Immigration in the United States, covers everything from Mexican immigrants to health-care coverage to government budgets and backlogs. A few interesting numbers:

• Of the 46.9 million people in 2008 who identified themselves as having Hispanic or Latino ancestry, nearly two-thirds (62.0 percent) were native-born US citizens. The remaining 38.0 percent were immigrants.
• Immigrants, who in 2008 made up 12.5 percent of the US population, accounted for 29 percent of the 46.6 million working-age adults and children under 18 with no health insurance in 2008.
• According to a Mexican survey, 14.2 percent of Mexican migrants who headed toward the United States in 2008 came from the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico.
• Funding for the US Border Patrol increased 519 percent between 1986 and 2002, from $268 million to $1.6 billion. The Border Patrol budget was more than $3.5 billion in 2008, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
• In 2008, there were about 16.3 million children age 17 and under with at least one immigrant parent. They accounted for 23.2 percent of the 70 million children age 17 and under in the United States.

This article is available on the Migration Information Source, an online journal of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. that studies immigration issues, trends, and policies in the United States and around the world. The MPI Data Hub provides instant access to the latest immigration statistics, maps, and numbers for the United States and other countries. For US state-level immigration data, see the ACS and Census Data Tool.

Also, if this is a subject area of interest to you, be sure to sign up for the free twice-monthly Migration Information Source email newsletter, which offers interesting, smartly packaged articles and data on immigration-related developments in the United States and around the world.

Alas, the vast majority of us were not fortunate enough to attend Gary’s presentation on Mobile Access to Information at Web Search University last month in Washington, D.C. But since this is a topic of intense, growing interest — 56% of adult Americans have accessed the internet by wireless means, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project — we thought we’d link to Gary’s presentation as our Resource of the Week.

In his presentation, Gary covers mobile terms and jargon, how scholarly publishers are joining the mobile revolution, mobile search, podcasts/phonecasts, television on mobile devices, location-based services, “m-commerce,” fast/free directory assistance, traffic reports and other real-time information…and much more. You’ll also find links to information about such cutting-edge services as Google Voice.

Gary has been touting the virtues of mobile internet access for *years* now — keeping track of new services that come online, experimenting with new mobile technologies, etc. This presentation gives you the opportunity to take advantage of his expertise. (sdk)

Forest Gump once said “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” That is a good description of the current Resource of the Week, the Lost Docs Blog at
http://lostdocs.freegovinfo.info.

The Lost Docs Blog was created by Free Government Information to be a public clearinghouse of federal documents reported to the Government Printing Office (GPO) as so-called fugitive documents. Fugitive documents are reports and other federal government documents that are eligible to be described in the Catalog of Government Publications but are missed by GPO.

By providing a public feed of reported fugitive documents, Free Government Information hopes to provide more accountability for GPO’s cataloging section and to draw community attention to documents that depository libraries might wish to acquire before GPO can determine whether a reported fugitive document belongs in the Federal Depository Library Program.

The blog is powered by e-mail receipts received from librarians and others who have submitted fugitive documents reports to GPO. Volunteers at Free Government Information post these receipts so that they appear once or twice a day, depending on volume of reports. This is where the “box of chocolates” metaphor comes in. The documents that appear on the blog can be from any federal agency. This makes the blog a sort of miscellaneous current awareness tool of what falls through the official cracks — and an excellent resource for highlighting the breadth of government information.
–
Read more about the Lost Docs Blog via Free Government Information.
–
Bonus Resource of the Week: Shirl’s Basic Government Docs Cheat Sheet

+ Catalog of U.S. Government Publications

The CGP is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive records for historical and current publications and provides direct links to those that are available online. Those not available online are available from a federal depository library.

To keep up with newly released titles, click the New Titles link at the top (duh). Click the “Preferences” link above the search box for a variety of options. Among other things, you can choose to search only those publications available in full text on the Internet (Internet Publications). See the light blue “Catalogs to Search” section just below the title near the top of the page.

+ Congressional Budget Office
CBO’s mandate is to provide the Congress with:

• Objective, nonpartisan, and timely analyses to aid in economic and budgetary decisions on the wide array of programs covered by the federal budget and
• The information and estimates required for the Congressional budget process.

You’ll also find PowerPoints, testimonies, etc. Note the “Frequently Requested” items at the lower right for a selection of “hot” documents. The keyword search tool at the upper right corner works pretty well. Douglas W. Elmendorf, CBO director, maintains a weblog, which is a good way to keep up with what’s new on this site.

+ Congressional Research Service (via Open CRS)

American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a “think tank” that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained. A project of the Center for Democracy & Technology through the cooperation of several organizations and collectors of CRS Reports, Open CRS provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports.

There are other collections of CRS reports on the Internet, but the vast majority of them end up absorbed here eventually. Alas, the search engine on this site is marginal at best. You’ll have better luck using Google’s advanced search form; after typing your search in the boxes at the top, go down to the box at the bottom — Search within a site or domain: — and type opencrs.com.

+ Government Accountability Office

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress. Often called the “congressional watchdog,” GAO investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars.
…
GAO’s best known products include reports, testimonies, correspondence, and legal decisions and opinions, which are available to the press and the public. We also produce special publications to assist Congress and executive branch agencies by recommending corrections to problems in government programs and operations, identifying long-term trends, and raising concerns about the nation’s fiscal imbalance.

The keyword search option at the upper right works pretty well; an advanced option is readily available if you need it. To keep up with new releases on a daily basis, check the GAO Daybook. You can browse collections of reports on hot/popular topics here.

See also: Pilot Phase Concluding: CIC & Google Partnership Digitizes Around 1.5 Million Volumes of U.S. Federal Documents

Another one of our serendipitous finds, this collection comes to you from Online Classes.org, which regularly features nice topical collections of lectures, tips, hacks, etc., via its blog.

The economy has taken central stage in world news for the past few years due to rapidly failing markets the world over. Even with so much attention focused on economic issues if you’re not familiar with the field, or simply want a more in-depth look at things, it can be hard to follow just what’s going on. These lectures, given by scholars from some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States and around the world can help give you that foundation of knowledge and help you better understand the financial crisis that’s been building over the past few years.

If you follow business and economic news, you will recognize the names of some professors here. The lectures, which also include panel discussions, are grouped by category:

+ General Economics — examples:

• Beyond Freakonomics: New Musings on the Economics of Everyday Life: University of Chicago professor and economist Steven Levitt further explains his theory on everyday economics in this lecture. [Princeton]
• Financial Markets: This lecture series from professor Robert Shiller will teach you about the basics of the economic system and how each part fits together. [Yale]

+ Understanding the Economic Crisis — examples:

• Understanding the Crisis in the Markets: A Panel of Harvard Experts: Get an explanation of the financial crisis from some of the best and the brightest by watching this panel discussion at Harvard. [Harvard]
• Jeremy Siegel: Snapshots of the U.S. and Other Markets: Get a handle on what events precipitated the market fall with this lecture that addresses the sub-prime market, the stock market and foreign markets. [UPenn]

+ Proposed Solutions to the Economic Crisis — examples:

• Preventing the Next Financial Crisis: Pay close attention to this lecture series that brings together numerous scholars, researchers and experts to discuss how future financial disasters can be averted. [Columbia]
• Will the Stimulus Actually Work?: Billions of dollars were pumped into failing U.S. businesses, but will it make any difference at all in the long run? This lecture from professor Steven Kyle discusses the issue. [Cornell]

+ Future of the Economy — examples:

• Once the Market Has Fallen 50% Your Future Returns are Even Better: Here you can learn why now may be a good time to invest. [UPenn]
• One War We Shouldn’t Avoid: A New Approach to Reducing the Cost of Future Catastrophes: In 2005, three major hurricanes battered the southern United States, costing billions in repairs and with thousands of lives lost. This lecture addresses how we can be better prepared both for the weather and the financial ramifications of it. [UPenn]

+ International — examples:

• The Outlook for the Global Economy and the Challenges That Must Be Met: Former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin gives you some insight into how the global economy is changing and the many challenges within it that still must by met. [Princeton]
• Feeling the Pain: How the Financial Crisis Is Affecting Brazil, Russia, India and China: This lecture from late last year will give you some insights into the real toll the economic crisis is having abroad as well, with input from business leaders in these four countries. [UPenn]

+ Business Focused — examples:

• Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making: David Rothkopf discusses his book by the same name in this lecture and how a few powerful people are pulling the strings in worldwide business and economics–usually to their advantage. [Columbia]
• Business, Knowledge and Global Growth: Learn how the MBA degree has changed the way business is done in the United States and the world over and the impact it has had on the economy as a result. [Columbia]

Depending on the individual lecture, the links will take you either to the university websites or iTunes U. A few open up as direct links to media (e.g., QuickTime).

The National Museum of the American Indian — the 16th Smithsonian Institution museum — which opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2004, is the first U.S. national museum dedicated solely to Native Americans. And we think teachers, scholars, librarians and researchers everywhere will be interested in the excellent collection search tool available on the museum’s website.

Welcome to NMAI Collections Search, which includes a representative sample of NMAI’s object and historic photo collections. Each item is accompanied by basic, standardized information. To become familiar with the site, start with one of the Collection Highlight tours or search the website using this page or the tabs at the top.

Our goal is to include as many items as possible, but objects and photos will be added only when NMAI staff have reviewed the accuracy of accompanying information. Items identified as culturally sensitive or which are no longer part of NMAI’s collections will not appear on this website. Please contact NMAI about providing additional information or correcting any errors.

Records for many objects include their original catalog cards, which often date to the early 1900s. These cards may include tribal names and terminology considered unacceptable or offensive today but they have been included to illustrate the information that originally accompanied the objects.

Five different search options are available:

• Peoples/Culture
• Artists/Individuals
• Places
• Object Specifics
• Advanced Search

There are different functions available depending upon which search option you’re using, but under all of them are check boxes that allow you to restrict your search to any combination of the following: archaeological Items, ethnographic Items, modern and contemporary arts, photographic collections. Or you can just check “All of the above categories” if you want to cast the widest net possible. Search help is just a click away.

We enjoyed browsing the collection highlights area at the bottom right of the page, which included such categories of interest as beadwork and toys and games.

Bibliographers and catalogers will be interested in the thesaurus:

The following reference lists represent NMAI controlled terminologies in their respective hierarchies. Use these reference lists if you are in doubt about what terms are used or how they should be entered for searches. If you cannot quickly locate a term you may use your browser’s “Find” (”Ctrl” + “F”) option combination to see if a term is listed. When you click on a term in a Reference List, a search is automatically performed across all applicable collections categories.

Even if this is not a subject area of interest to you, the site as a whole is well worth browsing just because it’s so…elegantly done.

Gary found this jewel on the International Olympic Committee (IOC) website, and we thought it was deserving of a little love. Actually, down in the lower right corner, there’s a little info box that says, “The Sports calendar is provided by the General Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF).” But if it’s good enough for the International Olympic Committee, it’s good enough for us.

The dropdown menus make this calendar dead-simple to use. You can zero in on a particular time period, Olympic sport, and/or geographic location. It goes as far back as 2002 (if you’re interested in the recent past) and as far ahead as 2013. Nice bonus: The names of the individual sports are hyperlinked. Click on the link to get a brief description and history.

While you’re here, have a look at the IOC Library (”Reference centre for the publications of the Olympic Movement”). You’ll find an online catalog, bibliographies, and various reports and other publications.

Everyone loves lists. Everyone loves useful stuff. You will surely find at least a couple things to love right here, right now.

+ Online conversion tools for Adobe PDF documents: Convert PDF files to text or html. If the file is online, you provide a URL. If the file is on your hard drive, you e-mail it. In the day job, I often run into situations where I have to send PDFs to someone who is on a mobile device that can’t accommodate these. Copy-and-paste is OK if you’re only dealing with a small amount of text, but can become a formatting nightmare if a large document is involved. So…here is an alternative.

+ CPI Inflation Calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: There are plenty of these scattered around the internets, but this one is simple, elegant and “right from the horse’s mouth.” Goes back to 1913. (In 1913, $100 had the same buying power as $2,175.26 in 2009. Wow.)

+ Universal Currency Converter: This one, from XE, has been around forever. I still love it.

+ Sized Up: I’m not wild about brick-and-mortar shopping, and I have limited free time anyhow…so I do a lot of online shopping. It’s useful when the dimensions of a product are included in its online description, but it can be difficult to visualize its actual size, particularly if you are not spatially-oriented. Here, you enter the product dimensions and compare it to a list of “presets” — objects everyone is familiar with, such as a credit card, a soda can, a sheet of paper, a door… Since the site has been around awhile, it has accumulated a ginormous database of user-generated product size comparisons; for example, here is Macbook versus Asus.

+ Tweet Blocker:

Tweet Blocker is a free resource for Twitter users and application developers. Using highly advanced filtering, we catalog and rank the top spammers on Twitter, allowing users to quickly and easily find spammers.

Twitter does its own clean-ups periodically, but this is a dynamic effort “across the Twitterverse.” You can drag and drop a “Report Spammer” bookmarklet to your browser bar. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely worthwhile if you are a heavy Twitter user. Read more about it on Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.

+ Home Energy Saver, from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

The Home Energy Saver calculator quickly computes a home’s energy use on-line based on methods developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Users can estimate how much energy and money can be saved and how much emissions can be reduced by implementing energy-efficiency improvements. All end uses (heating, cooling, major appliances, lighting, and miscellaneous uses) are included. A detailed description of underlaying calculation methods and data is provided a comprehensive report (PDF 6.2 MB). Documentation of how the site handles electricity tariffs is provided here (PDF; 974 KB).

A home energy “librarian” link takes you to a a comprehensive collection of related links.

+ Website Grader:

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

ResourceShelf, we were pleased to learn, received a grade of 99/100 — which means our site scored higher (in terms of marketing effectiveness) — than 99 percent of the 1,221,867 sites that had previously been “graded” here at the time we ran our evaluation. The site report includes such interesting data as readability level (we are “graduate school”), Google page rank, number of Google pages indexed, last Google crawl date, traffic rank, number of inbound links, blog ranking (via Technorati), and number of pages saved as del.icio.us bookmarks.

+ How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website: This is not a “tool,” per se, but it’s Useful! It’s a comprehensive collection of instructions, with appropriate links, on how to embed RSS feeds, videos, mp3s, slideshows, Google Calendar events, MS Office files…and much more into web pages, including blogs. You’ll want to bookmark this one.

+ allofcraigs.com: For most people, Craigslist is at its most useful on a local level. You want to sell a couch or are looking for a house to rent. But what if you’re a serious collector of…say, Matchbox cars. Location doesn’t really matter. You can easily buy something small like this from someone across the country, who can ship it to you without a great deal of difficulty. But who the heck wants to hop from one local Craigslist to another, running the same search repeatedly? Come here instead, and search all craigslists at the same time. A dropdown menu allows you to pinpoint a category to search, and you can also limit by dollar amount and how long ago ads were posted.

+ Open Car Price: What are people really paying? Shopping for a new car? Here you can see “1000s of actual transaction prices and real quotes that people have received from dealers,” — and geographic location is noted — which helps you come up with a reasonable target price. You can register, submit quotes you’ve gotten from dealers, and get buying advice from the “community.” I spotted some quotes for late model used cars as well, so it’s worth checking here even if you’re buying pre-owned.

You’ve probably been seeing a lot of news stories lately about the inherent danger of “texting while driving.” This seems to be the latest variation on the overall issue of cell phone use by drivers, which continues to be hotly debated. Many states have already passed laws against it. While some permit the use of hands-free devices, others have banned any cell phone use whatsoever by drivers. Some states forbid any text messaging whatsoever by drivers, while others specifically target only novice drivers.

While you may be familiar with what’s legal in your own state, it’s a different story when you’re planning a road trip that will take you through several states. Will you need a Bluetooth headset? What’s the story if your 18-year old kid and his friends are taking to the open road — with their cell phones? Well, you can always rummage around the Net in search of different state driving laws — or you could call AAA.

Or you could take the recommended ResourceShelf route and seek out a reliable one-stop shopping site — in this case, the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), which maintains a collection of various highway safety laws in every state, updated monthly. Topics covered:

• Aggressive Driving Laws
• Cell Phone Driving
• Child Passenger Safety
• Drug Impaired Driving
• Drunk Driving
• Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL)
• Helmets
• Mature Drivers
• Seat Belts
• Segways
• Sobriety Checkpoints
• Speed Limits
• Speed and Red Light Cameras
• Work Zone Speed Limits

Click on any of these and you can see a neat matrix of laws on a state-by-state basis, with comments, notations and additional information, including links to related issue briefs. If it’s more useful for you to browse all the laws at once for a particular state, you can access the information that way.

There are other treasures on the GHSA website, notably this outstanding collection of links and resources, from which you can get to all state highway safety office websites, related federal websites, and a nicely annotated page of links on various highway safety topics.

For a look at traffic safety beyond the U.S., check out this page of Global Road Safety Websites.

How many people use the Internet — in China?  How many people are using Twitter?  What are the demographics of Facebook users?  What percentage of folks have high speed Internet access at home? Find the answers to all of these questions and many, many more at the following websites:

+ ClickZ Stats (”News and expert advice for the digital marketer”)

“Trends & statistics: the Web’s richest source”

+ A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009 (Jeremiah Owyang, analyst, Forrester Research)

Stats on social networks are important, but I’m going to need your help in creating a community archive, can you submit stats as you find them? I’m often asked, “What are the usage numbers for X social network” and I’ve received considerable traffic on my very old post (way back in Jan 08) of MySpace and Facebook stats, even months later. Decision makers, press, media, and users are hungry for numbers, so I’ll start to aggregate them as I see them.

+ comScore press releases

comScore is a global leader in measuring the digital world and the preferred source of digital marketing intelligence.

The company also publishes a blog that is statistics-rich.

+ Domain Counts & Internet Statistics (DomainTools)

Welcome to Domain Tools’s daily domain statistics page. Our stats show how many domains are currently registered and how many domains used to be registered but are now deleted.

+ E-Stats – Measuring the Electronic Economy (U.S. Census Bureau)

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Internet site devoted exclusively to ‘Measuring the Electronic Economy.’ This site features recent and upcoming releases, information on methodology, and background papers.

+ Facebook Press Room: Statistics
Facebook publishes its own set of frequently updated statistics about growth, “user engagement,” etc.

+ How big is the internet? (News.com Australia)

The internet has permeated everything from buying to banking to bonking. So how big is it?

+ Information and Communication Technology Statistics (International Telecommunications Union)

As a United Nations agency, the ITU has an obligation to identify, define, and produce statistics covering its sector – the telecommunication/ICT sector.

+ Nielsen Wire: Online and Mobile
Weblog that alerts you to the results of current Nielsen surveys and reports.

+ Pew Internet and American Life Project: Get the Latest Statistics

Browse a list of our latest reports, look through out infographic highlights, and check out our freqently updated trend data.

While we usually post reports on our sister site, DocuTicker, we wanted to make sure this one was seen by as many folks as possible. This report — from The Common Data Project, a nonprofit based in NYC — analyzes the privacy policies of 10 major websites, as well as several start-ups. According to a press release (PDF; 78 KB):

Unlike existing privacy policy analysis, CDP’s report seeks to provide a “how to read” guide for the user who is curious about what is happening to his or her data online, but has little understanding of the technological and legal mechanisms at work.

The report walks through seven questions meant to pinpoint the issues CDP believes are most crucial for a user’s privacy, from questions on how “personal information” is defined to the kind of choices offered to users regarding how their information is shared.

You need to read this because you use most or all of these websites — some of them on a daily basis — Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Craigslist, Photobucket, NYT, WebMD, Ask, Cuil, and Ixquick. The seven questions CDP asked of each of these?

1. What data collection is happening that is not covered by the privacy policy?
2. How do they define “personal information”?
3. What promises are being made about sharing information with third parties?
4. What is their data retention policy and what does it say about their commitment to privacy?
5. What privacy choices do they offer to the user?
6. What input do users have into changes to the policy’s terms?
7. To what extent does they share the data they collect with users and the public?

The report is based around an ongoing series of posts on CDP’s My Place in the Crowd weblog. On one of these is an intriguing visual of how the various privacy policies “stack up next to each other, literally,” in terms of their length.

Some interesting tidbits from the report:

• “Companies rarely vouch for what these third party advertisers are doing. Some companies, such as AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, and the New York Times Digital, will at least explicitly acknowledge there are third parties that use cookies on their sites with their own policies around data collection…. Google, in contrast, doesn’t mention third party advertisers on the “privacy policy,” alluding to the separate controls for opting out of their tracking on a separate page discussing advertising and privacy.”
• “Researchers at the University of Texas in recent years have demonstrated that it is possible to de-anonymize through combination, as when Netflix data is combined with IMDB ratings, or when Twitter is combined with Flickr. So when companies offhandedly note that they are combining information they collect from different sources, they are learning a great deal more about individual people than the average user would imagine. And as you might imagine, large companies like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! have a wealth of databases at their disposal, but none of this is being made explicit in the policies.”
• “For example, Google promises not to share “sensitive personal information,” defining it as “information we know to be related to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, political or religious beliefs or sexuality and tied to personal information.” Does that mean that a user’s search queries for B-list celebrities are fair game to Google? Given the varying definitions of “personal” that are used, the strong declaration that “personal information” will generally not be shared is not, ultimately, a very comforting one.”
• “Certainly, the volume and breadth of data Amazon collects pales in comparison to what Google has access to, and some might argue that search queries are more “private” than what books one chooses to buy. But most people still probably wouldn’t want their purchase histories on Amazon to be revealed willy-nilly. Every item view shows what others have considered buying, what others have ended up buying, what else you might like. In contrast, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have yet to vividly demonstrate why collecting and retaining data makes their services better. Perhaps if they did, they would be less hard-pressed to delete their data as soon as possible.”
• “AskNetwork developed AskEraser to be a more visible way for users to use Ask.com without being tracked, but as privacy advocates noted, AskEraser requires that a cookie be downloaded, when many people who care about privacy periodically clear their cookies. AskEraser also doesn’t affect data collection by third parties on its site at all.”
• “Facebook can’t offer the service that it does without the content generated by its users. But as it’s begun to realize, its users then have to be a part of decisions about the way that content is used.”
• In some ways, consumers are starting to already feel that they’ve gotten a bad deal. Even though most only feel a vague discomfort at this point, it’s unlikely that companies like RealAge will be able to continue what they’ve been doing. RealAge promoted itself as a simple online quiz to help people be healthier, with endorsements by famous doctors, with only limited disclosure of the fact that their profits were based on selling quiz-takers’ information to pharmaceutical companies.

All in all, CDP, concludes:

By our standards, none of the privacy policies we surveyed quite measure up. Most of them provide incomplete information on what “personal information” means. Many of them fail to make clear that they are actively sharing information with third-parties. Even when they change their policies on something like data retention to placate privacy advocates, the changes do little to provide real privacy. The legal right companies reserve to change their policies at any time reminds us that right now, the balance of power is clearly in their favor. When they do offer users choices, the choices fail to encompass all the ways online data collection implicates users’ privacy.

And yet, CDP adds, “there are many positive signs of companies making smart moves, because they’re realizing they need buy-in from their users to survive in the long-term.”

If you prefer, you can read or download the full report as a PDF (165 KB).

The ReadWrite Enterprise blog discusses the report.

+ Privacychoice LLC recently evaluated the privacy policies of the top ten advertising networks.

+ In 2007, Privacy International issued a report — A Race to the Bottom:
Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies — that described the privacy practices of major Internet companies.

+ Know Privacy — “a collaborative research project” by several graduates of the UC Berkeley School of Information Masters program, class of 2009 — offers “(a) comparison of users’ expectations of privacy online and the data collection practices of website operators.”

This interesting and well annotated collection of resources showed up on ResourceShelf earlier this month, and we thought it was worthy of more attention because this is a topic of perennial interest.

Compiled by Sidney Lowe, head of research and information, University Libraries at University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Susie Skarl, urban studies librarian at Lied Library, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, this guide appears in the July/August 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries News (C&RL News), from the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).

From their introduction:

Generational categories are based on the time period in which a person was born, and there are variations in how they are labeled. For example, people who were born prior to World War II have been referred to as the “Silent Generation,” “Veterans,” “Radio Babies,” or “Traditionalists.” Some sources cite five separate generations, but most refer to only four. Depending upon which resource one is perusing, the generations are roughly represented as: 1) Traditionalists (born 1927–45), 2) Baby Boomers (1946–64), 3) Generation X, or Gen Xers (1965–80), and 4) Generation Y, or Millennials (1981–2000).

Regardless of the variations in generational birth dates or labels, we live in a continuously evolving world where generations of people are living and working longer than ever before. The electronic landscape is a fertile field for exploring and comparing a wide range of issues across age groups. We believe that the resources highlighted here represent a fascinating cross-section of generational themes.

The guide is divided into three sections: Generational snapshots, Learning styles, and Generations in the workplace. Everything here is useful and interesting, and scattered among these categories are some truly outstanding resources that were new to us, such as:

• The Center for Generational Studies (Don’t miss the bibliography here.)
• Information Seeking Behavior and the Generations (PDF; 27 KB), a comprehensive summary chart put together by Eileen Abels, a professor at Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology.
• Several fascinating articles and reports, such as Decoding Generational Differences: Fact, Fiction . . . or Should We Just Get Back to Work? (PDF; 2.6 MB) by W. Stanton Smith, and Understanding and Appreciating the Communication Styles of the Millennial Generation (PDF; 19 KB) by Jenna Reith.

By the way, all of the Internet Resources webliographies from C&RL News are aggregated in one spot on the ACRL website. Browse by topic or date. Or visit the Internet Resources wiki, where the guides can be updated by their original authors or other knowledgeable folks.

After several delays the shuttle is set to launch today at about 7pm (EDST). Here’s a set of resources — all from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — that might be of interest.

Real Time Tracking
+ Shuttle and ISS Tracker
+ Real Time Shuttle, ISS and Satellite Tracking (Java)
+ JTrack 3D (Java)
+ Skywatch 2.0 (Java Applet)
+ Space Shuttle and ISS Real Time Ground Spotting Opportunities

Blogs, Twitter Feeds, RSS Feeds, Video
+ Launch Blog
+ NASA Twitter Feed
+ Astronaut Twitter Feed (Mark Polansky, Commander of STS-127)
+ NASA Facebook Page
+ STS-127 RSS Feed
+ NASA’s YouTube Channel
+ NASA TV Schedule (You Can Watch This Service Online)
+ Direct to Live NASA TV Feeds (5 channels Available)

Materials and Press Kits for STS-127
+ Mission Press Kit (6.8 Mb PDF)
+ Mission Summary (429 Kb PDF)
+ Launch and Landing Facts
+ Crew Bios
+ STS-127 Countdown Timeline
+ STS-127 Mission Timeline (Requires Flash)

Shuttle Fast Facts
+ Remaining Space Shuttle Missions (PDF)
+ Flights by Orbiter
+ Night Launches
+ Extended Missions
+ Extended Duration Missions
+ Shortened Missions
+ End of Mission Landings

Imagery
+ NASAImages.org (a Service of the Internet Archive)

Some related resources:

+ History of U.S. Space Flight (David Shedden, Library Director, Poynter Institute)

This page deals with the history of space flight, including links to resources about the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle, and other space flights.

+ Congressional Research Service Reports (via OpenCRS)

• The International Space Station and the Space Shuttle (18 March 2009)
• U.S. Civilian Space Policy Priorities: Reflections 50 Years After Sputnik (2 February 2009)
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration: Overview, FY2009 Budget, and Issues for Congress (29 October 2008)
• U.S. Space Programs: Civilian, Military, and Commercial (13 June 2006)

+ Miscellaneous Reports (via DocuTicker)

• U.S. Space Program Should Align With Broader National Goals (National Research Council, July 2009)
• Space Debris: Assessing Risk and Responsibility (Advances in Space Research, May 2009)
• Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel 2008 Annual Report (NASA, April 2009)
• The Budgetary Implications of NASA’s Current Plans for Space Exploration (Congressional Budget Office, April 2009)
• NASA Report Reviews Crew Safety Measures During Columbia Accident, Recommends Improvements (NASA, December 2008)
• New Report Details Aerospace Workforce Needs, Remedies (Aerospace Industries Association, December 2008)
• White Paper: The Future of Human Spaceflight (Space, Policy, and Society Research Group/MIT, December 2008)

Why eBooks? Why now? Because the Fourth Annual World eBook Fair got underway July 4…which means you have free access to more than two million eBooks through August 4. Also, the Kindle DX — with its larger screen format — just made its appearance…and apparently sold out quite rapidly.

—–

Word from Michael Hart, the Founder of Project Gutenberg, that once again this year the World e-Book Fair will take place from July 4th-August 4th. This is the 4th year of the annual book fair. It starts on July 4th to celebrate the 38th anniversary of Project Gutenberg which began on July 4th, 1971.

Once the event begins you’ll find FREE access to over 2.5 million full text eBooks that you can download to your computer. Some titles can also be downloaded and read on certain types mobile phones.

Book Sources include:

+ Project Gutenberg

+ Digital Pulp Publishing

+ Internet Archive

+ The World Public Library (normally a fee-based site)

+ E-Books About Everything

++ Direct to World eBook Fair Web Site and Database

—–

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the pond…

From the Announcement

JISC has funded an ‘e-books for Further Education (FE) project to make over 3000 e-books freely available to every college and sixth form in the UK.

Over the next five years, the project, which also received funding from the Learning Skills Council (LSC), will enable all students in FE in the UK to access online course texts to support their studies.

E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform E-books will be made available from the start of the next academic year via the ebrary e-books platform. Subjects will range from Fashion Design to Software Engineering, Health and Social Care to Automobile Electronics, and Beauty Therapy to Practical Lambing. Access will be available whether students are studying in the college, at home or in an internet café.

See Also: UK National e-Book Survey (May 2008) (14 pages; PDF)

—–

Want to learn a little bit more about eBooks?

A new primer by Jane Lee from the California Digital Library.

The article includes the following sections:

+ Content vs. Delivery

+ Reading as an Experience

+ Why e-books now?

+ Control of Content, Control of Distribution

+ Standards and Protocols

+ Will e-books make printed books obsolete?

+ Issues to Consider

Direct to Complete Article (7 pages; PDF)

—–

Do you use Google Book Search?

Seven new and updated features and tools from Google Books today. You can read about them here. Here are a few highlights:

Embeds and links – This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs–all with a simple html snippet. It’s a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos.

Better search within each book – You’ve always been able to search inside books you find on Google Book Search. Now, for public domain and partner books, we’ve made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears.

Thumbnail view – Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine

Contents drop-down menu – Above the book itself, you’ll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book–or articles within a magazine.

Page Turn Button and Animation – In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven’t yet finished the page.

Improved Book Overview Page On the Overview page you’ll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.

Source: Inside Google Book Search
Hat Tip: Barry S.

—–

And what about the hardware?

From the Blog Post:

The interest in e-readers, or e-books as they are called now, has reached a fever pitch. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fields nothing but Kindle questions at the company’s shareholder meeting. Prime View picks up E Ink, the company that supplies the screen to Amazon’s Kindle, for $215 million. And companies ranging from Google to Interead are aiming to upset Amazon’s early advantage.

The complete post contains a chart from a new report from Forrester Research laying out how they believe the market will develop.

Source: ZDNet

—–

Do you use a Kindle? Are you thinking about buying one? Check out The Kindle Warehouse blog, which offers Kindle- and Kindle product-related news, tips, and reviews. Be sure not to miss the post about — Free Kindle eBooks. User comments contain links to even more resources. Who knew there was so much free stuff available for this popular — though proprietary — device?

More worthwhile Kindle stuff:
+KindleBoards
+ Kindle Tips
+ Kindle Wiki
+ KindleTips – Ultimate Kindle 2 Shortcuts and Tricks (GeekTonic)
+ KindleMag (e-bookvine)

Here’s another time-sink for you. How could you not love this site?

HistoricAerials.com provides free online access to historic and current aerial photography. You can view aerial photography from the 1930s through today. Use our multi-year comparison tools to detect changes in property.

If you just want to look at cool aerial pictures, scroll down to the bottom of the page, to Points of Interest. Click on the Show Categories link. Those who regularly follow us on ResourceShelf know that we kind of got lost looking at aerial pictures of sports stadiums old and new, such as:

• Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium, Philadelphia (1970)
• Polo Grounds, New York City (1964)
• Soldier Field, Chicago (2007)
• Candlestick Park, San Francisco (2005)

(We were, however, less than crazy about the fact that after choosing a category to browse and clicking on an image, we were basically bounced out of that category when the large-size image was displayed, and we had to go back and start all over again.)

Of course you’ll want to click on the Oddities category, although right now, there are only four images available — Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch (2005), a blimp and its shadow (1957), Airliner in Flight (2002), and the ever-popular “Boneyard” of mothballed aircraft at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base (2004)

Other imagery categories include: airports, American cities, amusement parks, construction, landmarks, mansions, military, states, Texas, zoos. Some categories have only a few images. Others are stocked with more.

If this was just a collection of static aerial imagery, it wouldn’t be much different from other, similar sites like Bird’s Eye Tourist, for example. But Historical Aerials has a variety of tools that allow you to search for a geographic area, manipulate the images, extract more information from them, and look at images from the same location over a number of different years. A detailed FAQ describes how to do such things as pan, zoom, find latitude/longitude, measure distance, etc. You can choose to overlay roads, counties and cities.

Note from the U.S. map on the home page that historical imagery (back to 1930, in some cases) is available only from certain limited geographic areas — indicated in dark green. “Modern” imagery of the light green areas covers the years 2003-2008. When you initially display an image, labels on the right side indicate which years are available. You can use a slider tool to compare images from two different years.

Note also that the images have the Historical Aerials logo on them. You can purchase logo-free images, which may then be used for publications, etc.

Historical Aerials comes to you from Nationwide Environmental Title Research, LLC (NETR). You may already be familiar with their excellent directory of links to free online public records searches. (They also offer a variety of fee-based public records searches and information.)

Resource of the Week: The Internet at 40
Source: Open University (UK)

2009 is the 40th anniversary of the first computer network – the precursor of the internet – and the 20th anniversary of the brilliant idea that led to the creation of the world wide web. What exactly is the internet, and how does it differ from the world wide web? Who were its pioneers, and what technological surprises has it sprung? This album opens with a specially recorded interview with John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University and author of ‘A brief history of the future – the origins of the internet’. He explores some of the key moments in the short but spectacular history of an extraordinary phenomenon, the people who made them happen, and some of the problems that have emerged. The album also features archive interviews with Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Donald Davies and other pioneers of the internet age, recorded in the late 1990s. The album is completed by a newly recorded interview with Rodney Harrison, lecturer in Heritage Studies at the Open University, in which he talks about his research into Second Life: Cyber-Archaeologies, Heritage and Virtual Communities. The interviews are presented by radio journalist Penny Boreham.

Quick ROTW for you this week, since we are at SLA.

This online database presents data on the property tax in all 50 states. Because accurate data provide the critical foundation for sound governmental decision-making, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the George Washington Institute of Public Policy joined in a partnership to provide information and support public policy concerning the property tax, probably the most controversial tax in the United States.

The term “Significant Features” pays tribute to the work of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, which was established by Congress in 1959 to study the relationships among local, state, and national levels of government. Until its termination in 1996, ACIR provided a wealth of research on the functioning of the federal system, particularly through its flagship publication, Significant Features of Fiscal Federalism.

This new site provides data sets and links relating to the property tax and its role in state and local finance in all 50 states. The interface allows users to access property tax and data online in a variety of forms, including tables of the most frequently sought figures, a query system for creating new tables, and a downloadable database. This data will be of value to a wide variety of users, including journalists, public officials, and researchers.

+ User guide (PDF; 29 KB)
+ Tables
+ State summaries
+ Census of governments data
+ Glossary

Microsoft’s new general-purpose search engine (think Yahoo and Google) named “Bing” has gone live on the web. If you were a user of the Live.com search, many of Bing’s features will be familiar to you.

Here are a few things we noticed when using the new search engine:

+ An advanced search interface is located next to the search box on any search results page.

+ The left rail offers the ability to find related search terms.

+ The left rail also keeps track of your most recent searches. To clear them, hit the “clear” button and/or turn off the feature.

+ Enter the names of two cities and at the top of the results page you’ll see airfare information. Here’s an example. The air fare and fare prediction data comes from Farecast, another Microsoft property that has been renamed Bing Travel.

+ Cached pages are available. Look for the link next to the URL on a web results page.

+ Previews: If you place your cursor on the right side of a results page next to each result, a box will appear with a preview of the content that’s on the full page. No clicking required.

+ Video Search Previews: Simply cursor over a video thumbnail and watch a preview of the clip. No clicking.

+ Enhanced views of Wikipedia content are accessible via a link next to a Wikipedia URL. The first two results on this page contain enhanced view links.

+ Sites NOT in English contain translate links next to the page title on the search results page. Here’s an example.

+ In some searches, local results appear at the top of the page. Here’s a search for “newspapers Chicago.” Note the local listings at the top of the page. In this example, the results don’t include Chicago’s two largest papers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Not good. Same thing when you run the same type of search for “newspapers New York City”.

+ Here’s a search for Paris France Airport and another search for Los Angeles Sports. Note how the options at the top of the left rail change depending on what content is available. For the Paris search you’ll see:

• Events
• Weather
• History (with content from Encarta at the top of the page)
• Airport
• Map
• Image
• Video

For the Los Angeles Sports search you’ll only find (in the same location):

• News
• Local In some cases, these left rail options will take you to images, video, etc., while in other cases they will take you to a more focused list of web pages that Bing believes will be useful.

  + The same “direct answers” that were available with Live Search are also available with Bing. Examples include:

  • Athletes
  • Calculator
  • Stock Quotes
  • Flight Tracking

  + When running an image search, you can focus by size, layout, color, style, people. Look for these options on the left rail on the search results page, as in this example. (These tools were available with Live.com search.) You can also find “related images” — based on the composition of an image — by hovering over an image with your cursor and selecting, “show related images.”

  + When running a video search, you can narrow by length, screen size, resolution, and source. Look for these options on the left rail, as in this example. Very cool!.

  + WARNING! If you turn off the safe search feature when searching for images and then toss in the correct terms, you’ll find a ton of adult material.

  + Microsoft’s wonderful Virtual Earth maps and imagery appear when you run a Map search. Bing also offers 1-click directions. Here’s an example. Note the directions to the Museum of Modern Art from from four compass locations (N, S, E, W) plus the option to add a specific location/address.

  + Boolean: Yes. Default is AND. OR is also available. More advanced search syntax here, here, and here. Note: These are the same options that were available with Live.com. No major changes seem to jump out at us.

  Update: We have tested several of the advanced search operators and they appear to work correctly.

  + All searches can turned into RSS feeds. Most browsers should be able to autodetect the presence of an RSS feed. No? Simply append your search with the following: &format=rs.

  + In some cases, pages will be marked as an official site. Example. In this example, take note of the customer service number readily available and a search box to directly search the site from the results page.

  Overall, while it’s good and important to have another unique database of web content out there, we are a bit saddened to see the lack of new feature and services with this first release of Bing as opposed to what was available with Live.com. Bing is worth knowing about and using, but getting the masses to switch to it as their default search tool will be a massive challenge. Time will tell. Expect to see a lot of advertising for Bing. Finally, Bing Maps (and imagery) continues to mesmerize, and the limiting functions for images and video are very useful.

  See Also: More Tips and Tricks (via Digital Inspirations)

  See Also: Bing411 is Now Live (via TechCrunch)
  This appears to be a simple rebranding and enhancement. Microsoft has had two interactive voice services (IVR) for several years. The first was Live411 (now Bing411). The service came from the Microsoft acquisition of long time player TellMe (1-800-555-Tell) which is still live. It appears that Bing411 adds several new features like movie times, movie ticket purchases and news headlines.

  Want More Interactive Voice Response Tools?
  + 1-800-Free-411 (business and residential listings)
  + 1-800-Flights (Flight Info)
  + 1-866-My-TRAFC (Traffic Info for Major U.S. Cities)

  Update: View the Bing TV Commercials (via SEL)

  ]]> http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/06/08/microsofts-new-and-enhanced-search-engine-named-bing-debuts-on-web/feed/ 0 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/06/01/resources-of-the-week-really-special-libraries/ http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/06/01/resources-of-the-week-really-special-libraries/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2009 13:15:35 +0000 ResourceShelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/?p=19917 Resources of the Week: REALLY Special Libraries
  By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

  In honor of the 2009 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference coming up June 14-17 in Washington, DC (at which you can see some of your friends from DocuTicker/ResourceShelf/FreePint), we offer for your online perusal the websites of a handful of X-tremely special libraries.

  + Federal Bureau of Prisons Library

  The Federal Bureau of Prisons Library offers a wide variety of traditional and automated information services. There is a wealth of resources covering the field of corrections and related fields of study including, criminology, sociology, psychology, and business.
  …
  The BOP Library has nearly 5,000 books, Government documents, statistical and organizational publications covering all areas of corrections and other criminal justice topics.

  You can search the OPAC directly from the home page. While you’re there, hop on over to the Federal Bureau of Prisons home page, where you can find a link to the Inmate Locator. This is useful if you’re doing a background check on someone; it contains (very) basic information on anyone who has been incarcerated in a federal prison from 1982 on.

  + International Maritime Organization Maritime Knowledge Center

  To support the day-to-day activities of the Organization, the Centre maintains selective collections in the following subjects: maritime safety and protection of the marine environment and more specifically ship design and equipment, stability and load lines, fishing vessels safety, containers and cargoes, bulk chemicals, fire protection, life-saving, search and rescue, standards of training and watchkeeping, carriage of dangerous goods, marine pollution, preparedness and response, navigation and communications, facilitation and technical co-operation. There is a small collection on the commercial aspects of shipping and an audio-visual collection.

  The OPAC is called SeaLibrary Online. Don’t overlook the Information Resources link , which will take you to a large collection of interesting and potentially useful content, including papers, reports, bibliographies, periodicals and free IMO texts. From the IMO home page, you can get to all sorts of other stuff. The site uses frames, which makes for an awkward navigation scheme (IMHO), but here’s a direct link to the section a lot of folks might find interesting — Piracy and armed robbery against ships.

  + Macauley Library at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology

  The Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the world’s largest natural sound and video archive of animal behavior. Its mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species behavior and natural history and to make them available for research, education, conservation, zoos and aquaria, wildlife managers, publishers, the arts, and both public and commercial media. Since 1930, recordists of all backgrounds have contributed their recordings, which now number to several hundred thousand in total. A large percentage of the recordings can be searched and played online.

  If you enjoy nature, this site is a serious time sink. There’s a search box on pretty much every page, or you can browse taxonomically or by common name. The library uses a free browser plugin called RavenViewer, which “enables you to see and visually analyze the sound as you play it.” Some sounds can be downloaded and used for personal or educational purposes.

  + The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection, University of Buffalo Libraries

  The George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection is comprised of over 25,000 pulp fiction books and magazines. Dr. George Kelley donated the collection to Lockwood Library in 1994. Currently the collection is housed in Special Collections at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

  This special collection is an absolute must-see, even if you only browse the digitized lurid covers that are scrolling slowly across the home page. You can search the collection by author, title or keyword. Also available — the keyword searchable Gumshoes, Sleuths & Snoopers section, which provides “(a)n in-depth look at 185 detective and mystery novels.” (BTW, if you like looking at old paperbacks, be sure to check out one of my favorite Flickr groups — Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers.)

  + American Nudist Research Library

  Welcome to the American Nudist Research Library® (ANRL). The Library was established in 1979 to preserve the history of the social nudist movement in North America and throughout the world. It is a repository of material rather than a circulating library. Visitors may read or view most of the collection as long as they are in the Library. The Library is enjoyed most by individuals and groups who treasure on-going nudist activities, and who wish to participate in a sincere effort to preserve the unique history of the movement.

  Although there’s no OPAC here, you can read about the collection, which is apparently in the process of being converted to electronic archives. Note that the site does include photos of patrons using the library; you won’t see anything particularly shocking or “unsafe for work,” but we’re willing to bet that you don’t see folks like this in your library. You’ll also find a small listing of Links to Nudist Website of Interest. And, in case you were wondering, “The ANRL is located on the grounds of Cypress Cove Nudist Resort in Kissimmee, Florida, next to the the tropically landscaped pool area.”

  ]]> http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/06/01/resources-of-the-week-really-special-libraries/feed/ 0 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/25/resources-of-the-week-people/ http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/25/resources-of-the-week-people/#comments Mon, 25 May 2009 06:18:09 +0000 ResourceShelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/?p=19839 Resources of the Week: People!
  By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

  Pretty much everyone who’s ever worked as a librarian is familiar with the Marquis Who’s Who series of reference materials. Well, we recently stumbled across a great free resource from the Who’s Who folks, and you know how enthusiastic we are about free quality content here on ResourceShelf.

  Take a look at the Who’s Who in America Experts Guide:

  The launching of this Web site, WhosWhoInAmerica.com, marks an exciting time for us as we expand beyond the pages of our books to the digital world. Expect to see the same great biographical information coupled with recommendations and advice directly from the experts of Who’s Who. Find out which restaurants our chefs prefer, what vacation spots our travel specialists say are “must visits,” and which doctors are the best for what ails you—and that’s just the beginning. Check back soon for the latest in luxury lifestyle, fashion, beauty, real estate, art, business and more.

  You’ll find advice from familiar names here — e.g., Peter Greenberg and Arthur Frommer providing travel tips. You’ll also find interviews with folks who are not necessarily household names, but who are notable in their own fields, such as medicine and real estate. The site is divided into several sections, according to content:

  • Health
  • Travel
  • Food & Wine
  • Real Estate
  • Interviews
  • In the News

  You can sign up for e-mail updates about new content in any or all of these sections.

  What’s cool…as you travel around the site, when you click on a highlighted name, you are taken to that person’s Who’s Who biography, which includes date and place of birth, career achievements and awards, family info, and more.
  –
  Another venerable — and widely available through public libraries — people resource is Biography Resource Center, from Gale Cengage. We didn’t learn until recently that it has its own blog, with postings about people in the news, celebrities, historical figures, and new content added to the database. It offers an RSS feed, e-mail updates, and notes that, “Twitter is coming soon.”

  ]]> http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/25/resources-of-the-week-people/feed/ 0 http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/17/fast-facts-anyone-a-brief-users-guide-to-wolframalpha/ http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/17/fast-facts-anyone-a-brief-users-guide-to-wolframalpha/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 16:30:21 +0000 resourceshelf http://www.resourceshelf.com/?p=19755 Resource of the Week — Fast Facts Anyone? A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha
  By Gary Price, Chief/Founding Editor

  As of 10:34 PM EDST on Friday, May 15, 2009 the site is live.

  Since Wolfram|Alpha, (W|A) — a new fact/answer engine (the company calls it a “computational knowledge engine”) — was preparing to go live over the weekend of May 15-17, we decided to give it a try. Thanks to the Wolfram team for the the early access. Here’s our brief report and hopefully some other useful information for future W|A users.

  The Question Everyone Is Asking
  NO, W|A is not a Google or any other general-purpose web engine killer . W|A works differently than Google, Yahoo, Live.com, Ask.com and other engines. If anything, W|A helps make some invisible — i.e., “deep web” — data useful by getting it out of the silos that are often difficult to find and access.

  Google and those other engines crawl the web and find unstructured pages/content to add to their databases. Think of Google as an encyclopedia — not the best analogy, I know, but it works here. It’s massive and has content on thousands and thousands of topics.

  On the other hand, W|A searches organized data sets (time series, etc.), or creates them (using both electronic and print resources), and has curators (aka editors) massage and manage the structured data before it goes into the database. (Remember that most web engine databases are full of unstructured data.) Quality, currency, and accuracy are key. Not only do curators find new data sources, but they also watch for the data sets to be updated, at which point they update the content in the W|A database.

  BTW, look for W|A to be adding new and updating old data on a regular basis. Hopefully, they’ll have a page that documents the changes as new data enters the database and older data is updated.

  If Google is an encyclopedia, than W|A is a “must have” almanac. It’s also a “must have” resource for use at the busy reference desk. Even though the database covers many areas, W|A is going to be gold for science and engineering information professionals. And remember — it’s free.

  This from a CNN article:

  It’s not a new Google. It’s not supposed to be. It’s very complimentary, in a way, to what search engines do, said Theodore Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research, the company behind W|A.

  However, not every answer and domain of knowledge is in the W|A database. Founder Stephen Wolfram says in a video that the project is really just getting started. So we’ll Just have to wait and see.

  Wolfram says W|A consists of four pillars:

  1. Curated data (Finding data, keeping it current, etc.)
  2. Linguistical analysis (free form queries and the ability to process them)
  3. Algorithmic processing of the data
  4. Automatically presenting the results and making them useful

  If W|A doesn’t have the answer, you’ll get a blank results page and/or perhaps some suggestions to retry your search.

  This is why it’s important to spend some time with the W|A database to get an idea of what it can and can’t do. This is no different than learning a new print or electronic resource that you purchase from a book or database vendor. Trust us on this onem W|A is also fun to use — especially if you’re a fact junkie.

  One interesting feature is that if you enter multiple search terms (e.g., surnames), the answer is returned in an easy-to-read comparison box.

  Syntax
  Since this a question-and-answer type of engine, natural language works best. For math-related queries, math symbols (+, -, %, etc.) work. The / sign works for dividing.

  Why the Name Wolfram|Alpha?
  Wolfram comes from the name of the company’s founder, Dr. Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram’s primary product, Mathematica, is used by tens of thousands of mathematicians and engineers.

  Let’s Search
  The search box — what you see on the W|A home page — is nothing new. It looks and behaves like any other familiar search box. This early in the game, it’s difficult to say what W|A’s strengths and weaknesses are. As we pointed out above, every domain of knowledge is not yet in the database.

  Here are a few queries the company suggests that new users try:

  + enter any date (e.g. a birth date)
  July 4, 1776

  + enter any town (e.g. a home town)
  New York

  + enter any two stocks
  IBM Apple

  + enter any calculation
  $250 + 15%
  or
  x+5=y

  + A name

  + Two Surnames

  + Pi

  + Currency Conversion

  + Carbon

  + Swiss Cheese

  + Buffalo Weather November 12, 1978

  Visit this page to access even more examples of the types of searches W|A can handle.

  Results Page
  Again, your results page is based on your query, but in many cases you’ll find lists, tables, graphs, and much more. Every results page is different, based on the content that’s been found in the W|A database.

  This annotated results page does a good job of illustrating some of what you’ll find on a W|A results page.

  Perhaps the MOST important part of the search results box is found near the bottom of the page. It’s labeled “source information.” Click the link and you’ll see the many sources W|A used to come up with the results. It will be interesting to see if/how major bibliographic citation styles handle W|A data.

  Also, at the bottom of a results page, is a link that will turn the results page into a PDF file to print or download. Very useful.

  If W|A doesn’t work for you or you want to see results from another engine, look for the “Search the Web” box in the right rail. There you can select from Google, Yahoo, and Live.com and get results.

  W|A also does its best to handle disambiguation. If you type “Apple,” it will default to information about the computer company. But it also provide clickable links near the top of the page if what you really wanted was information about the fruit.

  Remember
  Researchers have different information needs, and they need the right tool at the right time to get the job done. Without the right tool, the end result will be frustration and aggravation. For many types of queries — not all — W|A will be a welcome addition. It’s not the solution, but it can be a valuable tool in the researcher’s toolbox. Remember — no research tool is perfect for all research questions, but W|A does a very good job of providing authoritative results to many type of queries.

  But not all queries. For example, a search for The Beatles or Rolling Stones returns zilch. But other pop culture queries do generate results. A note says that the topic — music performers — like many other categories (including commercial products) are being reviewed. Stay tuned.

  What’s Missing?
  Well, plenty. No site is perfect. That said, two items come to mind every time I visit the site.

  1. Spell-check (We’ve been told it’s coming soon.)
  2. A mobile version. How great would it be to have a massive amount of factual information at your fingertips no matter where you are located?

  Update: W|A looks o.k. on an iPhone. However, a native app would be even better.

  Update 2: More Searches to Try:
  + Occupations: Actor

  + Find Words Matching a Pattern: Gol___

  + Word Definitions

  + Member Countries of an Organization: WHO

  + Movies: Gone with the Wind

  + People: Plato

  + Books: Gone With the Wind

  + Decipher Between 2 Dates: This Monday ||| Last Monday

  + Holidays: Pay Special Attention to How W|A Disamibugates the U.S. Holiday vs. other “Labor Days” Around the World.

  + Songs: Stairway to Heaven

  + Genealogical Tree: Great Uncle

  + Animals: Giraffe

  + Musical Notes
  Note the “Listen To” Link

  ]]> http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/05/17/fast-facts-anyone-a-brief-users-guide-to-wolframalpha/feed/ 0