Ever hear a news story on the radio about a new bill introduced in Congress and wonder what the bill actually proposes? Well, I do.   Let me show you a quick way to find out just what that bill says.

The easiest way is to use Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the legislative information gateway of the Library of Congress.

You can search for legislation from the current Congress (there’s a new one every two years) right from the middle of the home page.

Right below the search box are drop-down menus that you could use to see what legislation  a particular Senator or Representative has been involved with.  You can also search for terms across multiple Congresses.

OK, let’s track down the bill I heard about on the radio, it was about college textbooks.  I didn’t catch the sponsor’s name so let’s just search for the keyword “textbooks”.

This search brings us results from two bills.  One is H.R.1464 and the other is S.1714.  Now I heard them say this was a Senate bill, so we’ll  click on the link for S.1714.

From this link we see that this bill was introduced by Sen. Richard Durban (IL) on 9/24/2009 and is titled, “A bill to authorize grants for the creation, update, or adaption of open textbooks, and for other purposes. “   Hmm, sounds interesting, huh? We can also see what Senate committee the bill is before and there is a link to the full text of the bill.

You can also follow links to see what action has been taken on the bill, including Sen. Durban’s introductory remarks for the bill, from the Congressional Record.  When available, there will also be links to the Congressional Budget Offices’ (CBO) cost estimates for the bill.

Pretty cool stuff.  And that House bill looks interesting too.  We could go back and look at that too.

Looking for something older than this Congress?  No problem.  Thomas searches back to the 101st Congress (January 3, 1989 to January 3, 1991).  And Drexel has a subscription to Lexis Nexis Congressional (including Congressional publications called the Serial Set) that searches content all the way back to the first Congress in 1789.

Oh, and if the title of this post didn’t start you humming, maybe this will help:

Welcome back everyone!

This Fall I’m trying something new.  I am offering online office hours with Adobe Connect.

Twice a week (starting September 24th), on Mondays and Thursdays from 3pm to 4pm, I will be online in a virtual meetingspace ready to help you with your research needs.  Here is the link: http://drexelmeeting.na4.acrobat.com/r55763449/

screenshot of Adobe Connect meetingspace

With this tool, you will be able to watch me demonstrate a database, explain how to collect citations with RefWorks or Zotero, or chat about your research topic, all in realtime.  Adobe Connect is AV chat ready to facilitate a real discussion and several people can be in the meetingspace at once, so a whole group can join in the conversation.

This will be a trial to see if there is interest in this kind of service.  If there is, I may be able to expand the hours I am available.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be just as available as I always have been. You can reach me in person or electronically over IM, email, or phone.

The Wilson Center is, right at this moment, running a live webcast of its panel discussion of KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev’s newly released notebooks.   Drawn from the KGB archives, these notebooks offer an unprecedented look into Soviet espionage activities in the US from 1930-1950.  Some topics discussed will be Alger Hiss, and I.F. Stone.

The webcast is available here. The agenda is available here (PDF).

English language translations of the notebooks (now held by the Library of Congress) and available as PDFs here.

Primary day in Philadelphia is Tuesday, May 19th.  Do you know who is running? What ballot issues are up for the vote?  If not, Philly good government organization the Committee of Seventy has a web pages devoted to introducing the candidates and ballot issues.  You can find it here.

If you haven’t yet tried Zotero, a free, open source citation management system (CMS) for the Firefox browser that is similar to RefWorks and Endnote, this would be a good time to give it a shot.

The Zotero 2.0 beta already syncs citations and notes remotely and, if you have a webDAV account, can even sync your PDFs.  This weekend’s update to 2.0b3 has now added (partial list):

• Support for group libraries
  • Create and join public and private groups on zotero.org
  • Access group materials from within Zotero, even when you are offline
  • Easily move materials from a group library into your personal library
• Add Item by Identifier
  • Automatically add an item by DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID
• RTF Citation Scan
  • Author a document in your editor of choice using ”(Smith, 2006)” citation placeholders, save as RTF, and run through Zotero for automatic formatting in style of choice
  • Asks for disambiguation if required
  • Still under development
  • Does not currently work for names with accents
• Import from Clipboard
  • Import any supported format (RIS, BibTeX, etc.) from the clipboard
  • Available via Actions menu option and keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Shift-V/Ctrl-Alt-V)

This can be a very power research tool.  If you have any questions about using it I’d be happy to talk with you about it.

As part of it’s very interesting “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact” series, the New York Times has put up a fascinating interactive map that displays the country of origin for the foreign-born population by county.

This is pretty cool in itself but the demographics fun is multiplied when you notice the slider that lets you look at the map using data from every census back to 1880.  Want to see how the population of your home county has changed over the last 128 years?  Just move the slider and watch the color coding shift.  Want to see where people from a particular county settled, and when?  Just choose one of the countries a drop-down menu and you can see what counties they settled in.  Sadly the list of countries isn’t very long but does cover the most common countries of origin.

A mouse-over of the county will cause the county, it’s number of foreign-born residents, and total population — all for the selected census–to be identified in a bubble.

New York Times–Immigration Explorer

The New York Times has an interesting web feature up right now that presents a timeline of all of the presidential Inaugural addresses from 1789 on.  While that is pretty useful in itself, this site is particularly interesting because it shows you a tag cloud of the frequently used words in each speech.  It’s a great way to quickly survey the changing language and themes.

The page is available here: Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present.

Or just the results?

With the Roper Center’s iPoll, you not only get to see the results, you can also see the actual questions asked and the results for each one.

iPoll can be searched by keyword.  Say, maybe something like “Sarah Palin AND Tina Fey” and we can see the question, “How much if anything have you heard about each of the following? Have you heard a lot, a little or nothing at all?…Skits on Saturday Night Live with actress Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin?”  That question was reported by the Pew Weekly News Interest Index Poll this October.

By the way, 42% of those asked heard a lot about it, 30% heard a little, 27% heard nothing at all, and 1% didn’t know or refused to answer (Survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Methodology: Conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, October 3-October 6, 2008 and based on telephone interviews with a national adult sample of 1,006.)

Looking at individual questions is pretty nice but that’s not all.  There is also a section of the site devoted to browsing poll results by topic.  Broad topics include the economy, the government, personal beliefs, education and, of course, the election! All of this adds up to an important tool for following public opinion on issues that matter to you.

And if you want even more political and elections information don’t forget to look at the growing number of links in my Delicious collection.  Try the terms elections or politics for example.

Click here to search PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES (EBSCOhost)

It’s a trusted and familiar resource for finding scholarly articles, book chapters, books and dissertations in Psychology but could a different interface make it easier to use?  That’s exactly what I want to find out.

Now through November 21st, 2008 we have a trial of PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES on the EBSCOhost database platform.  It’s the same content that we have on the OvidSP platform, just a different interface.

Try it out, compare how you do the same search on both platforms, you know, kick the tires.  And then let me know what you think! Your feedback matters!

Maritime Jurisdiction and Boundaries in the Arctic Region

Well, it looks like Denmark does.  But why does that matter?  Bragging rights aside, fixing the international boundaries around the actual North Pole may not be that important.  What is far more important is who will control the vast amount of oil and gas thought to be sitting below the Arctic ocean.

The International Boundaries Research Unit, at Durham University has issued a new report, available in pdf from the website above, that that examines boundaries in the Arctic and discusses both likely boundaries and potential claims that the surrounding countries may make soon.  The report and briefing notes are a good introduction to an issue that could have major international-relations and economic implications.

The IBRU’s website is also a good resource for boundary-related news and links, with searchable news and link archives.