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:
International Law Resource Guide
Oxford Reference is rolling out the barrel of research!
Metasearch Engine Focuses on UK Search Engines
LLRXBu zz Tour of 50 State Web Sites
LLRXBu zz Archives : April 3, 2000 – Present
The Latest on Legal Research
Click here to subscribe to the weekly LLRXBuzz Email Update.
International Law Resource Guide
The American Society of International Law has its ASIL Guide to Electronic Resources for International Law posted online at
http://www.asil.org/resource/Home.htm. According to the Introduction, there are about 2,000 links in the chapters on human rights, treaties, environmental law, criminal law and more. And when I say “chapters,” that’s just what I mean.
This site isn’t just a portal, there is more to it than a list of links. In each chapter, the author elaborates on research strategies in that particular arena of international law, from general to specialized resources. Web links have explanations on their content and how they can benefit the researcher. Every six months, each chapter is revised and updated to assure timely accuracy of its information.
If you find the Web version of the site useful, it’s also available in a book version for $35. Worth a look.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and Michigan State University sponsors a mailing list focusing on constitutional and legal history. Subscription is open to anyone from advanced student to professional, including teachers and others interested in the serious study of constitutional and legal history. You can join by sending an e-mail to [email protected] and putting subscribe h-law in the message field.
If you don’t want to subscribe via e-mail, you can sign up via the Web at http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~law/. This page also contains recent messages from the list, monthly archives back to June 1993, reviews, and a set of links of
interest to legal and constitutional historians.
Goldie Oldies
OldVersion, at http://www.oldversion.com/, offers downloadable installation files of older software programs that have been superceded by more current versions. Click on any of the listed programs ranging from Ad-aware to ZoneAlarm and including Adobe Acrobat, Eudora, WinZip, and others.
Each program is described with its latest version and a link to its Web site, then all available earlier versions are listed. Note that the older version links are .exe files so they will start downloading as soon as you open them.
Note that these are not old versions of paid programs; instead these are older versions of free programs. The Eudora page, for example, has Eudora Light 1.5, 3.0.1, and 3.0.6. Extremely handy if you have an older computer that won’t run the latest software or browser incompatibility with newer software.
Practical Privacy Tools
An entire box of privacy tools is online at http://www.epic.org/privacy/tools.html The Electronic Privacy Information Center starts this site with a featured tool, which currently offers a way of analyzing the privacy of the your Internet connection. (It checks for cookies, your browser type, whether your browser is sending a referral URL, what plug-ins you have installed, whether you’ve got JavaScript, Java, and VBScript running, etc.)
Additional tools are sorted under categories headings like Snoop Proof Email, HTML Filters and Cookie Busters. The section on Email and File Privacy provides a link to MIT’s Distribution Center for PGP (that’s Pretty Good Privacy). PGP enables the user to encrypt messages so they cannot be
read by someone else on the network. MIT offers various versions of PGP freeware to “U.S. citizens in the United States, or to Canadian citizens in Canada.”
There are also more pedestrian privacy tools here, like firewalls and a random password generator. I would like to see more resource annotation here, but there’s plenty to see, especially for the beginner to privacy. Worth a look.
The Nevada Index
If you like law, politics, Nevada, and lots of bright colors on your Web pages, you’re gonna like The Nevada Index at http://www.nevadaindex.com/.
The first part of the front page is divided into two parts. The left side of the side has links to Nevada legal resources. Categories include law and legal resources, but also local media and Los Vegas history. (Skip the search
engines page, though — it’s still got listings for Excite, Magellan, and Webcrawler.)
The right side of the page has links to political information — state and local links, public complaints, frequently used government services, and essays about Las Vegas. Below that you’ll find search forms for several search services: the Nevada Index itself, Nevada Revised Statutes, Google, etc.
There’s plenty to see at this site and I love the attitude that recommends Opera and Pegasus. The site does look a little aged (the award notations on the front page are from 1998!) but apparently the front page was last updated in
February 2002 and there are essays/articles from 2001 and 2002. Worth a look.
Oxford Reference is rolling out the barrel of research!
Get more information in the ResearchBuzz article at
http://www.researchbuzz.com/articles/2002/oxfordreference0320.htm.
Metasearch Engine Focuses on UK Search Engines
AllSearchEngines (http://www.allsearchengines.co.uk) has started a metasearch engine that offers results from six UK-focused search engines — Overture UK, Yahoo UK, Mirago UK, AltaVista UK and MSN UK.
You have the option of waiting between 2 and 25 seconds for your search results, and it looks like you get 100 search results (ten pages of ten.) You can also search for MP3s (three UK sources) and images (two UK sources.) Fast results. Worth a look.