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Resource of the Week: Change Is Good

Monday, November 10th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Change Is Good
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Here in the U.S., at long last, we have a new President-Elect. And, for the first time, this means a new presidential transition website. Simple but elegant and still under construction — Change.gov. At the top left, you’ll see a countdown, in days, till the January 20, 2009 inauguration.

“The Newsroom” is basically a blog of press releases from the new administration that sits front and center on the site. You’ll also find biographies of Barack Obama, the President-Elect, and Joe Biden, the Vice President-Elect. You can watch Obama’s election victory speech in Grant Park, in Chicago.

There are a variety of links at the bottom of the page under the headings Newsroom, Learn, American Moment, America Serves, and About This Site. There’s also a link you can click to apply for a job in the new administration. Fill out the brief online form and you’ll receive, via e-mail, a link to a more extensive online form. (Note: These are non-career positions, not civil service.)

Among the links at the bottom of the page — and also along the right side — you’ll find a link to something called the GSA Transition Directory:

The Presidential Transition Act of 2000 (P.L. 106-293) authorizes the General Services Administration (GSA) to develop a transition directory in consultation with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The Act provides that the transition directory “shall be a compilation of Federal publications and materials with supplementary materials developed by the Administrator that provides information on the officers, organization, and statutory and administrative authorities, functions, duties, responsibilities, and mission of each department and agency.” Senate Report 106-348 clarifies that the directory is intended to “assist in navigating the many responsibilities that fall on a new administration” that is “confronted by an overwhelming amount of material.”

Obviously, there’s not much information here yet, but if you click around, you will find some interesting governmental odds and ends:

And the new administration wants to hear from you:

Tell us your story and the issues that matter most to you. Share with us your concerns and hopes – the policies you want to see carried out in the next four years.

The White House Transition Project is an interesting resource:

Since 1997, the White House Transition Project has combined the efforts of scholars, universities, and policy institutions to smooth out the American presidential transition. WHTP bridges the gaps between the partisan forces engaged in settling elections and the decision processes essential to governing by providing non-partisan information about the challenges of the American presidential transition and the strategies for overcoming those challenges. It provides these and other resources to presidential campaigns, to the president-elect, and to the new administration. These resources include three separate report series providing a White House institutional memory, perspectives on past transitions, and advanced research covering special aspects of transitions and governing. The WHTP also provides unique analysis of the appointments process and a clearinghouse on other transition resources.

Lots of historical stuff here, including photo archives. A couple items of note:
+ Presidential Power in National Security: A Guide to the President-Elect (PDF; 500 KB), from the Law Library of Congress
+ White House Transition Project Expert Registry (PDF; 211 KB)

Other transition resources, governmental and otherwise:
+ Hearing — “Passing the Baton: Preparing for the Presidential Transition”

On Wednesday, September 24, 2008, at 2:00 p.m., in room 2247 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Subcommittee held a hearing titled, “Passing the Baton: Preparing for the Presidential Transition.”

This hearing continued the Subcommittee’s oversight of the ongoing preparations for the upcoming presidential transition. With only 77 days between the November election and the January inauguration, the transition teams of the executive branch and the incoming administration will have much work to do to ensure that the incoming Administration can begin its work immediately. The hearing reviewed the steps that GSA is taking to fulfill its responsibility to assist members of the incoming and outgoing administrations. The hearing also reviewed expert research on federal executive management challenges surrounding the transition.

Testimonies and other documents in PDF.

+ General Services Administration: Presidential Transition

The transfer of power from one administration to the next marks a significant moment in U.S. history. The Presidential Transition Acts of 1963 and 2000 give the General Services Administration (GSA) a prominent role in this process. They authorize the Administrator of GSA to provide the President-elect and the Vice-President-elect the services and facilities needed to assume their official duties.

+ Government Accountability Office: 2009 Congressional and Presidential Transition

Following each presidential election, GAO serves as a resource to assist with the transition to a new Congress and administration. On this Web site, using its institutional knowledge and broad-based, nonpartisan work on matters across the government spectrum, GAO provides insight into, and recommendations for addressing, the nation’s major issues, risks and challenges. Also located throughout the site are key reports for further research, as well as contact information for and video messages from GAO experts.

+ Council for Excellence in Government: Presidential Transition
Offers links to various news articles and reports. One hot item that will show up here soon — The Prune Book Online:

PrunesOnline is a must-have tool for prospective Presidential appointees, the Presidential Personnel Office looking for the best and brightest, members of Congress, journalists, advocacy groups, and regular citizens who want to know more about the people working for them. It’s your guide to the presidential appointment process and the people involved.

This, of course, follows from the infamous “Plum Book” — United States Government Policy and Supporting Positions — the new version of which is due out this week.

Published by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and the House Committee on Government Reform alternately after each Presidential election, the Plum Book lists over 7,000 Federal civil service leadership and support positions in the legislative and executive branches of the Federal Government that may be subject to noncompetitive appointment, nationwide. Data covers positions such as agency heads and their immediate subordinates, policy executives and advisors, and aides who report to these officials. The duties of many such positions may involve advocacy of Administration policies and programs and the incumbents usually have a close and confidential working relationship with the agency or other key officials.

+ IBM Center for the Business of Government: The Presidential Transition

The next President will face a wide range of challenges – economic, political, and social. He will need to be able to lead an effective government that can address these challenges. The IBM Center for The Business of Government is committed to helping identify and bring best practices from research to practice to help address these issues.

There’s a blog here, addressing “management challenges for the next president,” as well as various guides, reports, and issue briefs.

+ 1105 Government Information Group: Government Transition 2009 Wiki

This public service Wiki site seeks to be a repository of those ideas and recommendations from knowledgeable organizations and experts–and provide a forum for elaboration and discussion. In particular, this site will focus on transition ideas pertaining to Program Execution, Performance Management, Procurement and Acquisition, the use of Information Technology, and the management of Human Capital in government.

This non-partisan site is being made available as a public service by 1105 Government Information Group. [The lead collaborators of the site currently include 1105 Government Information Group chief editors Wyatt Kash (Government Computer News), John Monroe (Federal Computer Week) and Nick Wakeman (Washington Technology) along with other government transition experts, including: John Kamensky, of the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

Of special note: the “Key Players” page, which seeks to “catalogue think tanks, government agencies, academic institutions and other thought leaders following and generating assessments about transition issues related to government management.”

+ Congresspedia: Presidential transition resources
A fine collection of relevant laws, Congressional Research Service reports, discussions/hearings, media coverage, supporting documents and other materials. (”Congresspedia is part of SourceWatch, a similarly collaborative, wiki-based website documenting the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda.”)

+ Finally, our friends at the Free Government Information blog have assembled a collection of special interest resources “relevant to government information and technology policies during this transition period” — The Transition: Information, Technology, and Information-Technology.

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: United National Audiovisual Library of International Law

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Resource of the Week: United National Audiovisual Library of International Law
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Our friends at UN Pulse — a perpetually useful blog by the staff at the UN’s Dag Hammarskjöld Library — tipped us off to this unique, new resource from the UN Office of Legal Affairs.

The Audiovisual Library is a unique, multimedia resource which provides the United Nations with the unprecedented capacity to provide high quality international law training and research materials to an unlimited number of recipients on a global level. The Audiovisual Library consists of three pillars: (1) the Historic Archives containing documents and audiovisual materials relating to the negotiation and adoption of significant legal instruments under the auspices of the United Nations and related agencies since 1945; (2) the Lecture Series featuring a permanent collection of lectures on virtually every subject of international law given by leading international law scholars and practitioners from different countries and legal systems; and (3) the Research Library providing an on-line international law library with links to treaties, jurisprudence, publications and documents, scholarly writings and research guides. The Audiovisual Library is available to all individuals and institutions around the world for free via the Internet.

This is a very rich resource, but there is plenty of helpful information on how to access the content — for example, this detailed page on what is in the Historical Archives and how to navigate this section of the site. Topics included here: Criminal Law, Decolonization, Diplomatic and Consular Relations, Disarmament, Education / Science / Culture, Environmental Law, Health, Human Rights, International Economic Law, International Organizations, Law of Outer Space, Law of the Sea, Law of Treaties, Peace and Security, Refugees and Stateless Persons, Succession of States.

About the Lecture Series section:

A series of lecture cards lists the lectures given by each lecturer under a particular subject matter heading. Each lecture card includes the name, professional affiliation, photograph and a brief biography of the lecturer; the title, a brief summary and the recorded lecture; and related materials such as a lecture outline, power point slides or recommended reading, to the extent provided by the lecturer.

You’ll need RealPlayer to watch the lecture videos. Topics here include: Arctic, Boundary Delimitation Courts and Tribunals, Criminal Law and Procedure, Cultural Heritage Development, Diplomatic Protection, Disaster Prevention and Relief, Environmental Law, Health and Science, Human Rights, International Civil Aviation, International Economic Law, International Labour Law, International Law, International Migration Law, International Organizations, International Watercourses, Law of Armed Conflict, Law of Outer Space, Law of the Sea, Law of Treaties, Peace and Security, Regional Organizations, Rule of Law / Democracy / Good Governance, Specialized Agencies and Related Organizations, States, United Nations.

And then there’s the site’s Research Library:

The research library contains links to other web-based resources providing international law-related materials of interest to the researcher and practitioner alike. The library is divided into four components: resources relating to treaties and treaty status information; materials concerning the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals; access to selected United Nations publications and to repositories of official documentation; and selected scholarly writings in international law, including publications and journal articles as well as information on research guides presently available on the Internet.

The collection of scholarly writings in the library is a joint pilot project with HeinOnline. It includes:

According to UN Pulse, “The Audiovisual Library aims to provide free, scholarly resources to students and practitioners around the world, particularly in regions where there are few resources for the study of international law.”

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, New Websites and Resources, Resource of the Week, Resources for Educators, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Cold or Flu?

Monday, October 20th, 2008

Resources of the Week: Cold or Flu?
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

It seems like whenever the seasons are in transition, more people get sick. In some cases, it may be allergy. The weather patterns change and new particles of whatever are floating around in the air where you live. If you’ve lived in one place for awhile and you do have allergies, you’re well aware of those times of the year that are most troublesome for you.

But as we move on into the colder weather (here in the Northern Hemisphere), flu season also approaches. And we start seeing more information about who/what/where/when/why/how to get a flu shot. Should you get one? All the information you need is here in the CDC’s (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) document: Influenza Vaccination: A Summary for Clinicians. Though it’s “for Clinicians,” this summary is written largely in non-technical language and tells you pretty much everything most people need to know about flu shots. (Always check with your own health care provider, however. Remember that we are information professionals, not medical professionals.) This document is part of CDC’s Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Resources for Health Professionals site, which falls under the more general resource, Seasonal Flu site, where you’ll find a wealth of information for both health care providers and consumers.

Where can you get a flu shot — that is, besides your own doctor’s office, which may not be convenient. Check the American Lung Association’s Flu Clinic Locator. Just plug in your zip code, provide a geographic distance range via the dropdown menu, and specify a range of dates. The Lung Association also provides a wealth of influenza information for consumers.

And then there’s the National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus, if you really need A LOT of information. The Flu page informs us that

Flu is a respiratory infection caused by a number of viruses. The viruses pass through the air and enter your body through your nose or mouth. Between 5% and 20% of people in the U.S. get the flu each year. The flu can be serious or even deadly for elderly people, newborn babies and people with certain chronic illnesses.

It continues on from there to describe symptoms, and it provides a huge, nicely organized collection of links to more information — from the basics to clinical trials, journal articles, multimedia resources, organizations, directories, alternative therapies and much more.

But let’s face it. Even if you’re vaccinated and extremely well-informed, you may well get sick anyhow. Most of us get up and go to work every day, go shopping, go to the movies, participate in community activities…there’s no avoiding people and their germs. And if you’re a parent, you know that every small child is a viral smörgåsbord. So here you are, feeling lousy. Is it a cold or the flu?

According to the CDC:

The flu and the common cold are both respiratory illnesses but they are caused by different viruses. Because these two types of illnesses have similar flu-like symptoms, it can be difficult to tell the difference between them based on symptoms alone. In general, the flu is worse than the common cold, and symptoms such as fever, body aches, extreme tiredness, and dry cough are more common and intense. Colds are usually milder than the flu. People with colds are more likely to have a runny or stuffy nose. Colds generally do not result in serious health problems, such as pneumonia, bacterial infections, or hospitalizations.

Colds, of course, occur much more frequently. According to the American Lung Association, “Adults get an average of two to four colds per year, mostly between September and May.” (Children get six to eight.)

This adds up. According to the CDC, “In the course of a year, people in the United States suffer 1 billion colds.”

You can get a cold by touching your eyes or nose after you touch surfaces with cold germs on them. You can also inhale the germs. Symptoms usually begin 2 or 3 days after infection and last 2 to 14 days. Washing your hands and staying away from people with colds will help you avoid colds.

There is no cure for the common cold. For relief, try

  • Getting plenty of rest
  • Drinking fluids
  • Gargling with warm salt water
  • Using cough drops or throat sprays – but not cough medicine for children under four
  • Taking over-the-counter pain or cold medicines – but not aspirin for children

Earlier this year, if you remember, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended against giving over-the-counter cold and cough medicines to children under the age of two. In general, this stuff needs to be stored where curious little people can’t get to it. Says the CDC:

An estimated 7,000 children ages 11 and younger are treated in hospital emergency departments each year because of cough and cold medications, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Approximately two-thirds of those incidents were due to unsupervised ingestion (i.e., children taking the medication without a parent?s knowledge).

Read the complete study published earlier this year in the journal Pediatrics.

As we all know, there is no “cure” for the common cold. But there are things you can do and ingest to make yourself feel better. The Mayo Clinic offers a rundown of what works and what doesn’t.

We just hope you stay healthy.

Posted in Fast Facts, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: A Half-Dozen LC Jewels

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Resources of the Week: A Half-Dozen LC Jewels
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

The Library of Congress website is ginormous and multifaceted. While we regularly post useful features and items that we learn about, we readily acknowledge that there is probably plenty we are missing. Still…here’s a small collection of LC resources we like. If we’ve missed any of your favorites, please let us know. We’ll probably feature another collection like this in the future.

++ Baseball in the Library of Congress: A Selected List of Sites

The sites listed below all include, to various degrees, graphic or textual materials relating to baseball. These links are all found on Library of Congress Web pages, and do not include materials found on other web sites, except for those provided by the Library’s program American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library. The links were collected by staff in the Music Division (Performing Arts Reading Room), where one can find an extensive bibliography of published baseball music and songs (included below).

Your ResourceShelf editors are serious baseball fans, and we know the game has a loyal following among information professionals generally. (SLA’s Baseball Caucus is a group of the nicest, most knowledgeable fans you’ll ever meet.) And this guide is a great pathfinder for all the baseball-related materials on LC websites.

++ Business Reference Services: Indexes, Bibliographies, and Guides
This resource has four components:

  • Guide to Finding Business Information at the Library of Congress

    This publication describes selected print resources in accounting, company and industry information, entrepreneurship, international trade, statistics, business education, regional economic information, non-profit organizations and trade associations, and the federal budget and expenditures.

  • Specialized Business Guides

    Guides to print publications, subscription databases, and selected freely available Internet sites which are useful for researching a variety of business topics.

  • Subscription Databases for Business and Economics Research

    Use of the subscription resources listed in this guide is limited to users on site at the Library of Congress.

    Yes, but…your own library may well have access to at least some of these databases. The detailed descriptions provided are valuable in and of themselves. And a few of these are free on the open web to everyone.

  • Subject Guides to Internet Resources

    Links to freely available Internet resources on business and economics topics arranged by subject.

    Valuable to everyone. They are also accessible by title.

    ++ Law Library of Congress
    The Law Library of Congress bills itself as “The world’s largest collection of law books and legal resources.” As such, most of its services and resources are restricted to on-site use. But you’ll also find a variety of excellent online resources, such as:

    • GLIN: Global Legal Information Network

      International legal database with official full texts of published documents in the original languages.

    • Guide to Law Online

      Annotated guide to online sources of legal information on government and law by U.S. state, country, or region.

    • Multinational Collections Database

      Sources that reprint the laws and regulations of international jurisdictions on specific legal topics.

    • Congressional Hearings

      Full-text access to historical Congressional committee hearings on a variety of topics.

    • A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation

      Collection of U.S. Congressional documents and debates (1774-1875), including laws, journals, and letters of the Founding Fathers.

    • Global Legal Monitor

      The Global Legal Monitor is an online publication from the Law Library of Congress covering legal news and developments worldwide. It is updated frequently and draws on information from the Global Legal Information Network, official national legal publications, and reliable press sources. You can search previous news by searching the archive.

      ++ The Learning Page…especially for teachers

      The Learning Page is designed to help educators use the American Memory Collections to teach history and culture. It offers tips and tricks, definitions and rationale for using primary sources, activities, discussions, lesson plans and suggestions for using the collections in classroom curriculum.

      This site is currently undergoing a facelift. Check out a preview of the new version.

      And for those unfamiliar with the American Memory Collections:

      American Memory is a gateway to the Library of Congress’s vast resources of digitized American historical materials. Comprising more than 9 million items that document U.S. history and culture, American Memory is organized into more than 100 thematic collections based on their original format, their subject matter, or who first created, assembled, or donated them to the Library.

      The original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music. Each online collection is accompanied by a set of explanatory features designed to make the materials easy to find, use, and understand.

      ++ The Vietnam-Era Prisoner-of-War/Missing-in-Action Database

      This database has been established to assist researchers interested in investigating the U.S. Government documents pertaining to U.S. military personnel listed as unaccounted for as of December 1991. The title of this collection is “Correlated and Uncorrelated Information Relating to Missing Americans in Southeast Asia.” The documents are declassified by the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) and released to the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, for public access.

      Researchers using this database can identify documents of interest by using search terms such as last names, country names, service branches, keywords, and statements such as “downed over Laos.” Once identified, copies of desired documents may be obtained in three ways:

      1. Researchers wishing to use this microfilm collection may come to the Library of Congress Microform and Machine Readables Collection Reading Room, located in the Thomas Jefferson Building, First Floor, Room LJ-139B.
      2. Microfilmed copies of the material can be sent to the researcher’s local library on inter-library loan for viewing. This service is free, but materials must be returned to the Library of Congress.
      3. Photocopies or microfilmed copies of desired documents can be ordered from the Library of Congress’ Photoduplication Service. These copies must be paid for, but are retained by the researcher.

      As of September 2008, this database contained 153,206 records.

      ++ Webcasts from the Library of Congress
      A privileged few of us are able to take first-hand advantage of LC’s rich and varied schedule of events, performances, panel discussions, etc. But everyone can pick and choose from among the many, many webcasts available online here. Browse by general topic (biography/history, culture/performing arts, education, government, poetry/literature, religion, science/technology), choose from among the current top ten (listed at the upper right), or check out what was recently added — such as playwright and screenwriter Mark Stein discussing How the States Got Their Shapes. You’ll even find webcasts and podcasts from the 2008 National Book Festival.

Posted in Business and Economics, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Guide to the Global Economic Crisis

Monday, October 6th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Guide to the Global Economic Crisis
By Robert J. Tiess, Reference Department, Middletown (NY) Thrall Library

Editor’s note: We are big fans of one-stop shopping sites here on ResourceShelf, and we are unabashedly partial to sites created by librarians. This week’s resource is both…and since the topic is especially timely, we’ve invited one of its creators to tell you about it.

Mary Flannery Climes, our Head of Reference, and I created a web resource guide in hopes of helping people locate key information on the current economic crisis, related concepts and initiatives, as well as recent U.S. Government statements and actions concerning the situation.

Our web resource guide contains:

  • National & International Economic Information
    • Learning about the Economy
    • Economic Indicators
    • Global Economic Crisis Coverage
    • Economic News (U.S. & Global)
    • Government Information (relevant to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008)
    • International / Global Economies
  • Personal Finances / Consumer Interest Topics
    • Banking
    • Credit & Debt
    • Energy
    • Housing Crisis / Mortgages / Subprime Mortgages
    • Investments
    • Labor & Unemployment
  • Economy keywords/subject headings for researchers

The guide is updated as new information becomes available.

Our decision to create this resource guide partly stems from our long-held belief that a library can and probably should (wherever possible, appropriate, in support of the institution’s mission) act as sort of a “first responder” whenever the public’s need for substantial and immediate information intensifies.

At such a time, when search engines have yet to index key points of information, when media sources are just starting to make sense of and report on breaking news, and when the general state of information (on and off the Web) can range from the uncertain to the chaotic, libraries can step in and lend a sense of stability, direction.

How?  By combining traditional library strengths (such as organizational skills and resource awareness) and related knowledge and practices with the latest resources and technologies, we believe libraries can provide some notable degree of “informational relief” by offering clear and convenient paths to critical sources.

What can make such efforts especially advantageous and attractive is the ability to not only point to remote websites but also to feature otherwise unknown resources available within one’s own library or library system.  Collections, databases, and any other materials or services (library, community-based, or local government) relevant to the cause can be highlighted for the instant benefit of each library’s patrons.

These considerations inspired us over the years to create topical web guides (http://thrall.org/guides), our Special Coverage Center (http://thrall.org/special), Current Interests (http://thrall.org/current), and even our blogs (http://thrall.org/blogs). Many of these guides have local linkage.

Several factors determine the content and structure of our guides, including, but not limited to:

  • The nature and complexity of the subject.
  • The strength of local (in-house or library system-wide) resources.
  • All the local service area considerations, including demonstrations of the need for specific information by local patrons; local news coverage sources; local government and community services,   activities, contacts, and so on.
  • The currency, quality, and relevancy   of information available; consequently:
  • Collection development criteria.
  • The information actually available at the moment and how that information might be made more navigable through classic, contemporary, or novel subject headings and groupings.
  • How information might need to be reorganized as new sources/materials become available.
  • How the guide could be integrated and cross-referenced with our other resources and Reference services and, later, incorporated with items like our in-house publications and classes.

Afterwards, each guide remains in a state of perpetual reconstruction, organic and evolving in response to dynamics in the informational environment, which often influence and require the resource guide to adapt in various ways if it is to survive (i.e. be visible, discernible, relevant) amid millions of other web pages indexed by search engines.

Such work requires a strong initial effort, preceded by planning and achieving a familiarity with the resource you wish to create a pathfinder for, and succeeded by a long-term commitment to keep the guide alive and thriving through periodic edits and link reviews (and not simply automated link validation, but actual human site checks to ensure every resource included is still at least what it once was when you first listed it in your guide).

We believe such efforts are indeed worthwhile — necessary, even — if a library is to give its patrons a better starting point than an empty search box. We applaud other libraries engaging in comparable local/web resource organization for patrons.  Likewise, we would encourage other libraries not currently involved in such resource guide creation to consider pursuing something comparable. In doing so, more libraries might enjoy increased appeal, relevancy, and utility within their communities, possibly to the point of reclaiming the “first-stop-for-information” status often lost to search engines these days.

Posted in Business and Economics, Libraries and Librarianship, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Lists & Rankings

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Lists & Rankings
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Everyone seems to love lists and rankings. There is perennial interest in biggest, richest, highest rated, most popular, etc., etc. Of course, some of these compilations are highly subjective, e.g. The Top 18 New Money Management Sites. But many of these do have reference or research value, such as U.S. Census Bureau lists, e.g., Fastest Growing Large Cities in the United States.

Here on ResourceShelf, we’ve kept track of Lists & Rankings for as long as we’ve been in existence. (seven-plus years, if you’re counting). This has its own category here, if you haven’t already noticed. Half a dozen recent postings:
+ The 50 Richest Members of Congress
+ Largest US Bankruptcies
+ America’s Top Wired Colleges, 2008 Edition
+ 2008-2009 U.S. Television Market Rankings (PDF)
+ America’s Hardest Drinking Cities
+ UK Top Consumer Brands

Special issues of magazines often contain valuable list/ranking information that would otherwise be difficult to find — i.e., for specific industries, professions, etc. Gary’s original List of Lists, now maintained by Special Issues, is a good place to start looking. We also like the James J. Hill Reference Library’s Special Issues Database. Once you find what you need, you can search for it online or in your local library, or order it from Hill’s document delivery service. (We featured Hill Library’s BizToolKit as a Resource of the Week last August.)

Posted in Lists and Rankings, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: ResourceShelf Special Collection — Media Guides, Factbooks, Fact Sheets, Press Kits

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Resource of the Week: ResourceShelf Special Collection — Media Guides, Factbooks, Fact Sheets, Press Kits
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Last June here on ResourceShelf, we started “collecting” media guides, factbooks/fact sheets, and press kits from a variety of government agencies, professional societies and other organizations. Why? Because they are so utterly useful. Since these resources are designed for primarily for media outlets, they are content-rich, and may also include photos and/or contact information.

You can usually ferret these out on your own when visiting organizational websites by clicking on links that say “Press,” “Media Center,” etc. Generally, you’ll find a collection of press releases (though if you look at as many of these sites as I do, you’ll find yourself shaking your head over all the press release archives that haven’t been updated since you had to connect to the Internet with a modem and an acoustic coupler). If you’re lucky, you’ll also find online media guides, factbooks or meaty FAQs. These can be good ready reference material or fodder for papers and reports.

A dozen examples of what we found:
+ Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress: Fact Sheets
+ GLAAD Media Reference Guide, 7th Edition (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation)
+ Guide to Researching Public Records (Federal Election Commission Press Office)
+ Human Genome Project Media Room
+ Major League Baseball: Media Guides (PDF) for All 30 Teams
+ A Media Guide to Disability (Connecticut Council on Developmental Disabilities)
+ National Weather Service: Information Center
+ Planetary Fact Sheets (NASA)
+ Psychology Topics (fact sheets — American Psychological Association)
+ Terrorism and Other Public Health Emergencies: A Field Guide for Media (via U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Newsroom)
+ ToxFAQs: Frequently Asked Questions About Contaminants Found at Hazardous Waste Sites (Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry)
+ U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Species (Endangered Species, Birds, Invasive Species, Pollinators, Image Library, Wildlife Fact Sheets)

Posted in Media Guides, Factbooks, Fact Sheets, Press Kits, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Five Niche Search Engines

Monday, September 15th, 2008

Resources of the Week: Five Niche Search Engines
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

We’ve done niche websites here as well as sources of niche statistics. This week, we’ll take a look at a handful of niche search engines. If you’re a regular follower of ResourceShelf, you know we preach the gospel of bypassing a general Web engine for a more focused search tool whenever possible. So consider these when the need arises.

+ eHealthcare Bot

Searches selected healthcare resources and sources taken from various Subject Tracer Information Blogs and resources from the Virtual Private Library. Currently over 119 healthcare meta search engines and resources are accessed.

This Google Co-op search engine, which appears to be updated regularly, is a project of Marcus P. Zillman, a Internet consultant, writer and speaker who has been hunting and gathering on the Web for more than a decade. We all know the pitfalls involved in searching for health information on the Net. Marcus has culled out high quality medical resources and bundled them for metasearching here.

+ Homeland Security Digital Library: Search 30+ Homeland Security Blogs

The librarians at the Homeland Security Digital Library created this custom search engine to help blog readers find postings on topics of interest in the growing community of Homeland Security bloggers.

Who’s behind the Homeland Security Digital Library? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Preparedness Directorate, FEMA and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security. As “the nation’s premier collection of homeland security policy and strategy related documents,” it’s definitely a key destination for anyone doing national security research. But we think it’s especially cool that the librarians here have created a search tool for the homeland security blogosphere. We can only assume that they’ve focused on blogs with worthwhile content rather than…well, screed, but a list of the blogs being searched would be helpful here.

+ LibWorm

LibWorm is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries.

Do you have the time to read more than a thousand librarian-oriented blogs…and would you want to, even if you did? LibWorm allows you search the archives of more than 1,500 library/librarian-oriented RSS feeds. Radio buttons facilitate and/or Boolean options as well as phrase searching.

Not finding what you need here? Try LISZEN, a Google co-op engine where you can search 750+ library blogs and maybe get different results.

+ Omgili

Omgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources. Omgili knows to analyze and differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.

A tag cloud at the bottom of the page shows “hot topics” of the moment, or you can click on the Buzzzz link at the top to see popular videos, headlines, movies and products. Also on this page — a nifty little tool called Omgili Graphs which allows you to pick any three keywords and compare their “online buzz” over the past three days.

Two other search tools that focus on online forums are BoardReader and BoardTracker.

+ Twitter Search. Until this past summer, this was a standalone search tool called Summize. Personally, I’ve never found Twitter useful enough to actually join, but I’m not above mining its content for trends, etc., when appropriate. Plus, you can save your search as an RSS feed if you’re interested in following a topic at a microblogging level, which could be useful for marketers, advertisers…politicians, etc. The advanced search interface allows you to refine your search in many different ways — i.e., by people, by geography, by posts containing links, etc. But even the basic keyword search form supports a wide variety of search operators.

Posted in Resource of the Week, Search News, Search Tools, Source File, Web Search | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Court Records Free Reference and Directory

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Court Records Free Reference and Directory
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

If you work with public records at all, you quickly realize that different states and different jurisdictions have all kinds of laws/rules/quirks about what they will or will not make available online. Florida, where I work, is an “open records” state — which means, in practice, that we are pretty darn spoiled because the amount of public information you can access free via the Internet here is awesome. Not so in other locales, where it can often end up costing serious money to obtain a document.

But since free is good — particularly in these economic times when everybody’s budget is lean — doesn’t it make sense to try fishing for what you need on the Web before contacting a vendor? And let’s face it…court records are confusing, especially if you don’t work with them regularly. Even if you know your way around the court system in your state, it is often quite different in other states. And so the Court Records Free Reference and Directory — provided by Northwest Location Services (”Finding People Since 1990″) — is a valuable resource:

Access to trial court records varies from state to state, and many trial courts offer online access to court records or court case information through statewide judiciary or individual court websites. Use CourtReference.com to find online court records and contact information for trial courts in every state and county. To help make a search for court records more targeted and effective, CourtReference.com also offers a summary chart of the types of cases heard by each type of court in each state, as well as more detailed information about the jurisdiction of each type of court.

CourtReference.com lists links to online court record search services offered by statewide trial courts, individual trial courts and government agencies. In addition, there are links to other online legal resources from courts, government agencies, bar associations and non-profit legal services organizations. Statewide and local links include online access to court records, online court case information, court dockets, court calendars, published court orders, legal information, legal research, self-help tools, online court forms, court services, online payment services for court fines and fees, free legal services and lawyer referral services. Links to online legal resources offered by individual courts are listed in the Court Directory, with court location and court contact information for every state and county.

Basically, all you have to do here is choose a state and click. Voila! You get a nicely written and formatted guide to that state’s court system. At the top of each page, you will find a few search options — a dropdown menu that offers directories of courts by county; a search box that helps you find court records by town or zip code; a dropdown menu that helps you locate court resources by category (e.g., case records, dockets, opinions, online fine payments, etc.); and, finally, a dropdown menu that allows you to hop to a different state page.

Note that there is a “Public Records Search” form directly below these options; this is basically an advertisement for Intelius, which is a pay service.

Keep scrolling down the page for a brief, lucid explanation of the state’s court system. At the bottom of the page is a useful chart that tells you where to find which kinds of cases. Keep in mind that you will not necessarily have Web access to these documents, but at least you will have some idea of where you should be looking.

You might also be interested in the Court Records Blog associated with this resource.

And these folks offer a Free Public Records Directory:

Use of our links is absolutely free , although some state or county agencies may charge fees for accessing public records. All links indicate whether online public records searches are available for free, as paid services, or not available online. Where no online search options are available, we attempt to provide contact information for the appropriate agency.

It has its own associated blog, as well as a discussion forum that is organized by state.

Bonus Resource:
Court Records Free Reference and Directory is oriented toward state courts. Interested in federal courts? Bookmark this one:

+ A Journalist’s Guide to the Federal Courts

Federal judges and the journalists who cover them share much common ground. One clear area of mutual interest is accurate and informed coverage of federal courts. A Journalist’s Guide to the Federal Courts is intended to assist reporters assigned to court coverage.
…
There are justifiable and distinct differences between the three branches of government and the access they grant the news media. Most of the work of federal courts is performed in open court and decisions, and in most cases court filings are available on the Internet. This primer is aimed at helping reporters who cover federal appellate, district, and bankruptcy courts – the cases, the people, and the process.

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Resource of the Week: State and Federal Electronic Government in the United States, 2008
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

We usually don’t offer up a report as a Resource of the Week here on RS, since posting reports is what we do on DocuTicker, our sister site. But this report from The Brookings Institution came out just before Labor Day weekend, when posting on both sites is traditionally light, and we thought it was interesting enough to bring it to your attention.

The social and political impact of new technology long has been debated among observers. Throughout American history, technological innovations – from the movable-type printing press in the 15th century, the telegraph in 1844, and the telephone in 1876 to the rise of radio in the 1920s and coast-to-coast television broadcasting in 1946 – have sparked much speculation. Transformationalists often claim that new technology will produce widespread consequences. Incrementalists, on the other hand, point to the influence of institutional forces—such as structural fragmentation within government as well as issues related to the investment cost and organizational structures of state and federal government—in limiting the speed and breadth of technology’s impact on the public sector.

This report assesses the nature of American state and federal electronic government in 2008 by examining whether e-government effectively capitalizes on the interactive features available on the World Wide Web to improve service delivery and public outreach. Although considerable progress has been made over the past decade, e-government has fallen short of its potential to transform public-sector operations. This report closes by suggesting how public officials can take maximum advantage of technology to improve government performance.

These key findings come from the full report (PDF; 543 KB):

+ Eighty-nine percent of state and federal websites have services that are fully executable online, compared with 86 percent in 2007.

+ Three percent of government websites are accessible through personal digital assistants (PDAs), pagers or mobile phones, up from 1 percent last year.

+ Seventy-three percent of government websites have some form of privacy policy available online (the same as last year), and 58 percent have a visible security policy (up from 52 percent last year).

+ Forty percent of government websites offer some type of foreign language translation, up from 22 percent last year.

+ Sixty-four percent of government websites are written at the 12th-grade reading level or higher, which is much higher than that of the average American.

+ Seven percent of government websites have user fees.

+ Twenty-five percent of federal websites and 19 percent of state websites are accessible to the disabled.

+ The highest-ranking state websites belong to Delaware, Georgia, Florida, California, Massachusetts, Maine, Kentucky, Alabama, Indiana and Tennessee.

+ The top-ranking federal websites are the national portal USA.gov, Department of Agriculture, General Services Administration, Postal Service, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Education, Small Business Administration, Library of Congress, Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board.

See also from Brookings:
+ Improving Technology Utilization in Electronic Government around the World, 2008

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Databases — National Institute of Standards and Technology

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Databases — National Institute of Standards and Technology
By Pat Harris, Technical Information Specialist (NIST)

Editor’s note: Do you work with standards? There was a time in my career when I did just that. Pat Harris, Technical Information Specialist at NIST, sent us a message to let us know about these resources, and we asked her to tell us more…so that we could share this knowledge with you.

ResourceShelf has, collectively, an amazing audience. We always enjoy hearing about resources you have developed or are hosting. Here’s Pat:

—–

Technical standards are one of the niche information resources that often get overlooked. This is especially true in the Untied States where the standards environment appears chaotic (and often is). Even for those who call themselves “standards professionals,” it is tough to determine which particular standard among many is operative. But over the last ten years, the federal government — recognizing that standards are increasingly important to national and global trade and critical to building a coherent business infrastructure — has invested in creating a number of free online databases to expose different facets of standards information.

The two databases that I will tell you about were developed by the Standards Services Division at NIST the National Institute of Standards and Technology (known for many years as the National Bureau of Standards.) Although these tools may not have the glitz and glam of commercial products, they have content value and are worth exploring.

And, of course, they are free.

If you work with researchers or faculty examining trade issues and the economy, companies outside the U.S. that want to import their products to the US, or US companies that are building an export strategy, you will want to know about these information tools which expose different facets of how standards are being used.

The Standards Incorporated by Reference (SIBR – I pronounce it “cyber”) database aggregates information on private-sector standards that are cited in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), the federal government’s comprehensive codification of all federal regulations. If a standard or process is cited in the CFR, then it must be used. Not doing so is not an option if you want to do business in the U.S.

Using SIBR, you can easily find what U.S. standards are cited and underpin mandatory U.S. regulations. Why would you want to know this? In the U.S., the standards system is voluntary and market-driven — there is no “standards tsar.” Often there will be competing standards developers or at the least overlapping standards “camps.” Using the SIBR you can quickly extract the details on which U.S. standards in federal regulations are operative and be prepared to design to that standard.

You can also quickly determine how many times standards promulgated by particular standards developers are cited in the Code. You’ll find that over 300 standards organizations are mentioned. At the head of the pack are ASTM, capturing almost 2,400 citations; true to the 80/20 Rule, most organizations have fewer than ten references.

—

Notify U.S., the second standards tool NIST makes available, reports on proposed national regulations and standards that are potential Technical Barriers to Trade and might impact global trade.

This database aggregates all of the TBT Notifications issued by the 153-members of the World Trade Organization. The World Trade Organization (WTO) works to make international trade flow smoothly and fairly by requiring that the rules of trade be transparent and predictable. This database supports transparency because it makes public what is going on at the ground level.

What we see in the trade world is that, as traditional trade barriers such as tariffs and duties have been lowered, technical barriers to trade, such as national regulations and standards, have proven to be equally effective tools for restricting access to national markets. Labeling and packaging requirements, and conformance to a particular national standard are the most common examples of technical barriers to trade. To support an open and transparent trading community, WTO members are required to inform the WTO community of proposed national standards and regulations that might be construed as a Technical Barrier to Trade.

The Notify U.S. database aggregates all of the WTO notifications and makes them searchable by country, topic, HS (Harmonized Schedule) code and ICS (International Classification for Standards, an ISO code set) code. Most important, it also links each entry to the full-text of the original announcement. For example, U.S. entries are linked to the announcement in the Federal Register. This feature ensures that database users get to the legal source.

Notify U.S. also offers an email alert service; registered users receive a brief email message telling them of new notifications that meet their defined profile. Is your company a pump manufacturer that exports only to Japan and Korea? Your Notify U.S. profile can be set up to include only Korean and Japanese notifications that pertain to pumps. This feature minimizes clutter in your in-box.

This database has grown considerably since its release in 2005 and, over time, trends will emerge. Already you can see that China, the U.S., Brazil are the biggest notifiers. However, it is also interesting to note that countries that are classified as developing economies are starting to notify proposed national standards and regulations, a sign that their economies are expanding due to growing trade culture.

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resource of the Week, Resources | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Child Welfare Information Gateway

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Child Welfare Information Gateway
By John L. Vogel, Library Services Manager

Editor’s note: The Child Welfare Information Gateway — a service of the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — has proven to be an excellent source of reports and other documents for our sister weblog, DocuTicker. Library Services Manager John Vogel routinely e-mails us to let us know what’s new on the site. We asked him to tell us more about the Gateway, and he kindly put together this Resource of the Week for you.

—–

Child Welfare Information Gateway promotes the safety, permanency, and well-being of children and families by connecting child welfare, adoption, and related professionals to information and resources that help them address the needs of children and families in their communities.

A service of the Children’s Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare Information Gateway provides access to print and electronic publications, websites, and online databases covering a wide range of child welfare topics, including:

  • Family-centered practice
  • Preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect
  • Supporting and preserving families
  • Out-of-home care
  • Achieving and maintaining permanency
  • Adoption
  • Systemwide issues and information

Website Highlights

+ Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect, including resources and information for Child Abuse Prevention month

+ National Foster Care & Adoption Directory, including State-by-State listings of adoption agencies, State officials and services, and support groups

+ Laws & Policies, including information on Federal and State laws

+ Statistics, reports, databases, and other sources of demographic data on children and families in the United States

+ Workforce & Training Resources, featuring curricula, publications, training organizations, and university degree programs

+ Improving Practices, including information and resources on evidence-based practice and program evaluation

+ Spanish-Language Publications from Information Gateway and others, for use by professionals and families

+ Online Catalog, providing listings and descriptions of all publications available from Information Gateway

+ Logic Model Builder to assist child abuse and neglect prevention and family support programs in evaluating their effectiveness in improving outcomes for children and families

+ Search the Information Gateway Library for full-text electronic versions and abstracts of more than 50,000 publications

+ Free email subscription services, including E-lert!, a monthly email about new Information Gateway publications and resources; My Child Welfare Librarian, which notifies you of recent additions to our library collection in your areas of interest; and Children’s Bureau Express, an online digest of news, issues, and trends in child welfare and adoption.

Posted in Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Another Handful of Niche Sites

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Resources of the Week: Another Handful of Niche Sites
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

In all likelihood, you don’t need any of this information right now. But you never know — and maybe someone in your life could benefit. Sometimes you are searching for something very specific, and that is how I unearthed this eclectic assortment of sites.

+ Ballotpedia

Ballotpedia is a free, collaborative, online encyclopedia. It focuses on ballots, ballot measures, ballot access for initiatives and candidates, petition drives, the supporters and opponents of initiatives and, in general, all things ballot.

Ballotpedia is a wiki, which means that anyone–including you right now–can edit any article by clicking on the “edit this page” link that appears on every article on Ballotpedia. By helping to edit, add information, any fix any mistakes you see, the quality and depth of the information steadily improves and grows over time.

The Sam Adams Alliance became Ballotpedia’s sponsor in March 2008, sponsoring two paid editors and underwriting the server space and other expenses. Ballotpedia was originally sponsored by the Citizens in Charge Foundation. The project commenced on May 30, 2007. As of March 15, 2008, Ballotpedia had 4,030 pages and 238 registered users.

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but here in Florida, there always seem to be a wealth of “citizen initiatives,” etc., on the ballots at election time. The ballot language is often dense and impenetrable, and it can be difficult to figure out what you are voting for — or against. Ballotpedia attempts to keep track of these things and provide some context. It explains how the measure got onto the ballot in the first place, and tells you which groups/organizations are for it and against it — something that can be particularly helpful in the case of those ballot initiatives sponsored by special interest groups, but disguised by language to seem like something other than what they are.
–
+ Cornell Lab of Ornithology Macaulay Library Animal Sound & Video Catalog

Nestled in the wilds of Ithaca New York, the Macaulay Library preserves recordings of animals. We collect examples of animal behavior, as well as recordings of all species.
We are part of the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology.

  • More than 80 years of recordings
  • 67% of the world’s birds
  • More than 160,000 recordings
  • Videos of more than 3,000 species
  • We collect & film video in High Definition

Anyone who enjoys birds and animals — and who doesn’t? — will love this site. You can browse or search (an advanced search form is available) the collection. If you’re not looking for anything specific, a good place to start is with the Best of Collection links:

You’ll find both sounds and video clips here. If you like, you can “visualize” sounds in something called RavenViewer, which allows you to “display and control the spectrograms, waveforms, and power spectrums of audio and video files over the Internet.” (Requires QuickTime.)

Have you ever heard of the Horned Screamer? Me, neither…but apparently it is very cool: “This is a goose-sized bird with what looks like a TV antenna growing out of its forehead. Contrary to its name, the Horned Screamer makes a loud hooting noise.” Believe me, this is a don’t miss.
–
+ Diplodocs

How many user manuals available only on cd-rom, on the internet? They are sometimes very hard to get your hands on. And will they be here when you get back? What can you do when an e-bay auction you won ends with you getting the item without the instructions? On this site you will easily be able to find the required instruction guides and user manuals that you need.

This is essentially a large archive of instruction manuals for appliances and electronic equipment, including cameras and computers. Browse by manufacturer or search. Multiple languages are supported here, and an extensive FAQ is available. You can help the cause by uploading any PDF manuals you happen to have, especially one of the “most requested user’s guides.”
–
+ Manual of Traffic Signs

This website is a listing of the most commonly used traffic signs in the United States.

The signs are listed by type (regulatory, warning, marker, guide) and sub-type (R1, R2, etc.).

On most pages, clicking on the smaller sign images will bring up a larger GIF image of that sign.

This site is the work of Richard C. Moeur, whose home page identifies him as a professional traffic engineer and a member of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (Bicycle Technical Committee). Most of the information here comes from the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, the FHWA’s Standard Highway Signs book, the Arizona Department of Transportation’s Traffic Engineering Manual of Approved Signs and similar resources. The images on this site are Moeur’s original creations and are protected by copyright (although basic U.S. traffic sign designs are in the public domain). Non-commercial use of thse images is permitted, under Moeur’s Standard Use Agreement. Note that the site is currently undergoing remodeling.
—

+ PDF Search Engine

PDF Search Engine is a book search engine search on sites, forums, message boards for pdf files.

You can find and download a tons of e-books but please respect the publisher and the author for their creations if their books copyrighted.

Though it is billed as an e-book search engine, this thing turns up plenty of PDFs that are not e-books — government documents, forms, reports… Definitely worth a try if you’re looking for something you suspect is online somewhere in PDF format. The site is currently looking for advertising support. Let’s hope it gets a sponsor because it’s quite useful.

Posted in Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Hill Library’s BizToolKit

Monday, August 4th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Hill Library’s BizToolKit
By Matt Lee, Business Information Specialist, James J. Hill Reference Library

—–
Editor’s note: The James J. Hill Reference Library, is a private non-profit business reference library, located in Saint Paul, MN. Established in 1921, its focus is on practical business information resources, and it’s considered to be one of the comprehensive business libraries in the U.S. We regularly monitor this library’s blog, as it is a valuable ongoing source of business research tips and resources. And that is how we met Matt Lee, business information specialist at Hill, who maintains the blog, along with other Hill librarians. They also offer a business-oriented Website of the Week (which you can receive via e-mail), and have developed a truly awesome resource called BizToolKit. We’ve asked Matt to give you a brief tour of the ToolKit.
—–

Every day, or so it seems, the Internet becomes a better place to find free business information. New sites continually emerge, content is added and updated, and publishers increasingly adopt an open access mentality. Unfortunately, sunk in with all that great and reputable data is erroneous, misguided, and sometimes self-serving content in the guise of good info. You could spend eight hours a day keeping up with it all, or you could turn to the folks who already do. That’s us, and the BizToolkit is the fruit of our labor.

The BizToolkit (http://www.biztoolkit.org) is a collection of the best free Web sites on various business research topics. It is created and maintained by the librarians of the James J. Hill Reference Library (http://www.jjhill.org) a nonprofit business library open to the public. It is our sole mission here at the Library to help small businesses incorporate trustworthy information into their business strategies.

Business information is all we do here at the Hill Library, and the sites we link to from the BizToolkit are the best business sources we can find online, and the ones we use.

Getting Into the BizToolkit

From the BizToolkit landing page (http://www.biztoolkit.org), click the “Free Access” link. You’ll be immediately directed to the BizToolkit home page, where you’ll see the two ways of getting to content within the site: by stage of business and by business topic.

Search by Stage of Business

Most business people operate within a limited time frame. Who doesn’t, right? But when it comes to business research, most folks only want to know what they have to know right then, at that specific moment. The Stage of Business organization presents these need-to-know topics in accordance with where a business is in its life-cycle — the five main stages being:

+ Exploring – for those just thinking about starting a business, to help figure out if it’s feasible.
+ Beginning – when an entrepreneur is ready to take the plunge, and create a plan and implement it.
+ Growing – to help small organizations get to the next level by expanding business or services.
+ Managing – to keep a well-run business well-run by managing operations, employees, and financials.
+ Maturing – for closing a successful business through sale, going public, or ownership transference.

Once an entrepreneur has selected the appropriate stage of business, BizToolkit will guide them through the top issues to consider at that point. For example, a business at the Beginning stage would surely want to consider some of the following tasks to make sure their launch is successful:

+ Create a business plan, and get help doing so with sample business plans and downloadable templates.
+ Learn more about your industry, with industry statistics and trend reports.
+ Learn more about your potential customers, with demographic research.
+ Research your competitors, and find ways to identify and learn more about companies in an industry or location.
+ Find funding, by learning more about various types of funding and finding actual sources for that funding online.

Each of these task areas will present the best free Web sites and online tools to help in completing that task. If we were to visit the “Learn more about your industry” section, for example, we’d find links to industry-specific economic census reports, a database of trend reports called the Special Issues Index, and an industry association search engine. All of these resources are great for industry data, and they’re all freely available online.

***

Search by Business Topic

On the home page of the BizToolkit is an “I Want to Find” drop-down menu. This menu bypasses the Stage of Business organization and lists every topic covered in BizToolkit individually. Remember in the above example, when we navigated to the “Learn more about your industry” section through the Beginning stage? You can get to these same industry research sources directly by selecting “Industry Research” in the topic drop-down menu. If you’re looking for information on a particular topic, without regard to business life-cycle, use this drop-down menu.

So How Can I Use the Site?

Good question. You can use the BizToolkit to:

  1. identify the best business Web sites on various topics, and
  2. feel confident about using the data and information on those sites for your research and business.

To learn more about how to put some of the available data to use for your business, you might consider these silent videos:

+ Researching Your Customers with the BizToolkit (3:44)
+ Researching Your Industry with the BizToolkit (3:27)

A Quick Note About BizToolkit Pro Membership

For the most part, the BizToolkit is a free resource. From www.biztoolkit.org, just click the “Free Access” link to be immediately ushered into the site. However, there are additional research tools available to Pro members. A BizToolkit Pro membership costs $7.95 per month and includes access to several databases not freely available online, including the Business Plans Handbook (for sample business plans), the Encyclopedia of American Industries (for industry statistics and overviews), and the New Strategist Demographic E-Books (for detailed customer research). Several other benefits apply; see the Pro info page.

Finally

And if the BizToolkit only shows you one thing, let that one thing be our contact information. The Hill Library is open to the public and we’re always eager to help folks with business research projects – using both free online tools and our vast business reference collection. If you’re having a hard time finding the answer to a question, let us know. Give us a call at 877-700-4455 or send an email to info@jjhill.org.

Posted in Business and Economics, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Niche Information

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Resources of the Week: Niche Information
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

For the last couple weeks, we’ve highlighted sources for niche statistics — i.e., data you may not need on a regular basis, but…well, you never know. For the next couple weeks, we’ll point out some places you can go to ferret out very specific types of information. Enjoy.

+ Center for Gaming Research

The Center for Gaming Research is a world-class hub for the scholarly analysis of gambling and gaming issues.

Located within Special Collections at UNLV’s state-of-the-art Lied Library, its main resource is the Gaming Collection.

Many unique primary resources can be found only within the Collection. The Gaming Collection is the repository of record for the commercial casino industry; we preserve and make accessible company documents, state publications, and other important resources.

OK, so it’s not surprising this is located at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. But think about it for a minute. Do you really want to go to Google and type in “casino” or “gambling” if you’re looking to do research? The breadth and depth of information here is staggering. Especially cool are the three specific pathfinders:

  • The academic users guide is tailored for all researchers, from high school students to established professors.
  • The media/industry guide is designed to help those in the news media and casino industry find the information they need. The Center handles hundreds of queries a year, so if you are looking for something, there’s a good chance it’s here.
  • The just curious guide is a broader introduction for anyone who’s interested in gaming research or who’s just stumbled on this page while looking for Rat Pack photos or information about casino games.

+ The Disaster Finder

If you’re looking for the latest links in disaster information, the Disaster Finder finds them for you, and even lets you preview your selections with brief site descriptions. All sites are clickable from the Disaster Finder’s category screens. The Disaster Finder also allows you to perform quick or detailed searches of its links database.

Disaster Finder is a service developed and maintained by the NASA Solid Earth and Natural Hazards Program (Code YO), NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C., USA. This service was created for the disaster community at-large so that the best links in disaster information could be found quickly and easily.

What this looks like is a mini-Yahoo! for disaster info. Currently, there are five main categories:

Browse the directory, browse the “links tree,” or search. Contains just under 650 links.

+ The Food Timeline

Ever wonder what foods the Vikings ate when they set off to explore the new world? How Thomas Jefferson made his ice cream? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why?

Welcome to the Food Timeline! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some people will tell you it’s impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods we eat are not invented; they evolve.

This site is the work of Lynne Olver, “(a) reference librarian with a passion for food history.” It’s awesome! If you’ve never visited this site, stop what you’re doing and zip over there now. The section of this site that I, personally, use most often is Historic Food Prices. Seems like somebody always wants to know what a gallon of milk cost Back In The Day (PDF; 2.2 MB; scroll down to page 31). Some data from other countries can be found here as well.

+ Federal Forms Catalog for Citizens

The Forms Catalog provides citizens and businesses with a common access point to federal agency forms.

Yep. Forms.gov provides one-stop shopping for forms across all government agencies. Excellent search functionality. There’s even a link to Internal Government Forms for Federal Employees. Keep this one in the ref desk bookmark list.

+ Measure DHS

Since 1984, the MEASURE DHS (Demographic and Health Surveys) project has provided technical assistance to more than 200 surveys in 75 countries, advancing global understanding of health and population trends in developing countries. The strategic objective of MEASURE DHS is to improve and institutionalize the collection and use of data by host countries for program monitoring and evaluation and for policy development decisions. MEASURE DHS is funded by USAID with contributions from other donors.

DHS, here at least, does not stand for Department of Homeland Security. This is a resource that offers free data and publications related to population, health and nutrition in 75+ countries. It’s particularly strong on HIV/AIDS data, and allows you to browse by country.

+ WorldPublicOpinion.org

The WorldPublicOpinion.org website provides information and analysis about public opinion on international policy issues from around the world. While the studies of the WorldPublicOpinion.org network figure prominently, the website draws together data from a wide variety of sources from around the world. We have found that data from all reliable sources are important contributions and that as more studies are integrated into analyses, world public opinion comes into increasing focus.

Want to find out what vox populi in India and Pakistan think about the Kashmir situation? Curious about how people around the world regard the energy crisis? Interested in what Russians and Americans have to say about space weapons? This is your fishing hole. Browse by region or topic, or use the keyword search box.

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Niche Statistics

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Resources of the Week: Niche Statistics
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

I am not a specialist. I am a generalist. Numerous times in the course of the average workweek, I am asked for something I’ve never even tried to find before. Probably more than half the time, this involves statistics. Almost always, I can ferret out something useful and — most important — make it look easy.

Dial M for magician.

The actual moral truth is — no matter what the subject, someone or some entity Out There is collecting statistics about it. Find the appropriate source and you are golden. Here are half a dozen examples.

+ Center for National Truck and Bus Statistics

The Center for National Truck and Bus Statistics was established in 1988 to formalize the national program to collect and analyze truck accident data, which had begun with the 1980 data year. Since then the program has expanded to include a survey of bus crashes.

This site is located at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. What’s here? All manner of statistics about truck and bus crashes and miscellaneous publications. The latest data, published in 2008, is from 2005.

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+ Wedding Industry Research, from Library of Congress Business Reference Services.

Let us be clear at the beginning. This is not a guide on how to plan a wedding, but rather on how to find information on the business of weddings.

Click on the “Statistics” link and have a look at what’s there. Besides the “usual suspects” — Census Bureau, National Center for Health Statistics, Statistical Abstract of the United States — you’ll also find links to:

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+ Rodney Fort’s Sports Economics: Sports Business Data
Professor Fort, who teaches at the University of Michigan, is one of the nation’s preeminent sports economists. The collection of data here is staggering in both depth and breadth. Fort has assembled years of salary, attendance, and financial information for Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and English and European football associations. If it’s not here, you are likely to have a very difficult time trying to find it — especially for free, on the open Web.

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+ DoD Personnel and Military Casualty Statistics, from the U.S. Department of Defense Statistical Information Analysis Division.
This is the type of data that is requested over and over and over again, at least where I’ve worked.

  • Military Personnel Statistics includes Active Duty Military Strength by Service, Active Duty Military Personnel by Service by Region/Country, Active Duty Military Personnel by Service by Rank/Grade, Historical Total and Women Only Reports – FY 1994 through FY 2001, and Selected Medical Care Statistics – Military Facilities. The latter reports were discontinued after 1996; everything else is continually updated.
  • Civilian Personnel Statistics includes DoD Employment by Organization and Function, by fiscal year, from 1997 to 2008.
  • Military Casualty Information includes extremely detailed breakdowns of casualties for Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as casualty statistics for previous conflicts.
  • Military Admirals and Generals — This link has been more or less emasculated since 9/11. Official rosters of admirals and generals are now mostly available only to those who can log into the appropriate sites on .gov and/or .mil domains. But you can still readily access biographies of Air Force and Navy flag officers.
  • Statistical Information Analysis Division Work Force Publications — Manpower statistical reports by geographic region, year, etc.
  • Glossary of DoD Workforce Terms — Helpful in dealing with the plethora of jargon.

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+ Tax Statistics, from the Statistics of Income Division and Other Areas of the Internal Revenue Service
Say what you want about the IRS, but they are extremely efficient at compiling and disseminating data. Find business tax statistics (foreign and domestic), individual tax statistics (including personal wealth), data related to IRS operations, statistics related to charitable organizations and nonprofits, various and sundry reports and — this is particularly interesting — statistics by actual tax form, for various years.

—

+ Intercountry Adoption Statistics, from the U.S. Department of State
These are basically tables that show the number of immigrant visas issued to orphans entering the U.S., for the top 20 countries, by year, back to 1990. More detailed information for FY 2007 is available as a separate report (PDF; 53 KB).

Posted in Resource of the Week, Source File, Statistics | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

As I’m sure you realize, we are huge fans of librarian-created resources here at RT. After all, information professionals have been adding value to the Internet since back in the days when you had to connect with Dixie cups and string. We also love resources that can save us time and effort.

So when our friends over at the Free Government Information blog alerted us to the Government Information Clearinghouse & Handout Exchange, from the ALA Government Documents Round Table, we clicked on over to have a look. We liked what we saw. FGI-maven Daniel Cornwall, of the Alaska State Library, provided a quick tour in a recent blog post:

Government Information librarians have acquired a lot of expertise. We’ve written a lot of guides and pathfinders to government information.

The Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of ALA has been collecting these handouts for years so we docs librarians wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we needed to create a handout or give someone a starting point for research. Recently, this GODORT “Handout Exchange” has been wikified at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Exchange.

The Handout Exchange is divided into four areas:

Doug informs us that the coordinator for the Clearinghouse project is Jennie Burroughs, government documents librarian at the Montana State University Library. Note that she makes a number of library instructional guides available via her web page. An unusual one that caught our eye: Government Documents for Anthropologists (PDF; 60 KB).

The Clearinghouse is searchable (via a Google custom search). And contributions are welcome if you have handouts/guides/tutorials of your own to share.

FGI, meanwhile, is starting a new Guide of the Week column, in which a different resource from this collection will be highlighted on a weekly basis. The first week’s pick is Afro-Americans and the Military — 1939 to 1945, from Denise Schoene, at the University of Michigan Library Documents Center — long one of our favorite fishing holes here on ResourceShelf.

Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Resource of the Week, Resources for Educators, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: PolicyArchive

Monday, June 30th, 2008

Resource of the Week: PolicyArchive
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

On DocuTicker, our sister site, you will find a neverending stream of reports from government agencies, ngos, think tanks, and other groups. It is an impossible task to keep up with the sheer volume of this material; we do the best we can to offer a representative sampling of…What’s Out There. By and large, this is high quality research material — but if you are unaware of it, it might as well not exist.

We’re not the only ones who recognize this problem. Say hello to PolicyArchive, a joint project of the Center for Governmental Studies (CGS), a nonprofit organization in California, the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis Library and Communications Consortium Media Center in Washington, DC.

Problem: American philanthropic foundations spend over $1.5 billion a year on research. Spread out across the nation among diverse libraries, institutions, databases, and websites, this valuable research can be difficult or impossible to identify and obtain once it has been published. Research organizations have no central place to distribute or archive their content, and search engines cannot easily locate much policy research. Research is not optimized to appear at the top of search engine results. Existing policy websites are focused on single issues or available only upon payment of substantial fees.

Solution: PolicyArchive simplifies this complex research landscape by providing a universal, easy-to-use, free, and open digital archive of foundation-funded and other public policy research. The PolicyArchive solution provides public interest organizations a low-cost electronic system for distributing, publicizing, and archiving their research. It allows research users, policy makers, the media, and the public to quickly access the depth and breadth of research in various subject matters. It also provides a direct line of communication between research providers and end-users, thus increasing public awareness of an organization’s work and adding significant value to their research investment. Ultimately, PolicyArchive will indefinitely preserve the life of public policy research, substantially increase its impact, and provide society at large with long-term access to the benefits of that important research.

The archive is ridiculously easy to use. A dropdown menu allows you to browse by topic, author, funder, or publisher. Or hunt for something specific, via the keyword search box next to the dropdown menu. An advanced search form offers menu-driven field searching, Boolean options, and the ability to limit your search to a particular topic or type of publication.

Topic “quick links” are available at the bottom of the home page:

The archive currently contains more than 12,000 documents; organizations are encouraged to register and upload their research to the site. More than 250 diverse institutions (PDF; 14 KB) are already doing so, from Action for Children to Women’s Voices for the Earth. The entire political spectrum is represented as well — from the liberal Center for American Progress, to the libertarian Cato Institute, to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

About halfway down the home page, on the righthand side, you can see the latest additions to the archive. You can subscribe to an e-mail newsletter if you’re interested in keeping up with what’s new.

What’s sorely missing here? RSS feeds. We’d love to see individual feeds available for each topic. Which would turn this wonderful archive into a top-notch current awareness service.

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resources of the Week: Open….Stuff

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Resources of the Week: Open….Stuff
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

When we hear the term “open source,” we typically think of software. When we hear the term “open access,” we typically think of journals. But you’ll find other types of open…stuff out there on the Web, and we’ve got a couple of stellar examples for you.

+ OER Commons

OER Commons is the first comprehensive open learning network where teachers and professors (from pre-K to graduate school) can access their colleagues’ course materials, share their own, and collaborate on affecting today’s classrooms. It uses Web 2.0 features (tags, ratings, comments, reviews, and social networking) to create an online experience that engages educators in sharing their best teaching and learning practices.

Anyone who teaches on a more-than-occasional basis will quickly see the utility of a resource like this. Even if you, personally, don’t lack for fresh course material, you can check here to see what your colleagues are doing.

And we saw plenty of lesson plans and syllabi on unusual topics and contemporary issues:

  • Web 2.0: Risks for STI/HIV – Opportunities for Prevention, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

    This lecture explores the risks and prevention opportunities presented by the emergence of social networking and internet dating sites. Presented by the Department of Population, Family, and Reproductive Health.

  • Climate change, from The Open University:

    Climate change is a key issue on today’s social and political agenda. This unit explores the basic science that underpins climate change and global warming.

  • Determining Dinosaur Speeds, from DLESE Community Service Center (SERC)

    This exercise has students determine how fast a dinosaur was moving based on the tracks it made. It allows students with minimal quantitative background to become motivated and begin to develop an appreciation for dimensional analysis as they see whether or not they could outrun the track-making dinosaurs. Measurements from any dinosaur track site can be used in this activity. Learning goals, context for use, teaching tips, materials, assessment tips and related resources are provided.

You can search the site if you’re looking for specific content; an advanced search form is available. Alternately, you can browse by subject area (Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences) or by grade level (Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary). Also, on the righthand side of the page, there is a tag cloud you can use for topical navigation.

In the middle of the page, you’ll see a section labeled “OER Top Ten,” which features a series of tabs. When you first arrive at the page, you’ll be looking here at Featured content — especially current or unique course material — e.g., Beyond Burma – Studying Buddhism and Buddhist Culture around the World (New York Times Learning Network), Wheelchair Design in Developing Countries (MIT OpenCourseWare).

Clicking the next tab will take you to a list of the Most Popular courses. Number one right now is Basic Research Methods, from ItrainOnline. Moving along to the following tab, you’ll see the Highest Rated courses, led by MIT OpenCourseWare’s Physics I — which dates back to 1999, BTW. (Ratings are user-determined, from one through five stars.) Finally, the newest items can be found under the fourth tab.
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+ Open Web Design

Open Web Design is a community of designers and site owners sharing free web design templates as well as web design information. Helping to make the internet a prettier place!

Indeed.

Let’s face it — few of us have formal design training…or natural talent. So what happens when you are tasked to put together a website for some organization, and you’re starting from…basically clueless? Well, you can browse the templates here until you see something that catches your eye. Or you can search by using a series of dropdown menus to narrow your selections by features, colors or intended use (business or fun). There’s also a link to the most popular designs. More than 3,200 templates are currently available here. Consider uploading your own if you think someone else could make use of it.

Posted in Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

Resource of the Week: Prelinger Archives

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Resource of the Week: Prelinger Archives
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Warning! Time sink alert!

I’m not really sure how long it would take to to view all 2,000+ films in this collection, housed at the Internet Archive, but this site is really like a bag of potato chips. You can’t consume just one.

Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City. Over the next twenty years, it grew into a collection of over 60,000 “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven’t been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions. Getty Images represents the collection for stock footage sale, and almost 2,000 key titles are available here. As a whole, the collection currently contains over 10% of the total production of ephemeral films between 1927 and 1987, and it may be the most complete and varied collection in existence of films from these poorly preserved genres.

Interested in learning more about “ephemeral films?” You can download a copy The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (PDF; 755 KB), written by Prelinger and published in January 2007 by the National Film Preservation Foundation.

Where to start? You could do worse than browsing the list of “Most Downloaded Items Last Week” on the righthand side of the page. Near the top of the list you’ll almost always find the 1951 Cold War classic, “Duck and Cover” – “Famous Civil Defense film for children in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of atomic attack.” The entire “Atomic-nuclear: Civil defense” category is a fascinating look at a slice of American history. Icing on the cake — reviews posted by users, the vast majority of whom seem to be intelligent and articulate, unlike the general viewing audience at…well, YouTube. BTW, a longer list of Most Dowloaded items is available by clicking the “More” link. Further down on the righthand side, you can browse “Most Downloaded Items Last Month,” “Most Downloaded Items” (ever), and “Staff Picks.” (”Duck and Cover” is present on every one of these lists.)

Another interesting way of browsing here is via the ginormous tag cloud. You’re all but guaranteed to stumble onto some delightful serendipitous finds; I fished out the following half dozen jewels at random:
+ Trees to Tribunes (1937): “How newspapers are produced, beginning in the forest.”
+ Who’s Boss? (1950): “Husband and wife struggle to attain a balance of power in their marriage. This neorealist social guidance film was directed by Alexander Hammid.”
+ 6 1/2 Magic Hours (1958): “The comfort and delight of transatlantic air travel at the beginning of the jet age.”
+ Holiday from Rules? (1959): “‘Lord of the Flies’ from an adult’s point of view, starring four willful and confused children.
+ Motivation and Reward in Learning (1948): “Uses white rats to picture trial-and-error problem solving and to demonstrate the importance of motivation and reward in the learning process.”
+ Behind the Freedom Curtain (1957): “Sales film for voting machines, promoting them as engines of governmental efficiency and practical democracy.”

We think that teachers and public speakers in particular will find much useful content here; everything is available under the Creative Commons Public Domain license. Which, not surprisingly, has led to a related collection, Prelinger Archive Mashups.

What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born!

Here’s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites. If you have a video you created using footage from the Prelinger Archives, please let us know so we can include it here.

The archive is also keyword searchable, and most of these films are available for streaming or download in a variety of formats. You can also view a series of thumbnails for each movie if you don’t want to commit to watching the entire film.

But if you’re a librarian, like both of your editors, you should definitely watch this one.

Posted in Archives and Special Collections, History, Resource of the Week, Source File | No Comments »

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