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Utah.gov Offers Some New Services

Utah's official government Web site is online at http://www.utah.gov/. This home page offers a search engine and navigation menus with each of the options listed on the left, such as Doing Business, Living or Learning in Utah.

This site works for the residents of Utah by providing many services that can be completed online. Options include Vehicle Registration and Voter Registration, as well as many others when clicking on the "View All
Services" link. Some of the online search options, such as the Driver Record Search or Business Entity List require registration. Residents can also enter a
zip code to learn what services are available locally.

Another service offered from Utah.gov is a free auto theft prevention service called Watch Your Car. After vehicle owners report their cars are not usually used between 1:00 and 5:00, police officers anywhere can stop said cars during those hours to verify the driver's identity.

Additional information on the site includes a message from the governor and links to the latest state press releases. And there is a focus on current issues suchas information about anthrax.

Portal to the World

The Library of Congress has a portal to portals of the world at
http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html. It has a link to Spanish speaking languages in the United States, as well as links to many other global countries. This is nowhere near complete -- as I understand it, this project was just started by the LOC. Let's call it a beta.

Most of the portals include an image from the country, usually a map. I selected Tajikistan and clicked on history. My only option was from the Encyclopedia Britannica, but the link only took me to Britannica's home page and I had to search all over again for Tajikistan's history. This is silly. If the LOC didn't want to link directly to an encyclopedia page, why not do a search and link the query, like so:

http://www.britannica.com/search?query=Tajikistan&ct=

? I know they couldn't do that with everything but they could do it with some of the resources. It was the same way with Health - a link to the US CDC to look it up by country. Additional options on this country's portal included Culture, Organizations, and Education. Other portals had as few as just one option, such as the one for Galapagos Islands which offered only General Resources.

This is a good idea, and I really like how the LOC weaves in the many resources from its own collections in with the links. I hope the LOC reconsiders using really general hyperlinks. I'm looking forward to seeing more countries added too.

UB Law Courtroom Opens

The Buffalo Law School has completed and opened a state court facility on campus within the law school building. The facility includes a judicial chambers and a jury deliberation room along with a bench that will accommodate up to seven judges. The $1 million courtroom will be equipped with the latest technology for students to see the legal process "in action."

After the first of next year, the UB Law Courtroom will become an actual setting of court business. A State Supreme Court Justice will assigned to the court and will conduct all types of business from oral arguments to jury trials, including federal proceedings and appellate matters.

Get more information about the new courtroom here:
http://www.buffalo.edu/home/court_article.shtml. 

Find NC

The North Carolina State Library has a gateway to state government information at http://www.findnc.org/. The site features searching by keyword or phrase, as well as an advanced search option that narrows a query by field or index. Search results are pulled from state agencies and government sites, in addition to educational institutions.

Searching for "recycling" found 500 results. Since the first one was from Meredith College (a private college in North Carolina) I think this search engine goes a little further afield than just state government sites. There's nothing wrong with that, but the search engine might be a little more useful if non-government materials were removed. Search results include name of the document, brief excerpt, and URL.

Looking at the advanced search (http://www.findnc.org/search.html), I see that there's are several different databases on may search, including a "North Carolina Education Web Pages" one, which explains the Meredith result. The advanced search also lets you search specific fields or specialized
indexes. I rescind my gripe.

Back to the front page. he left column lists links to more information about North Carolina, such as government information, counties and municipalities.
The Frequently Requested Information link opens to a list of subjects from agriculture to voting, including Occupational Licensing Boards and Commissions. Worth a look.

GALILEO

A few months ago someone wrote to tell me about GALILEO, the Georgia Library Learning Online, at http://www.galileo.peachnet.edu. I got a little ways
into it and was thereafter confronted by the weirdest Opera problem I've ever seen. Unfortunately the weirdness was such that I couldn't tell if it was the
site or my browser.

Turns out it was my browser, so I'm finally getting to take a second look at the site using Mozilla. There's a lot here and I couldn't possibly cover it all. My
informant tells me to choose "Digital Library of Georgia." (I can't give you URLs unfortunately because they're rather long.)

While there are several interesting items here, items of particular interest to LLRXBuzz readers would include Georgia Government Publications (over 12,000 public documents of departments or agencies within the
Georgia state government, dated from 1994, updated daily) Georgia Legislative Documents (Georgia Acts and Resolutions from 1799-1995; this section is made up of materials that are still being digitized and will have more materials added to it later) and Jimmy Carter's daily diary of his activities as President of the United States.

There's a lot of interesting material here; I'm sorry I wasn't able to cover it earlier. Worth a look.

Article: Yahoo Adds Paid Listings and I'm Already Confused

Yahoo announced on Tuesday (http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011113/130618_1.html) that they've teamed up with Goverture -- I mean OvTo -- I mean Overture, formerly GoTo, to show Overture's pay- for-placement listings in their own search results. And, as it says in the headline, I'm already confused....
http://www.researchbuzz.com/articles/2001/yahoo1115.html. 


Toronto Star Database Made Available by Micromedia

The Toronto Star and Micromedia Limited have teamed up to create a digitized version of The Toronto Star archives. The archives go back to January 1, 1894,
and contain over 30,000 issues and over 1.9 million pages.

The archives are available in as fully-searchable image files. The pages are complete, containing illustrations and even ads (which I'm told can also be searched; pretty cool.)

The archive is available now on a trial basis for institutions, and will be available as a paid service starting January 1. (Subscription price will vary based
on the size of the institution.) You can get more information on the archive and contact information for Micromedia at http://www.micromedia.on.ca/.