Archive for the 'Research Resources' Category

I guess most Google Answers Researchers have used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but if you haven’t then it’s definitely one to check out.

Start at the Internet Archive Home Page, and type a URL into box above the “Take me back” button (not the “Search” box at the top). You will then see a page listing every date for which the Internet Archive holds a copy of that webpage. Just click on the date that you are interested in.

For example, here’s how the Google home page looked in 1998.

The advanced search lets you find archived pages in other ways, and also allows you to highlight the changes from one date to another.

I love reading old newspapers online.

Actually, I love reading old newspapers even if they’re on paper.  But the advantage of online historical newspapers is not only the ease of pulling up such and such a date from 150 years ago, but the sheer wonderfullness of full-text searching.  Researching historical newspapers used to be a painstaking, mind-numbing, onerous task.  Now it’s a breeze.

That is, it’s a breeze if you happen to have access to the right digital archives.  Proquest is the biggest and best, but also the most exclusive, available at large libraries and universities, but not to most mere mortals.  But if you’re lucky enough to have access to it, then you’ll find a century or more of newspaper heritage online.  Depending on what particular papers are subscribed to, you might find The New York Times (1851-2003), Washington Post (1877-1990), Los Angeles Times (1881-1985), Wall Street Journal (1889 - 1989), The Chicago Defender (1905 - 1975), Chicago Tribune (1849 - 1985), or the Atlanta Constitution (1868 - 1929), among others.

But even without Proquest, there are options for historical newspaper research.  I’ve written before about the wonderful service from newspaperarchive.com, so I won’t repeat myself here, except to say this is one of my most frequently-visited research sites.  If you haven’t had a look, please do.

newspaperarchive.com is a subscription site, but there are a few options for completely free access to some historical newspapers. 

 You can search historical Georgia newspapers covering the period from 1750-1925.

The Northwest History Database  out of the University of Washington has extensive clippings from around 1900-1950.  Here’s a cool shot of the Bonneville dam under construction in 1937. 

The University of Virginia makes an interesting resource available…almost a century of the school newspaper, The Collegian (1914-2003).  Almost a century-worth of The Cornell Daily Sun  is also available, beginning with 1880, though the coverage over the years is not complete.  Anyone out there old enough to remember these quaint pre-Ipod music delivery devices, that rocked the dorm rooms back in 1937?  Another college newspaper, The Argus out of Illinois Wesleyan University is keyword (not full text) searchable from 1894-2003.

Into cowboys, indians, shoot-outs and prospecting for gold?  Check out the archives of newspapers from Colorado (1859-1923)  or Utah (roughly 1850-1950). 

For a slice of the Big Apple, old time, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has been digitized and is online from 1841-1902.

If World Wars are your thing, then check out these two.  The Stars and Stripes from 1918-1919 are online…the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper’s World War I edition.  The Canadian War Museum has available more than 100,000 newspaper articles from World War II.

Canada isn’t the only non-US country to offer some free newspaper archives (though they are surprisingly few and far between).  Some others to note are:

Tel-Aviv University makes available the Palestine Post (1932-1950) and a few other Jewsih newspapers.

The Guardian Newspaper in London offers about a century of searching, though with a rather limited search interface.  The British Library Online Newspaper Archive  offers a few isolated years of archives between 1851 and 1918, and a rather clunky interface, but still…on occasion, it can be a fun and useful site. 

And I can swear I once found an Australian newspaper archive back to the 1920’s or so, but for the life of me, I can’t find it now.  Sound familiar, anyone…?

pafalafaga Dave Sarokin

Academic resources on the web are living a pretty schizophrenic lifestyle. A lot of them are freely available, and show up in plain-vanilla web searches. When they do, you can click on them for easy access…or not. Increasingly, the search results are just teasers to articles that you can only read if you’re willing to pay for them.

But a lot of scholarly resources aren’t pulled up in a simple search, even they they reside somewhere in the vast reaches of cyber-academia. They are invisible to Google and other search engines. For these, you need some specialty resources like:

Google Scholar, of course.

Microsoft has a similar, though oddly named, tool at Windows Live Search Academic .

Much more cleverly named is the University of Michigan’s OIAster, which doubtless stands for something…it’s a good collection of scholarly materials that include video, audio, databases and images along with text.

Want to search for a thesis? Canada’s done a nice job of making full-text thesis search available on an amazingly wide variety of topics. There’s also the NDLTD (who names these things?), with a rich, albeit ungainly, collection of searchable theses.

And, for that late-at-night-paper-due-tomorrow-morning, there’s Questia, the college student’s favorite (next to the papers-for-sale sites, anyway). Unlike the others I mentioned, Questia is fee-based, but you can still search its large and impressive collection at no cost, and at least see some snippets of results, before deciding whether to ante up or not.

Have fun.

pafalafaga Dave Sarokin

James Derk, of the Scripps Howard News Service, has made Google Answers his “Weekly Web Wonder” for his 27 June 2006 column. He writes:

WEEKLY WEB WONDER: Let’s try Google answers this time. Hit it at answers.google.com for your questions and answers.

James seems to realise that a free answers service would be unable to generate the same kind of content as a paid service:

I always thought Google’s implementation of it was a little snarky because it made people actually pony up and pay for an answer.

Turns out that’s probably not such a bad idea…

At least Google, by making people pay a buck or two, is keeping out the bottom-feeders. It’s either that or hire a 100,000 more editors for the abuse department.

(via Cynthia)

In the course of researching this question at Google Answers, I visted the site of the US Securities and Exchange Commission to make use of their EDGAR database, and what should I find, but this:

Search the EDGAR Database

Full Text Search (Beta Version) Search the full text of filings from the last two years.

This is big news!

EDGAR is the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system, and is one of the larger text-storage databases maintained by the US government. It has long been a gold mine of information on public companies in the US, but a very frustrating gold mine…a deep and valuable resource, on the one hand, but on the other, the lack of full-text searching made it hard to find that needle in the haystack.

SEC’s beta text search, which they slipped in quietly, is a major breakthrough in EDGAR access, and provides a feature which, until now, was only available in expensive private services.

It’s not as sophisticated as a Google search would be, but still, it’s a full light year ahead of where they were last month.

If you do any sort of company research, take note of this splendid new tool.

pafalafaga David Sarokin

Have you ever needed to post a large text file for discussion, but been stymied by line-wrapping gremlins? Did you want the file line-numbered so that you could discuss specific parts of it? Did you want to post a file for someone to see but have it automatically removed after a month (or after a day)?

What you need is a pastebin. You can host one on your own website, but why bother when there are a number of free online pastebins, for example http://pastebin.com/

Just visit the site and copy some text into the text box. Optionally add your name and choose how long you would like your post to be retained. Click “Send”, and you will be given a short URL at which you and others can access your content.

To show how it works, I posted the complete lyrics of God Save the Queen which you can now see at http://pastebin.com/709363 complete with the politically-incorrect line highlighted. To achieve the highlight I just prefixed that line with a marker of @@ which causes pastebin to use a yellow background for that line.

When you view a pastebin page you can download the file, or make some changes and post a revised version. You can even click “diff” to highlight the differences between one revision and another.

If you are pasting computer programs, you can ask pastebin to apply syntax-highlighting in any of dozens of programming languages.

You can’t post binary files - but for collaborating with text files it’s great!

When the US Department of Justice referred to a “criminal conspiracy to commit one of the largest corporate frauds in American history”, it was referring to the Enron scandal.

Now, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has released a database of hundreds of thousands of Enron emails to the public. The folks who produce the InBoxer “Anti-Risk Appliance” have cleaned up the database, stripped some of the spam and routine system messages, and made the rest easy-to-search.

You will need to register to search (it’s free). There’s even a series of contests, with iPod Shuffles as prizes. There are three contest sections:

• The email message whose sender is most deserving to be sacked
• Enron’s funniest email jokes
• The most embarassing message for the sender

The search site has been set up in order to advertise the InBoxer Anti-Risk appliance, which can apparently scan outgoing emails and report on those which appear to be personal in nature or which might be divulging company secrets.

But that needn’t get in the way of using these emails for research purposes.

(via Dave)

A few years back, I was at a conference and received an urgent message to call my office. A fellow attendee offered me the use of her cell phone, which I accepted not only for the sake of convenience, but also because, back in the day, I had never used a cell phone and was eager for the experience.

She handed it to me. I flipped open the phone, looked at the mini-cockpit, and my first thought was, “Cool!”

My second thought was, “Now what do I do?”. Try as I might, I wasn’t getting a dial tone.

Though I’m a mature, fully realized adult, I still haven’t totally shaken off my teen-angst capacity for embarrasment, so it was with a bit of chagrin that I had to ask my colleague for her assistance in making a call. “Ohhhh! Dial first! Then hit ’send’! Now I got it!”

You see the connection to cutting and pasting, no?

Just in case, let me spell it out. Both cutting/pasting and phone calls used to be easy. The inexorable march of technology have left both of these activities an unholy mess…a sophisticated unholy mess to be sure, but unholy just the same.

The analogy isn’t a bad one. The basic acts of phoning or pasting are still pretty straightforward. Once you learn where the right pull-down menu or keyboard shortcut is, it’s not hard to cut and paste, just as my learning to dial first was the key to being able to place a simple phone call.

But the devil (on this 6-6-6 day) is in the details, as they say. You Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V and what happens, as often as not, is not a nice clean reproduction of your text. What happens is this:

I would like to go into partnership with you, in
order to
invest a sum of Twenty Nine Million, Five Hundred Thousand USA Dollars
(29,500,000
USD)in profitable sectors in your country, as long as you are
interested in
my offer. I got this money from cash donations by foreign contractors

or this

> >I’ve granted many contracts in my department during my
> >tenure. As a close aide to the former President, I couldn’t use our
> >banking system to transfer such an amount without trace. This could
> >cause me serious problems.

or this:

You’re the one to ask about where to eat, what to wear, and whom (or whom not) to date.

But lately you’ve found yourself at the mall movie house on too many Saturday nights…

or a host of other problems — disappearing paragraph breaks, lost spaces between words, newspaper-style columns break down, text unwraps and runs right off the screen, hidden text that isn’t, or the whole thing just dissolves into a sea of garbled nonsense.

But wait….there’s more!

As if all that isn’t bad enough, there’s still the carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing anguish of plain vanilla cut and paste, even when it’s working fine.

For we Google Answer Researchers, who spend more time mousing around than any of us cares to admit, the strain and tedium of the ol’ C&P can be numbing to both muscles and brain.

Consider all the “list” questions we get — 667 at last count (the devil’s older brother?).

Imagine all the cutting and pasting and window-switching and mousing that goes into compiling a list of all known back brace products, or gay dating web sites (is there a relationship between the two, I wonder?).

Over the years, I’ve compiled a set of tools to make the task of cutting and pasting — and text management in general — much more humane.

The best of the bunch in the text toolbox, by far, is my little text editor freeware program, NoteTab Light.

And the best thing, by far, about NoteTab Light is a feature they hardly even make mention of…autopaste.

At least, that’s what I call it. The program itself has some clumsy name that only an English-as-a-second-or-third-or-fourth-language programmer could have come up with, something like Use As Pasteboard.

Anyway, you can pretty much guess at the rest. With autopaste turned on, the simple act of Ctrl-C’ing some text will instantly paste said text into the text editor. No switching windows! No need to Ctrl-V. No having to switch back to the other window, and find where you were.

It’s not the key to world peace…but it’s not a small thing, either. Multiply these little savings a few thousand times over, and I wind up saving not only time, but sanity.

I’m actually amazed that more text programs don’t develop and publicize similar features. I know I’m not the only one who appreciates autopasting, but try to find it in other programs, or to find it as a more well-developed feature (NoteTab’s autopaste, good as it is, still needs work). It seems to be a rare thing indeed.

NoteTab does a nice job with other text-handling problems as well, but there are many editors that can make that claim.

But there are few I’ve found that can autopaste.

NoteTab…ya gotta love it.

‘Night, all.

pafalafaga David Sarokin

I use MyYahoo as my personal homepage. It’s well-organized, and offers many features, both useful and fun.

Among other things, I enjoy reading the daily Ask Yahoo Q&A’s. The questions are often the type that spark one’s curiousity…Yeah, just why is that the way it is…? And the answers tend to be well and cleverly written.

But, as an inveterate Google Answers researcher, I can tell you this… they’re not always right! In fact, I’m increasingly finding that the answers provided are of…ahem…dubious scholarship, and sometimes just plain wrong.

Take their recent Hole-in-the-Wall question, asking about the origination of the phrase. Ask Yahoo answers that the earliest use of the term to mean a small, simple, (and probably dingy) sort of establishment dates back to about 1822.

Hmmm. They only missed it by a century or so.

The Hole in the Wall was a well-known London alehouse back in the 18th century (and who knows…maybe earlier). You can see it on this old London map from the 1740’s (look for the small yellow circle, middle of the map, left-hand side).

I found a record of an attempted theft at the Hole-in-the-Wall that dates back to 1717. You can read the actual trial transcript, which is a trip. Seedy bars in the 1700’s sound a lot like seedy bars today:

…The Prosecutor deposed, that as she was passing along near Charing-Cross, at about 11 a Clock at Night, the Prisoner William North came to her, and invited her to go in and drink with him, which she refused, telling him that she was no Whore, and he might find some that were; he walking by her till they came to the Sign of the Hole in the Wall, attempted to push her into the House, and that she being in pain left her Glasses should be broke, went in, and to humour him did taste of a Pint of Drink, and would fain have gone away, but the Prisoner would not let her, using some threatning Expressions…

The transcript is from a terrific site, The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, which have searchable trial transcripts dating back to 1674. Yet another great history resource.

Why did the researchers looking into this question miss the real history on it? I’ll have to Ask Yahoo!

Cheers,

pafalafaga David Sarokin

One of the principle tasks of a lawyer is research…lots of it! Even the most well-staffed law firm may find itself occasionally (continuously?) overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done in finding the best case law, conducting due diligence, untangling an intellectual property dispute, or looking for that prior art that you just know is out there, somewhere.

Lawyers can certainly hire a consulting service to assist them when its crunch time, but that takes a lot of effort to arrange, and a substantial budget to pull off.

Where to turn, when you need some fast, quality research assistance that won’t break the bank?

How about Google?

No, not Google, the automated search engine. Google, the researcher-staffed Answers service, which can be found at http://answers.google.com

Google Answers is as obscure as Google itself is famous. But it is a terrific service, especially for a lawyer in need of adjunct research talent. For a very modest fee, a team of Google Answers researchers stands ready 24/7 to provide high-quality, fast-turn-around work with almost no administrative hassle.

How Google Answers Works

Google has on contract a team of several hundred carefully-screened expert researchers. All of them are highly-skilled at using Google to mine the web, and uncover those little needles of information in the cyber-haystack that is the internet. But beyond simple Google searches, many of the researchers have access to other sources of information familiar to any law firm — Lexis-Nexis, Factiva, PACER, UCC records, and so on.

If you need the services of a researcher, you simply post your question to Google Answers, and set a fee. Whichever researcher feels that he or she can answer the question — and also feels that the price offered is fair! — will ‘lock’ the question and get to work on it. For a well-focused, attractively-priced question, you will often have an answer back in just a day or two, or in mere hours if you need it faster.

If a question needs some clarification, you and the researcher can engage in an online dialogue to pinpoint your needs more precisely.

What Google Answers Can Do

The best way to get a feel for what Google Answers can do, is to read through some of the questions and answers with a legal bent. Here’s a synopsis of a few questions my fellow researchers and I have worked on, along with a link to the full Q&A:

Prior Art
Early Online Frequent Shopper Programs
Google Answers provided documented examples of “electronic S&H stamps” prior to a specified date.

Divorce Law
Question about marital property in Virginia Research offered statute and case law pertaining to status of marital and separate property in the state of Virginia.

Intellectual Property — International
Intellectual property in the country of Beloruss
Provided an overview of the law and current practices regarding IP protection in Belarus

International Law
Conflict of Interest
An answer provided legal precedents in Canada for what constitutes a professional conflict of interest for architects.

Attorney Malpractice
PA case law
Client looking for a difficult-to-find example of misappropriated authority turned to Google Answers

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