Clusty Search Engine

A couple of years ago I told you about Vivísimo's clustering search engine. Clusty is its latest version and a whole new way to search the web.
Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This "metasearch" approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.
But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters. Clusters help you see your search results by topic so you can zero in on exactly what you’re looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. When was the last time you went to the third or fourth page of the search results? Rather than scrolling through page after page, the clusters help you find results you may have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list.

Earth Trends

EarthTrends is a comprehensive online database, maintained by the World Resources Institute, that focuses on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape our world.

Wildcard Searches using NewsBank

Wildcards are symbols that replace one or more letters or characters in a search term. They are helpful when you want to make sure you will find variants of your search term - child - children.

Single character wildcard: ? - Wom?n will find women or woman

Multiple character wildcard: * - environment* will find environment, environments, environmentalist, etc.

You can also place the * in the middle of a word. This is especially helpful for when you are unsure of the spelling. Wol*z will find Wolfowitz.

Searching NewsBank

When searching a name, always use NewsBank's proximity search. For example if you searched for "Mary Smith" you might not find articles that used "Mary Jones Smith". Here is NewsBank's proximity syntax: "mary near3 jones". NewsBank's search engine is not case sensitive.

This is also helpful when you don't remember all the words of an organization's name: "guilford near4 health" will find articles with the term, "Guilford County Department of Health". *note that you choose the number that will separate your two search words.

News & Record Archives

Do you know where to find articles written by News & Record staff writers from 1979? 1929? 1990? Articles for all three dates will be found in three different places. See me, David or Marc if you don't know where to locate archived articles.

Veterans History Project

The Library of Congress Veterans History Project and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) announced a joint community engagement initiative designed to gather first-hand recollections of the diverse men and women who served our nation during wartime. The public outreach campaign begins this spring and will continue beyond the broadcast of Ken Burns’ new film, "The War," which is scheduled to air on PBS beginning on September 23, 2007.

National criminal background checks

An article written byJackie Walters, Technical Services Librarian at Wiley Rein LLP for the Spring 2007 newsletter, Law Library Lights says that there are 7 facts that contradict the myth that a national criminal background check is even possible:
1. No central repository exists for federal, sate, and local criminal records.
2. Only 25 states - of the 49 states D.C. & Puerto Rico that have automated records - are fully automated.
3. There are no standards for collecting records.
4. Conducting on-site, county level searches where an individual has lived could be cost-prohibitive.
5. States are increasingly restricting personally identifying data, such as birth dates and SS #s and without this data you cannot link information across record types, and how do you know you even have the "right" John Doe?
6. Permissible use of these records are limited and sometimes restricted by federal and state privacy statutes.
7. So-called "national" databases are restricted to government users - law-enforcement agencies or agencies authorized by the FBI.

But don't let that stop you from requesting a search for your story. We'll do our best.