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:
State of Indiana Offers Health Professionals License Lookup
International Post Office Links
Donate Your Spam to a Good Cause
LLRXBu zz Tour of 50 State Web Sites
LLRXBu zz Archives : April 3, 2000 – Present
The Latest on Legal Research
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North Carolina Business Court
The The North Carolina Business Court, at
http://www.ncbusinesscourt.net/, is a forum of the trial division Courts of the state of North Carolina. The NC Business Court focuses on contemporary issues involving corporate and commercial law in the Tarheel state.
Recent opinions, listed on the front page, link to more detailed information. The more lengthy opinions are downloadable as PDF files. There is also a link to search the opinions library. Search results list the Document Title with a date and score. (The search I saw was just a basic keyword search.)
There’s much that can be learned from this site for legal and non- legal professionals if you have the technology. The North Carolina Business Court Technology Training Video is available online to the higher speed connections. (If you’re stuck on dial-up, you can request VHS and CD versions.) An Electronic Filing Tutorial Preview is also available, but it requires Flash.
What else is available for attorneys? Business Court practice pointers, Court technology training classes and more. Members of the Public may be interested in an April 2002 General Assembly report or information about class
action cases involving stucco.
On Politics
The Washington Post features a survey searchable database at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/polls.htm. The database includes polls taken since the beginning of 1998 (the “Poll Vault,” which just goes to show that even prominent national newspapers are not immune to the occasional bad pun.)
Polls can be searched by category or keyword with an additional option of narrowing the search to polls conducted within the last three months to one year. Categories include the President and issues such as Social Issues, Investigations/Scandals and Taxes/Spending. A search of “social security” for the last year found three polls. Results include the poll question and the date of the poll. Click on the date to see the poll results and the methodology
for the poll. You’ll also have the chance to break down the poll by gender, race, party, education, income, age, and region.
Since this is a Washington Post site, of course there are articles to go along with the survey queries. The front page features commentaries on the issues, such as politics being skewed without the involvement of younger voters. An interesting browse.
State of Indiana Offers Health Professionals License Lookup
The state of Indiana now offers a way to look up the license status of over 40 kinds of health related professionals. The license lookup is at http://www.in.gov/hpb/mlvs/, while the complete list of professionals covered is at http://www.in.gov/hpb/mlvs/health_related.html.
Click on the Instant Access icon and you’ll get a search form. You can search by license number, social security number, or first and last name (It looks like the name search finds partial matches — John Smi finds John Smith, etc.).
Search results include the license number, name of the licensee, city, license type, and status (expired and active are the only two I saw.) To get a complete record you can either become a subscriber to the site (in which case it’ll
cost $1.00) or you can pay by credit card (in which case it’ll cost $2.50).
International Post Office Links
Links to Post Office Pages (http://www.grcdi.nl/linkspo.htm) comes to us from Netherlands-based GRC Database Information and Graham Rhind, the company’s founder. This page is a portal to international name and address information. From the top of the page, you’ll see offerings from the company; the listings start a little further down the page.
The first category is General and it has information that does not apply to just one country. Each source is followed by its language and a brief description. Bright colors highlight extra information like if the site is new or has been updated. Countries follow the General category listed in alphabetical
order, and range from Ascension Island to Yugoslavia.
In addition to the postal links, check out the postal code links page http://www.grcdi.nl/linkspc.htm) and the
(“Other” links page (http://www.grcdi.nl/linksoth.htm) which mainly deals with telephone numbers, addresses, and mapping. The formats of these two links lists are much like the first page. Quite a lot of information here.
Gov Engine
Gov Engine (http://www.govengine.com/) is a portal of state and federal courts as well as government agencies on the federal, state and local levels. Click on a link in the map of the United States plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Additional sites, such as Guam, American Samoa, Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, are listed below the map.
From the State’s front page, you can follow bookmarks down to court and level of government links, or just scroll down the page. The last category on each page is State Resources. It includes additional links such as those to the government links from the Library of Congress, GoverNet Report Search and States.org. Nicely done!
Donate Your Spam To A Good Cause
Always wanted to do something useful with the Spam that shows up in your mailbox? News.com is reporting
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-966768.html on a new effort from CipherTrust called Spamarchive.org.
Spamarchive.org (http://www.spamarchive.org) isn’t too populated yet. Apparently the site has just launched; there are no spam materials here yet. However, there’s an overview of what’s going to be done as well as a couple of e-mail addresses if you want to volunteer.