Weekend update: More research links from the week

Found a lot of things this week, most of it good stuff for researchers. I added links to Google News Archive and Google Books again, because I sometimes forget to check them and they aren't obvious from the Google search results. These are two resources that need to be prominent in everyone's bookmarks.

I searched my name in Google Books again, just for a kick, and found some pages from a great Encyclopedia of Libraries, that has a chapter on news media libraries. Quite a lift to be mentioned there, along with several other news researcher friends like Margot Williams, Teresa Leonard, and Lany MacDonald, among others. (According to this chapter description, written by news librarian friends, too.)

There were some good threads on the Newslib listserv this week, too, including a great one on the necessity of local indexing of archives. My two cents: how can you ever come up with a quick chronology of plane crashes or murders, for example, if the stories don't get those index terms when they happen? Worth every minute of the library staff's time to do that.

On another thread, great discussion of how to find experts by topic and location. Some great answers here. I especially like Pete Basofin's on using Google Scholar, but got some good news out of this too, including:

• The St. Pete Times' Angie Drobnic Holan is updating the great list of Sources and Experts on the News Division's website.
  
• Depth Reporting's guide to useful websites for reporters also has some experts links. Check out Mark Schaver's main list too. (Several links here from Mark's blog this week.)
  
• News Sources and Subject Matter Experts, database from Annapolis Group, especially for journalists.

The links:

Reference:

Good links to AIDS resources from Resourceshelf, for World AIDS day.

World Events Calendar from Council on Foreign Relations, has upcoming events by date.

Timeline of Art History from Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ghost Plane database from the book, database of secret CIA flights.

German Propaganda Archive at Calvin College.

Reports:

Great Lakes sewage report card (Press release with links to fulltext document) from Sierra Legal.

Statistics:

Highway Statistics 2005 from DoT.

Public Records:

New on the Public Records online site: Public Records news stories, free telephone exchange location search (lists local telecom provider and shows you a map with link to local public records), and free online searches including airplane registrations, documented vessels and domain names.

Journalism:

Image of the Journalist in the Popular Culture, from the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg. $35 membership gets access to a database of films, articles, books, etc. (Thanks to UNC's Barbara Semonche for the link.)

Chronicle of a Newspaper Death Foretold, in Slate, about the 1970s report on the future of newspapers. Wasn't good.

Tools:

Zamzar: cool tool converts many file formats to ones you can use, like PDF to Word.

Google News Archive Search. have blogged it before (and the one below) but worth remembering to bookmark.

Google Book Search has some new features.

SearchEngineLand is opening Dec. 11.

IP-address.com shows you the general area a computer or ISP is located in, if you have the IP address.

News:

Newstrust (Beta): "NewsTrust is developing an online news rating service to help people identify quality journalism - or "news you can trust."

Some interesting stories/blogs:

Keeping up with stream of casualties, LA Times story (in the Merc) about Michael White, creator of ICasualties.org. Have been recommending this one for years since White is a meticulous researcher who scans the official releases and news stories every day to add each death as it is available.

Bill Dedman is now doing investigative reporting for MSNBC. The pioneer in computer-assisted reporting has a report online now: Gitmo interrogations spark battle over tactics.