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Library on the moon

Friend Laura Soto-Bara posts the following to the NewsLib listserv:Library on the moon http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/20/library_on_the_moon.htmlWednesday,September 20,2006The moon might be a good place for a massive storehouse of digitalinformation,sort of a Lunar Library of Alexandria. That's the ideaproposed by NASA scientist David McKay,who ten years ago led the teamthat announced that a [...]

Brushing up on sophisticated searching techniques

A helpful piece posted today on LLRX.com reminding us that just throwing what we think might be appropriate keywords into a search engine isn't the mostsensible research strategy. While you might find that the title of the articleis not exactly what it is about,the content is helpful. Here are the main points:“Summary of [...]

Tracking people and public records

Pete Weiss sends the following helpful tip to the CARR-L listserv:

Abstracted from Genie Tyburski's TVC-Alert list:“(20 Jul) Ballard announces the completion of the <http://www.virtualchase.com/topics/index.html>Database of Sources on The Virtual Chase. Released in beta during April of this year,the database contains abstracts and links to Web-based sources of information for conducting research on [...]

U.S. Terror Targets:Petting Zoo and Flea Market?

Regular readers know that the IAJ has long been interested in the quality of the data in public records databases. The NY Times of 12 July 2006 carries a front-page story by Eric Lipton on just how bad the data is in the “National Asset Database.” As Lipton's story points out:

“The [...]

Some well-deserved recognition for news researchers

Many of us have long-recognized that a top-flight team of news researchers is the marrow of any good news operation. So it is that we point you to a recent column in The Washington Post. 

NEWS | OPINIONS | SPORTS | ARTS &LIVING | Discussions | Photos &Video | City Guide | [...]

Ver 1.0 —The beat goes on

We're pulling together the final pieces following the Ver 1.0 workshop in Santa Fe last week. Twenty journalists,social scientists,computer scientists,educators,public administrators and GIS specialists met in Santa Fe April 9-12 to consider the question,“How can we verify data in public records databases?” 

The papers,PowerPoint slides and some initial [...]

Summer workshop on IPUMS databases

A good learning opportunity in the Land of Lakes this summer….

Dear IPUMS Users,

I am pleased to announce the first annual IPUMS Summer Workshop,to be heldin Minneapolis on July 19th-21st. This training session will cover fourmajor databases:IPUMS-USA,IPUMS-International,IPUMS-CPS,and the NorthAtlantic Population Project (NAPP).

For more information,please visithttp://www.pop.umn.edu/training/summer.shtml.

I hope [...]

U.S. federal FOIA officers

Scott Hodes,in a recent column on the LLRX site,points us to a potentially helpful Dept. of Justice page listing the chief FOIA officers for federal agencies. That said,he also has some appropriate criticism of some of those appointments.

FOIA Facts

Chief FOIA Officers Named

By Scott A. Hodes

Published February 15,2006

Agencies have now named their Chief FOIA Officers pursuant to Executive Order (EO) 13392. This act is the first milestone of the EO which was issued to increase agency FOIA performance on December 14,2005.

The Chief FOIA Officer is supposed to be “a …[...]

It's not that information wants to be free but it does want to be found

Danny Sullivan,a long-time search engine maven,has this to say. (Newspapers? Clueless? Gasp! How can it be?) “World Association Of Newspapers Dislikes Search Engine Exploitation,Clueless About Robots.txt Banning

Newspapers want search engines to pay over at News.com covers the World Association Of Newspapers planning to challenge the [...]

Getting that tabled data from there to here

Another reason to use Firefox….Copying and pasting data from online tables into a spreadsheet is often fraught with frustration,often centering around invisible characters or custom formatting in web tables. And then there's the problem of getting data from non-adjacent cells. Some fine fellow —actually,it is Davide Ficano —has written a slick [...]