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If you choose to follow any of the links to the rated Internet sites below, you will be leaving the Strategian Web site. If you wish to return to this page from the site you are sent to, please use the Back option of your browser. New Zealand Digital Library | DOE Information Bridge 1. National Academy Press -- http://www.nap.edu/ (The National Academies of the United States) Rating: 26/30 -- Quality 25/25 -- Uniqueness 10/20 -- Refresh Rate 11/15 -- Loads Fast 8/10 -- Organization 80/100 -- Total **Last Reviewed February 10, 2000** Review: The National Academy Press is the publishing arm of the National Academies of the United States--the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. This site provides access to the complete text of over 1,500 books--reports authored by commissions and panels of the various academies. These reports not infrequently find their way into the daily news as they examine prominent scientific and technical issues facing the United States and the world at large. The panels and commissions that author the reports are often composed of leading experts on the various topics, and the information in the reports has a deserved reputation for being authoritative and objective. The reports can be searched in two ways--by title and bibliographic information and by the complete text of every page of the 1,500+ books. In addition, it is also possible to locate reports of interest by browsing through a list of subject categories. Once a relevant report is identified, the text of the book can be viewed in Open Book format. This format essentially means that the text has the appearance of having been scanned and 1 page is viewable at a time. Each screen, however, includes several controls for moving through the text page-by-page, chapter-by-chapter, back to the table of contents, to options for searching text within that book, etc. Some books also offer the option of viewing the text in sections in HTML format. The National Academy Press Web site is very straightforward and easy to use for the most part. It is optimized for online purchasing of the various books though which makes the full text options a bit less apparent on the screen. All in all though, this site is a marvelous resource--a must link ... How-to-use: The available searching and browsing options are very powerful. I find all 3 of them to be very useful. Back to the Top 2. xxx.lanl.gov e-Print archive -- http://xxx.lanl.gov/ (Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. National Science Foundation) Rating: 20/30 -- Quality 23/25 -- Uniqueness 18/20 -- Refresh Rate 9/15 -- Loads Fast 5/10 -- Organization 75/100 -- Total **Last Reviewed March 2, 1999** Review: xxx.lanl.gov e-Print archive is famous in the world of the Internet and now beyond. This site helped start the emergence of electronic journals and has assisted in pushing publishers toward acceptance of electronic versions of their publications. This site "is a fully automated electronic archive and distribution server for research papers" (from General Information About the Archives); it currently covers the fields of Physics, Mathematics, Nonlinear Sciences, and Computer Science. Options are available for either browsing or searching the archives. Searching can be done using names, words, or phrases in the author, title, and abstract fields or by an identification number, while records for new or recent papers added to the archive can be easily browsed. Once the record for a particular paper is identified, information about the paper is available in a number of ways--an abstract can be viewed, the full text can be displayed potentially in a number of formats including PostScript and PDF, and an easy author search feature is available to see what other papers that author may have contributed to the Archive in that subject area. The Archive is somewhat of a spartan-looking site when compared to the graphic-rich orientations of many Internet sites these days. Basically, it provides the essentials quite well and leaves out the extraneous. Also, some of the explanatory pages are written in a rather irreverent fashion. Adequate help information is available and the organization works. Be aware, due to the many data formats in which the full text of the papers can be retrieved, that response time for that purpose can be only so-so. Response time when searching is generally pretty rapid. How-to-use: If you are a first-time user, be sure to check out the available help information. Once you have done so and once you have used the site a couple of times, the Archive is very straightforward. Back to the Top 3. New Zealand Digital Library (Computer Science Technical Reports and Computer Science Bibliographies) -- http://www.nzdl.org/cgi-bin/gw?l=&v1= (University of Waikato, New Zealand) Rating: 20/30 -- Quality 22/25 -- Uniqueness 13/20 -- Refresh Rate 12/15 -- Loads Fast 7/10 -- Organization 74/100 -- Total **Last Reviewed March 2, 1999** Review: The New Zealand Digital Library makes several databases available--2 of which involve Computer Science. Computer Science Technical Reports provides access to the full text of 45,700+ technical reports from nearly 300 institutions located around the world. The Computer Science Bibliographies is a collection of some 1,200 bibliographies of scholarly literature in Computer Science compiled by institutions worldwide. Currently, the bibliographies contain a total of more than 930,000 records of journal articles, conference proceedings, and technical reports published generally from 1985 to the present (but with records of some publications going back as far as the late 1940's) and updated monthly. Both databases can be manipulated in a number of intriguing ways ... you really need to explore the site to best appreciate the choices and innovations it offers. Briefly, the user has a choice, with both databases, of a basic or an Advanced Search option. I recommend the Advanced Search option for the greater refinement and flexibility it offers. Once search results are returned in the Technical Reports database, individual reports can be displayed via scanned images of the pages (and then the user can choose to view the report in HTML with links to keywords) or the full text can be retrieved in Postscript or formatted text. With the Bibliographies database, the user has the option of viewing the bibliographic information describing the publication and/or the user can search the Technical Reports database for documents similar to that item. The New Zealand Digital Library is a quality Web site. The organization is user-friendly, help information is plentiful, and the entire site is attractively-designed. Technical reports are important in the field of Computer Science, and this site makes access to this valuable literature much easier. How-to-use: If you are a first-time or sporadic user of this site, it will be well worth your time to consult the available help information especially for doing Boolean searches. Also, as mentioned, the Advanced Search option is the one to choose. Back to the Top 4. DOE Information Bridge -- http://gpo.osti.gov:901/cgi-bin/entry.pl (U.S. Department of Energy--DOE) Rating: 20/30 -- Quality 19/25 -- Uniqueness 8/20 -- Refresh Rate 8/15 -- Loads Fast 7/10 -- Organization 62/100 -- Total **Last Reviewed March 1, 1999** Review: The DOE Information Bridge allows access to the full text of 30,000+ reports produced by researchers working for the Department of Energy and researchers working for other organizations but funded by the DOE. The subject scope of the reports is broad--Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Environmental Sciences, Engineering, Computer Science, Renewable Energy, and more. Government-funded research is an area too often overlooked when students, faculty, and others search for information on a particular topic. This database provides welcome and much more convenient access to some of this type of literature--in this case, reports that have been received and processed since January 1996. The Web site offers both Easy and Advanced search tools which allow for pretty sophisticated searching of the database. Once search results have been obtained, reports can be viewed in either of 3 different formats and downloaded, potentially, in a wide variety of data formats (depending upon how the report was originally received). The DOE Information Bridge is well-organized and provides plenty of help information to assist the user along. Overall, this is a solid site providing good access to a useful body of literature. How-to-use: First-time users should be sure to review the General and Search Help information. Back to the Top Questions about any or all of the above? Do you have a favorite Internet site(s) that you would like to nominate for possible inclusion on these lists? Please let me know. |
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