Free Full Text

FreeFullText.com provides direct links to over 7000 scholarly periodicals which allow some or all of their online content to be viewed by ANYONE with Internet access for free (though some may require free registration).

FactCheck.org

FactCheck.org will surely come in handy as the as the campaign trails become increasingly littered with facts during the coming year. Note also the companion site, www.factcheckED.org, which is intended to help educators teach their students to be smarter news consumers.

State government information

Peggy Garvin provides a useful overview of state government information resources at the LLRX.com website. And while you're at it, check out Sabrina Pacifici's Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide

FARA

Thanks Bill M. for the tip about the new FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act) website. Below is its definition of FARA, and here's a May 31 CQ/NYT article about the website..

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was enacted in 1938. FARA is a disclosure statute that requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. Disclosure of the required information facilitates evaluation by the government and the American people of the statements and activities of such persons in light of their function as foreign agents. The FARA Registration Unit of the Counterespionage Section (CES) in the National Security Division (NSD) is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Act.

Streetview

Reference librarians are only human, and some of us are not above becoming defensive and snappish when someone asks a question we can't answer. I don't know how many times I've barked "what a stupid question!" at an innocent callers who asks, "if I was standing on the corner of x and y in New York city, and turned 360 degrees, what would it look like?" No longer. Now one can direct such callers to the new streetview feature at Google maps. Select the "Streetview" button at the top of the map, zoom in on NYC (or Las Vegas, Miami, Denver or San Francisco if you prefer) select your corner and presto, you're right there on the street, enjoying the scenery. Turn 360 degrees for a panorama view. Amazing, but scary! More on this feature in Google's press release.

Which search engine to use

Phil Bradley regularly updates this nice table that matches search engines to search needs. A handy cheat-sheet, and a nice handout if you're doing internet training.

Map of names

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me "how many people named x are there in the U.S., and where do they live?" I'd be no richer than I am today, but with names.whitepages.com at least I'm now prepared to answer that very tough question (and hope someone asks it soon!). Take "Bryce" for example, the database tells me there are 6,065 of them, and it's the 1118th most common name in a field of 2,634,850 names. Click on the map to find out where they live...you'll find the highest Bryce density in Texas, California and Utah, which even has a canyon named Bryce! You can browse name-frequencies by state, and you can search on last names or combinations of first (John is most common) and last (Smith is the most common). You might think John Smith would be the most common combination, but it comes in sixth..and it's not possible (except perhaps by trying combinations of the 10 most common first and last names) to determine the most common combination. By searching a couple of unusual first names like Btisn and Buwakeow (I know noone with either of these names), ranked 397,176 and 397,198 respectively, I discovered that there was only one occurrence of each...this means that there AT LEAST 2,337,674 unique first names in the database, even though the database ranks them sequentially (a unique name like Btisn, at 397,176, is sandwiched between other unique names Btily at 397,175 and Btlim at 397177 - the sequence here, obviously, is by alphabet rather than by frequency) I'm going to work my way up the list of unique names to the names of which there are only two occurrences, but that will have to wait till this weekend. Anyway, loads of fun at names.whitepages.com. Enjoy!

LibSite

This is a very professionally done "recommendation site for library-related web services" - and could become an invaluable resource if people contribute to it!

Chronicling America - historical newspapers

From the Library of Congress and National Endowment for the Humanities, Chronicling America is a welcome addition to ProQuest's selection of historic newspapers (via Bunche) and NewspaperArchive , for those who have a subscription there (cheap, interesting...and there's lots of free stuff there too!). Excerpt from LOC on this new product:
Welcome to Chronicling America, enhancing access to America's historic newspapers. This site allows you to search and read newspaper pages from 1900-1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

International Human Rights Research Guide

Grace M. Mills, Director of the Law Library at Florida A&M University, has compiled this thorough guide to information resources about human rights.

GovTrack and OpenCongress Go Beyond THOMAS

Here's an article by Peggy Garvin comparing GovTrack and OpenCongress with Thomas.

Service Arranges U.S. Government Sites by Topic

Here's something from beSpacific: A GPO & OSU Library Partnership: "This service arranges U.S. Government sites by topic. The main list of topics is based upon the current Guide to U.S. Government Information, also known as The Subject Bibliographies Index."
This looks useful, and while you're over at OSU check out the Government Documents Page, which has some interesting things, including a link to the USG Blue Pages, which were new to me.

"The Promise of Xrefer"

Might be worth checking out for American Corners or IRCs with public access internet terminals. Writing in the January 2007 edition of Library Journal, reviewer Savannah Schroll Guz notes:

"If you are looking for a tool that answers some of the concerns that Google raises, look no further than Xrefer. This online platform provides both Google's swift, electronic convenience and an accuracy and focus that the search engine's web-scouring mechanisms cannot deliver. It is a portal to a multitude of highly regarded reference sources, drawing on 244 titles by 55 publishers and providing access to tens of thousands of images and audio clips. "

GovBudget.com

Govbudget.com is a useful and graphically pleasing site that explains how the U.S. raises and spends $3 trillion per year.

OpenCongress

(Tatiana, thanks for alerting us to this!)
excerpt..."OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

* Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
* News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
* Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
* Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
* Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress."

Primary document resources

This posting to PubLib is a compilation of useful sites for locating primary documents. (thanks to MaryLaine Block's Neat New Stuff)

Search any site from anywhere

A nice feature of Google Toolbar ver.3 for Firefox is that it allows you to focus your toolbar search window to specific websites. For example, I often have occasion to search just usinfo.state.gov, or ircworld.blogspot.com, or our own embassy website. Rather than going to each of those sites and entering my search in their respective search windows, I just enter the search word in the search window in my Google toolbar, then select the appropriate icon from my toolbar (I've got one for each of those sites) - or from the Google searchbar dropdown menu - to focus my search to one site. The built-in search window that comes with Firefox has had a comparable feature for quite some time, but there one is dependent on help from resourceful programmers to develop and share the plugin you need for the specific search (many are available - even local ones such as the Norwegian white pages - but they of course comprise only a tiny fraction of all the local searches that exist on the web). With the Google toolbar you can create the local search yourself simply by right-clicking in the search window of the site you want to search, and hey presto, you've created an icon and menu item that allows you to search that site from your browser toolbar, no matter where on the web you might be! Nifty!

Peggy Garvin tests Thomas BETA

Here's a brief walk-through of the new BETA version of revamped Thomas, for gov. info enthusiasts.