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reCap

Federal Network, Inc. (FedNet.net) is introducing reCap. reCap  (http://recap.fednet.net/ ) is a video database of Congressional hearings, press conferences, policy briefings and whatever else is happening on the hill. This fee-based database is keyword searchable and search results include e-mail options. Check out the Web site for contact information
about a free demo.

Federal Judiciary Library

Aspen Publishing has posted a blurb for the Federal Judiciary Library Online at http://tinyurl.com/13z1. This product features the biographic data of the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary and the information required in the Directory of Federal Court Guidelines. It also has biographical questionnaires that must be completed when nominated to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Finally, the subscription includes the details of financial assets, including stock holdings, of senior officials within the Supreme Court System. Cost? $1,900.00.

South Dakota Puts Forms Online

South Dakota's Service Direct Web site has over 1100 forms online for its residents and businesses. Residents can select individual buttons or follow a time line of services for various age groups. Businesses will find all forms needed for operations within the state. The site also features a search engine in which forms can be searched by agency, category or keyword.  See the article on GNC at http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/19505-1.html. Note: The South Dakota Service Direct site, at
http://www.sd.gov/Main_Login.asp, requires registration. It also requires that your browser accept cookies and pop-up windows.

New Castle County Delaware Deeds Indexes Available Online

The Recorder of Deeds in Delaware's New Castle County has a site
of deed indexes at http://www.ncc-deeds.com/recclkshr/default.asp. Types of documents include mortgages and assignments from July 1969 until present and plot plans from January 1900 until present.

You can search the public index by name or date with a simple search or use the advanced search option to expand the query to include legal descriptions and document category. My name summary search produced a list of names from which I could select the ones to view more information. The summary data listed the instrument number and document location along with the mortgagor,
mortgagee and when it was received. The detailed data summary also provides a link to purchase a copy of the document. Online purchases require a Clickshare account.

Copyright & Fair Use

Stanford University Libraries has an online Copyright & Fair Use site at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/. It features links to primary materials such as the U.S. Constitution clause on patent and copyright, the U.S. Code and Federal Regulations. Primary materials include links to various case law and judicial
opinions and Supreme Court Opinions. Also on this site you will find legislation covering current copyright legislation and cases.

This site can be searched by keyword or concept. Relevancy scores are included with search results, along with icons to search for similar documents and a link to go directly to a summary of the document. Worth a look.

Digital Archive for September 11 Materials Being Built

You may already know that there's an archive dedicated to saving Web sites as they appeared around the time of the September 11 attacks (and if you don't, it's available at http://september11.archive.org/.)

Now there is an archive being created that collects photographs and digital images as well as e-mails and chat room conversations of the same day. It's available at http://911digitalarchive.org/.

The site is divided into several different sections. Stories provide the perspective of ordinary people, with over 800 narratives of what life was like on September 11. The E-mail section contains over 400 e-mails of people communicating during September 11. The images archives contains over 600
images related to 9/11 (some of them are not of the sites themselves, but are pictures taken around 9/11) and the special collections section contains links to several different forms of media, including video, Flash movies, and discussion board conversations.

This archive also has a link to other 9/11 related sites and highlights of the holdings on the front page. An extensive collection and I suspect it'll only get larger.

Tools for Webmasters

I know that ResearchBuzz covers a lot of tools for searchers, but tools for Webmasters are important too. Check out the page o' tools at
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/tools.htm.

There are several tools here. One shows how large your page is (HTML and images; it also provides an interesting HTML to text ratio.) Another's a search engine spider, which shows what your page looks like to a spidering engine. There's an HTML validator but I don't know HTML well enough to know how
well it works. It seemed to me to be picking up a lot of code that was all right.

If you use a robots.txt file to exclude search engines from your site, you'll want to check out the robots.txt validator, which checks to make sure your robots.txt file is properly formatted. Finally, the keyword density analyzer
shows you a list of the words on a specified Web page along with their frequency. The analyzer shows two- and three-word phrases, too.