joy at moll projects dot com
My favorite search engine, Vivisimo (famous for clustering the search results) has just announced the beta version of a new search engine called Clusty. Clusty returns similar results as Vivisimo for a web search, with the clustered results in the left column, but it also features searching of news, images, and other things with tabs at the top.
I did a search on "census," our current topic for the Government Documents class. The clusters to the left include "Census 2000" and "Historical," both of which might be useful depending on the question at hand. The top of the main results page includes a couple of links that might encourage me to try the other searching features and two sponsored links. The first actual search result is (drum roll, please) the U.S. Census Bureau page--exactly what I want to see as the first result.
Clicking on the News tab does the same search but of news sources. Here, I learn about a census of elephants in Sri Lanka. I love some of the pictures that come up when I switch to the Image tag--a drawing of a Victorian-dressed man taking a census of a crowded household, a photo of the census shelves in a UK library, and scans of old census forms.
I learned about Clusty from the Search Engine Watch blog.
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American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century is a series of subject guides describing each decade in the twentieth century. There are quick fact boxes at the top of each page and information about the decade divided into sub-topics like Art and Architecture and Fads and Fashion. Many links are provided to other web sites and most sections have reading lists for print material available at Kingwood College Library, although many of the books are probably widely held by other libraries. It's amusing to scroll down each page just to look at the illustrations--some are from the librarians' family photo collections.
I learned about this resource when Aimee C. Quinn posted a complimentary message about it on the GOVDOC-L email list server.
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My practicum supervisor found this blog for me: CoolGov.
My government documents professor introduced us to the Geographic Name Information System, a production of USGS. A database of over 2 million places, "the GNIS is our Nation's official repository of domestic geographic names information."
Typing "Lake of the Ozarks" and searching in Missouri, I get a list of 5 features including the lake itself and learn that it is a reservoir. Clicking through, I can get to a topo map that includes Bagnell Dam.
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The Librarians' Index to the Internet, an excellent resource for finding authoritative resources on the Web, has created a themed collection of links, September 11 & Beyond. They describe it as "a well-selected group of Web sites that have proven the test of time beyond many of the ephemeral sites related to this event."
LII led me to this Annotated Bibliography of Government Documents on the topic. Since hurricanes are also in the news, the FEMA Are You Ready? on-line brochure that I discovered through the bibliography is of current interest.
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How many librarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
I don't know, but I can look it up!
From the kids' jokes web page at Multonomah County Library that I discovered on LISNews.
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The U.S. Congressional Bibliographies web site is a searchable list of committee meetings held by both houses of Congress. Each meeting topic is briefly described along with the names and titles of the people appearing before the committee.
Barbara Rehkop, Washington University's government documents librarian, says that committee meeting transcripts are under-recognized as research resources. Congress is able to draw the foremost experts on any topic to their meetings. Just by reading the material in U.S. Congressional Bibliographies, a researcher can identify the major players in the field. Transcripts of the meetings, if they can be tracked down, will yield what these experts had to say--presumably in the most clear and concise expression they could manage.
The U.S. Congressional Bibliographies site is also a good way to get a feel for the kind of topics that Congress considers. For example, searching on "hurricane" resulted in 28 hits. The most recent was a House hearing about the efforts taken to protect money during natural and other disasters. A Senate hearing in 1989 discussed modernization and restructuring of the National Weather Service. Either of these might be interesting topics for research and these hearings would be a useful starting point.
I learned about U.S. Congressional Bibliographies from a message on GOVDOC-L by Jack McGeachy announcing updates.
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Since library careers have been something of a sub-theme the last couple of days, I'll add Lisjobs.com, which I came across today through a link in Library Stuff. Besides a newsletter and job postings, Lisjobs has a blog.
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Libweb is a directory of library web sites. This would be an excellent resource for library job hunters as well as a way to locate libraries to use as examples in papers for classes.
I learned about this from an article that appeared in the recent issue of LIScareer. When I read it, the link in the article was wrong, so I wrote to the author for a corrected link. Thanks to Jennifer Johnston for the quick response.
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