new links to play with

I scanned Information Today for my usual list of links to check out and came up with a few great ones this time around.

Search Engines**
Biznar.com and mednar.com are "innovative business/medical search." Basically they're federated searching for business and medical topics. I do always prefer Medline for medical information, but these are good sources as well. Both of these "beta" engines are by Deepwebtech.com.

I used "wireless electricity" to search biznar.com and it found me the FAST COMPANY article from this month's issue as well as other things like a patent (via google patents) for the "wireless electric swivel head hand lantern". :-) Some items were not free full text, but some were.

Science.gov
While checking out Biznar and Mednar, i came across science.gov which i'm honestly surprised to say i didn't know anything about. it's a partnership between usa.gov and worldwidescience.org.

Worldwidescience.org 

is also a good place to go... it's maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy's
Office of Scientific and Technical Information as the Operating Agent for the WorldWideScience Alliance.

** I'd continue to use my handy dandy librarian filtering skills to weed out a lot of the mess found via these sites, but they're another place to go.

DeepDyve.com

librarians know that most of the information on the web is in the "deep web" (less than 0.02%, according to UC Berkley, is indexed by traditional serach engines). This site claims to have access to the deep web. You have to sign up (which i haven't done yet) but there is a free and paid version... i wonder what the difference is. 

stats.oecd.org
i was hoping stats.oecd.org would be the place to go for stats online. So far so good. it's the statistical database for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). GDPs, the Agricultural Outlook, Health Expeditures, and more. take a few minutes and poke around this site, you may add it to your list of places to go when your customers need numbers.

Course Management Systems
Moodle and the Sakai project are open source CMS options for Academics.

Social Networking
ELGG.org/ allows you to create your own social network. I haven't had a chance to check it out further, but i will be.

Podcasting
I hear raves about Audacity being a great way to get into podcasting.

Semantic Search
http://hakia.com/ claims semantic search (natural language) and "search results from Cedible Sites recommended by Librarians." Even if you don't dig hakia, you may want to check out http://pubmed.hakia.com/ which is their search overtop pubmed, which we all love.

I'd be curious to see what David Lankes has to say about this claim of the whole "librarian" and "credibility" thing in light of his Reference Extract project.

Cool Firefox Extensions
Jureeka is a firefix extension that hyperlinks legal citations in webpages.

Book Price Comparisions
Bookburro is an extension that will price shop books for you. Yay!