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Newsletter March 2002 Newsletter index E-mail subscription to the newsletter |
Table of Contents
The Research Library is currently offering access to the Environment and Safety Library as part of a one-month trial of this product. BNA's Environment and Safety Library on the Web offers access to the complete collection of federal and state environment and safety laws, regulations and supporting materials, as well as notification of changes to those documents. Here are some (but not all) of the Environment & Safety Library offerings:
To get there, go to Environment & Safety Library and click on "Subscriber Access" in the right-hand column. Contact the library at 667-5809 or library@lanl.gov for a user name and password. Please let us know if this product would be worthwhile addition to our electronic resources here at LANL.
At a speech in Australia last week Chris Cramer, International President of CNN, discussed the difficulty of trying to make money from the CNN web sites. He said CNN had a very heavy investment in online staff, especially in the U.S. Although he believes that news Web sites are viable, he does see subscription access as a possibility. This reminds me, if you haven't looked at the nifty way Google is presenting news headlines, click over there right away. Under the classic box, click on the phrase "News and Resources". Then choose "Click here for headline news". Not only is each headline linked to a news source, but under each headline are links to four other sources for the same story. A great idea for presenting varying views of the same issue (librarians love that sort of thing). For other news resources on the Web, see our News Sources page.
To support research efforts at LANL Research Library staff have pulled together a collection of links to web resources on Defense and Military Science. The new Defense/Military page contains over to electronic journals, databases and indexes, books, defense news sites, online reference workds and military dictionaries, biological and chemical warfare sites, and other web resources for defense and military technologies. If you have any additional suggestions for links for this page, please
direct ideas to Jack Carter, jxxc@lanl.gov.
Weblogs appeal to me the same way talk radio does, time spent there should be measured in the nano range. But, the numbers keep on growing (the NY Times estimates 500,000+) and perfectly ordinary journalists continue to write about their positive attributes. There is now a transition from the world of the personal diary kept by a teen-age hacker to the professional sphere of Cisco engineers. Companies are encouraging their use among teams that need to collaborate and to keep all members informed about daily, if not hourly, performance/progress. They can be used to build a community around a specific interest. Perhaps the technology has been too simple and too free--you might start your own experiment by going to www.blogger.com.
FirstGov, originally released in September of 2000, was recently redesigned to do away with the huge search engine approach (that resulted in thousands of hits) and provide more of a service-orientated portal approach. FirstGov is an ambitious site that boasts over 35 million federal Web pages, along with state and local government sites. Their aim? Giving Americans access to a plethora of government services and informationeasily and online. In addition to the search engine, you now may select customer gatewayscitizens, business and governmentto find what you need. Here are a few examples from each gateway:
In the interests of avoiding standing in line or being on hold, check this out.
The following new electronic journals have been added to the library collection and are available from your desktop: Biology Chemistry Engineering Environment General Physics
Three of the search engines we've reviewed recently have won major awards from the "Search Engine Watch"a web site and information source run by Danny Sullivan, guru of such things. Scirus has won for 'Best Specialty Search Engine" and Vivisimo has won for 'Best Meta-Search Engine' and also 'Best Search Feature'. Not surprisingly, Google swept most of the other awards, from 'Best Design' to 'Outstanding Search Service'. Since these were not televised we can't comment on what Google wore to the event. In the last week Google has garnered lots of buzz. The Economist is worrying about whether they will go public and how is that they keep being successful by operating a site so different from the others. The Seattle Times is also puzzled by Google's stellar performance. They believe their most significant accomplishment has been to democratize information access and are concerned that this may decline with continued success. Traffick wrote about Google's new formula for pricing advertising that it was a positive step, and that customers benefit from the clearly labeled ads. Even though Northern Light shut off its Web search it is still available at http://www.nlresearch.com and a couple of other locationsNorthern Light folks say this site will soon be subscription only. Until then, enjoy! Want to be notified of new issues? Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Jack Carter, Lou Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian. The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed
an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or
further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions
or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter
Editor, Kathy Varjabedian. |
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