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Thomson & Thomson Announces New Service

Thomson & Thomson has announced a new delivery service for customers in the United States and Canada. 4-Hour Speed It! will be the newest delivery option in addition the usual next-day, two-day and standard delivery options for trademark and copyright services. The new service will include a report within fourhours and a printed report on the research by courier the next
day. Get more information from the press release at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/cnw/010928/ma_thomson_thomson_1.html.

Stateline

Stateline.org (http://www.stateline.org) is operated by a research organization out of the University of Richmond. This site focuses on news about individual
states, which the Pew Center on the State feels has lost out to political news coverage. Current news is listed in the center column with links to the full
article. News is on political ("Arkansas Gov Seeks Voter Feedback on Web Site"), economic, ("Tourist States Suffering But Hopeful"), and current events issues ("Bush Asks States To Help Secure Airports").

Issues from anti-terrorism to welfare reform are listed in the left column. Click on one of those and you'll get a page with an overview of the topic on the left
(though it may not be particularly current) and news about the topic on the right (the news topic is more current.) Toward lower left is a drop-down option to select a state of interest. Selecting a state will get a map of the state with the location and name of the capitol, information about the state and its officials (with several links to demographic information) and, on the right side of the page, several links to news stories. There's also a thorough search engine for searching just North Carolina stories and, at the bottom of the page, a mechanism for comparing North Carolina's demographics with another state's (or states'; you can compare four different states with the state of your choice.) Information compared includes budget and tax data, crime and prison data, income and poverty levels, and population demographics.
 
Stateline.org features a State News Roundup tab which links to state headlines in alphabetical order, twenty to the page. This option could take a while if your state is not in the beginning of the alphabet. (There's also a drop-down menu at the very bottom of the front page that allows you to choose a state from which to get headlines. So if you live in Wyoming, do that.) Sources and dates are not listed in the blurb, but the author is usually revealed.

Also featured on Stateline.org is the My Stateline option which invites users to register for a news alert service that can be narrowed to single or multiple states and single or multiple issues. My Stateline items can be received as e-mail alerts.

This is very nicely done. Worth TWO looks.

World Factbook 2001


The World Factbook 2001 is online at
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html. Select a country from the listing on the left (the page is framed) to view its profile. Countries are listed from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Taiwan is at the very bottom of the
listing, under Zimbabwe.

The page opens with the flag of the country and a map. Following that is profile headings with demographic information. Profile headings include introduction,
geography, people, government, economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues.

Field Listing (a link at the top of each page) refers to each of the profile heading sub-categories. Fields are listed in alphabetical order with bookmark links to each letter. Click on any listing, such as Life expectancy at birth, to view data on every country listed. Also revealed is the profile category which
includes the field listing, and bookmark links to each letter. It would be nice if each of these pages was available as an spreadsheet, but I didn't see that
option anywhere.

Reference maps are listed by area along with physical and political maps of the world. (They're available in both JPG and PDF format.) Another reference section is the Notes and Definitions, which clarify each of the Field Listings. There's a lot of information here, but once you get used to moving around in it it's an excellent source.

Gov Pro

Govpro (http://www.govpro.com) is a portal for government professionals. The home page offers links to the latest issue of Government Procurement and to the Government Product News Information Center. Government related news is listed in reverse-chronological order on the lower portion of the page. The site's Marketing section offers custom research and market data sheets by product category, as well as planning and budgeting resources and an open forum on government market topics.

Click on the Links option for federal, local and state governments. Additional Links options include associations, organizations, manufacturers and suppliers.

The Article Archive can be searched by keyword or by details such as select category, select issue, author, title and date range. Another search option is
available in the Literature Online section which offers searching by keyword, company or category. The Supplier Directory offers searching by keyword with product or company listings, location, or by category.

Place Name Search Engine

Places Named (http://www.placesnamed.com/) is a search engine for place names that also incorporates information about last names in the United States. Over 200,000 place names and last names are incorporated into this engine.

The query box is on the left of the front page. Enter a place name. (Pebble works well.) You'll get a list of places with that name, along with the location (state, county, sometimes elevation.) Information varies by the type of listing. Do a search for Rocky; you'll see the popularity of the word as a first name, the postal code for Rocky, Oklahoma, stats on the town of Rocky, Oklahoma, and other listings. (If you want to see stats on a last name try the query Lightning.)

You don't have to enter a place name to get search results. You can use a zip code or an area code as well. Entering smaller numbers, like area codes, can
get you weird results. 818, for example, will show you that it's an area code for Los Angeles, but it'll also tell you that Carver is the 818th most popular last
name in the U.S., Egypt's ISO-3166 number is 818, and other interesting bits. An interesting collection of information here. Worth a look.

Good Sources for Good Sites

Reader BH dropped me a note asking me what my favorite newsletters are for finding sources. Bearing in mind that I do a lot of searching on my own, and that the greatest readers in the world send me a lot of suggestions, I like these: 

Librarian's Index to the
Internet (http://www.lii.org/search/file/mailinglist); The Scout Report  (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/), and Gleason Sackmann's Net-Happenings
(http://listserv.classroom.com/archives/net-happenings.html).
There's also Gary Price's Resource Shelf (http://resourceshelf.blogspot.com/) and Marylaine Block's Neat New Stuff on the Net (http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html).