Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.
In This Issue:
WIPO Records Added to Trademark.com Collection
FindLaw LawCrawler Site Revised
Multilingual Insurance Reference Site
Hurricane and Tropical Storm Center Updated
Beretta Foundation Announces texasnonprofits.org
Cold North Wind Blowing About Huge Newspaper Archive
LLRXBuzz Archives: April 3, 2000 – Present
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WIPO Records Added to Trademark.com Collection
Trademark.com has announced that it’s added records from the World Intellectual Property Organization to its collection. WIPO records will contain color images and the countries commanding protection. The records will also include the viewing and analysis of post- registration transactions. Access to the WIPO database will be through a four-hour or annual trademark.com
subscription. Get more information via the press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010612/2171.html.
FindLaw LawCrawler Site Revised
FindLaw LawCrawler has announced a redesign of its Web site at http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com/. Google now powers the site’s search engine which can query LawCrawler’s database, specific FindLaw documents and
the Web. (The places you can search are in a directory underneath the main search box. It looks like they’ve set up query URLs for the “Search Legal WebSites” part, so when you click on a search option you get search
results. For example, if you search Canada, you get a list of results that have the word “FindLaw” in them.
Just use the search box at the top of the page to change the query from FindLaw to whatever you want.) The site features links to FindLaw & Web Databases as well as Legal WebSites which include law schools,
countries, US government sites, and US state government sites. FindLaw & Web Databases link to a legal market center, library documents, forms and other various law and case law sites.
The Find a Lawyer section has 1,000,000+ lawyers in a database searchable by city, zip code, state, practice area or name. FindLaw resources, posted on the lower portion of the page, include legal news, research, community and tools.
Multilingual Insurance Reference Site
MultiTech Communications has announced the launch of Glossary Agent, a http://www.insurancetranslation.com/Glossary_Agent/index.htm. Glossary Agent was designed to provide insurance professionals access to a variety of online glossaries in one or several languages. Categories on the site include Business, Fire Prevention, Reinsurance, and Employee Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources.
Languages include English most European languages. Information on the site is available at no charge, and does not require registration to use. At the bottom of the URL noted above, you’ll see several categories of words. Choose a category and you’ll get a list of available glossaries listing the name of the glossary, the language, the author/publisher, and the month and year added.
Click on the name of the glossary and a small window will pop up with that glossary’s search interface. Use it for a search and the results will appear in the same small window. (Sometimes this doesn’t quite work, but you can scroll the window up and down.)
Glossary Agent also offers an e-journal, Language Perils, which addresses and attempts to untangle confusion in translations of insurance terms and concepts.
Hurricane and Tropical Storm Center Updated
Just in case you missed Allison, the 2001 traditional hurricane season is upon us and AccuWeather.com has announced a new version of its Hurricane and Tropical Storm Center at http://hurricane.accuweather.com/adchurr/index.asp.
The site provides information on the latest storms, and histories of storms from past years, as well as storm facts, tracking maps, satellite pictures, and retired hurricane names. Storms in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are included in addition to the ones in the Atlantic/Gulf/Caribbean region. The site offers
extensive guidance about preparing for a storm and advice on what to do — or not do — after a storm. Five-day forecasts are available for any area by entering a city, state, or zip code.
Beretta Foundation Announces texasnonprofits.org
The Beretta Foundation has announced the launch of texasnonprofits.org, providing a forum and news resource for Texas foundations and nonprofits.
The site, at http://www.texasnonprofits.org/, features articles about Texas nonprofit organizations. Its information and news section includes news headlines, a focus on success, nonprofit resources and a salute to
volunteers. The site also offers features and tools, such as bulletin boards, sample letters, useful forms and a wish list.
On this site you can also search for Texas nonprofits or foundations. There’s a simple search on the main page but I recommend you go ahead and skip to the power search at http://www.texasnonprofits.org/Search.asp. It allows you to search by organization name, city, zip, county (the county search is a pull-down menu), or category. You can limit your search to just one
item: searching just for nonprofits in Bexar county found — 2401 results! Yi. The search results contain just the name of the organization (hyperlinked), the city, and the zip code. Click on the name of the organization and you’ll get a page with the name and full address of the organization at the top, and a form for additional information at the bottom. The form contains spaces for information like mission statement, year founded, funding opportunities, etc.
Most of the listings I looked at had none of this information filled in, but there are so many listings I have no idea if this is typical of the listings or if I
just found a group without information.
Cold North Wind Blowing About Huge Newspaper Archive
Cold North Wind and the National Newspaper Association have agreed to create America’s Chronicles, which will be an online search engine the accesses the digital archives of America’s community newspapers. They’ll
start with the 3600 NNA member newspapers.
Cold North Wind anticipates that the project could eventually result in 500,000,000 pages of content that will in some cases go back to the 1600s (yow!). It’ll be launched at the National Newspaper Association’s annual convention September 12-15 (I don’t think it’ll be completely finished then; I think it will just be launched.) It will be available at http://www.americaschronicles.com. There’s nothing there right now though you will be able to sign up to be notified when the project launches.
Search Engine Compares Terms
This is cute — a little Web tool that one can use to compare the popularity of two terms in a search engine AND compare the occurrence of another keyword in pages containing the compared words.
Not clear? It might be easier to show than tell. Go to compare-stuff.com <http://www.compare-stuff.com/>. On the right side of the page is the search form. Enter two terms that you should compare (I chose Colorado and
Montana.) You can add a global search term if you want. Below that is a yellow query box for adding a comparison term (I chose snow.) At the bottom of the page are advanced options. You can change several options, including which search engine you use for this (unfortunately Google.com isn’t
available), how many things you want to compare (up to 4, so you could compare Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma), and what page-language you want to restrict your search to.
The results page is very interesting. You’re shown the list of items you compared, how many “raw” results there were for each search, AND how many pages contained both the compared term and the comparison term (just-compare provides both the page count and the percentage of raw pages with the specified term.) The comparison ends with a nifty little bar graph.
You can mess up this engine — compare the words Perl and Python and choose Perl as the comparison term. You’ll get a word inclusion rate of 120% for the compared word Perl — but it’s an interesting idea, thoughtfully put together, and carefully done. Good job.
Worth a look. (And look REAL carefully — they hid their PubMed version of this tool at http://compare-stuff.com/pubmed/.)