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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. 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 Mathematics, Physics, 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 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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