Margaret Berkland is the president of Data Vision Design, Inc., which has provided applications development, business process design, and other IT services to the legal industry since 1989. Prior to becoming the president of DataVision Design, Inc., Margaret was the Info. Resources Technology Specialist for McKenna & Cuneo, where she still performs those duties on a contract basis. Margaret designed and maintains the firm’s internal homepage of Internet links, and manages the links, link annotations, and article content for McKenna & Cuneo’s Web site.
FreeERISA
http://www.freeerisa.com
FreeERISA claims to provide the “latest available pension and benefit information for U.S. employers.” You need to register for a free account before you can access the data. For more in depth research, you can check into their fee-based research service which is explained on the website. Click on “Find Plan Data Now” to access 5500 filings, 11k filings plus records of public pension funds and terminating pension plans that are filed with the IRS. The “Labor Library” link allows the user access to collective bargaining agreements and decisions under the Unfair Labor Practice and Representation Election cases plus much more.
GrayLIT Network
http://www.osti.gov/graylit/
GrayLIT Network contains information on over 100,000 full-text technical reports located at the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Gray (grey) literature is defined as “foreign or domestic open source material that usually is available through specialized channels and may not enter normal channels or systems of publication, distribution, bibliographic control, or acquisition by booksellers or subscription agents.” A GrayLIT Network search utilizes the capability of each individual site search. For this reason, search results may vary. The five collections can be searched individually or by selecting multiple collections to be searched simultaneously. Results are grouped by collection. DTIC reports are not available in full text. Abstracts and ordering information are provided for the DTIC reports.
Guidestar
http://www.guidestar.org
There are 640,000 U.S. nonprofit organizations available for searching via the Guidestar database. You can search by charity name, category, keyword, city, state, income range, and EIN. The search results provide the organization name, city and state location, zip code, and a summary of the organizations mission. Reports include the organization mission, programs, goals and results, finances, and leadership. Information about the organizations is derived from the organizations themselves, IRS 990 and 990-EZ forms and the IRS BMF.
Research-It
http://www.itools.com/research-it/research-it.html
This is an all-in-one research website. Research-It provides dictionaries, a language translator (universal and specific), shipping companies, listservs, a thesaurus, a quotations database plus much more.
VolunteerMatch
http://volunteermatch.org
If you are seeking to post a volunteer opportunity or seeking to locate a volunteer opportunity for you or your firm, VolunteerMatch can be a useful website. You can register your nonprofit organization and post a nonprofit opportunity for free. By entering your zip code, you can locate a volunteer opportunity. A search can be narrowed by mileage limitations, timeframe, and type of category of volunteer activity. You can be a remote volunteer and you can search the nonprofit directory.