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Internet Resources Newsletter, Issue 48, September 1998 (Section D)
This list aims to generate interdisciplinary discussion on the social and cultural analysis of sport.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/sport-culture-society/
A list for the discussion and dissemination of research and findings in agile manufacturing, agility and virtual organisations.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/agile-manufacturing/
The AUA, or Association of University Administrators, Quality Network is a loose grouping of administrators involved in quality assurance at any level. Main focus of the network is the AUA annual conference but it is hoped to expand activities beyond that.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/aua-quality/
ScotSIG aims to act as a focus for SGML and XML related activities within Scotland. The list will be used to disseminate information about the activities of the SIG (workshops, seminars, training courses) and to answer members queries.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/scotsig-sgml/
This list is for all those who teach in in higher education languages departments. It is a space for discussion of the use of peer observation for developmental purposes.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/develop/
A moderated list containing members of the british machine vision association (95% academic) and other interested parties to distribute information on one day technical meetings and conferences.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/bmva/
Discussion of research, technological and other issues concerned with conservation, breeding, evaluation and use of plant varieties and the improvement of seed quality.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/plant-varieties-seeds/
bopcas-northern-ireland offers weekly updates of the latest UK government publications relating to Northern Ireland and a forum to discuss matters arising from them. Keywords: Northern Ireland; Northern Irish; Assembly; Parliament; devolution; government; politics; UK.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/bopcas-northern-ireland/
bopcas-wales offers weekly updates of the latest UK government publications relating to Wales and a forum to discuss matters arising from them. Keywords: Wales; Welsh; Welsh Assembly; Parliament; devolution; government; politics; UK.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/bopcas-wales/
This is the mailing list of the UK Network of Excellence in Knowledge Discovery. It provides a means by which members of the UK academic and research community can communicate with others involved in the field both inside and outside the UK.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/kd-net/
A list for managers of self-access centres for language resources.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/language-self-access/
NGOs are increasingly developing market-oriented strategies to pursue their objectives. Meanwhile, more companies are developing sophisticated stakeholder relations policies. Thus relations between business & NGOs are increasingly diverse. This list discusses developments in business-ngo relations.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/business-ngo-relations/
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In the course of finding sites of interest for this Newsletter, we sometimes come across Web sites which we feel deserve slightly more than a passing mention. Each month we will try to pick out one or more such sites, and give them a short review. The sites will normally be UK based, may be small or large, and be of interest or potential interest to academics. After lengthy discussions we have decided, with incredible creativity, to call these: Nice Web Sites. Details of previous Nice Web Sites are available in the Nice Web Site Archive.
There are two Nice Web Sites this month:
URL: http://www.bsi.org.uk/bsis/index.htm
There is nothing particularly fancy about this addition to the British Standards Institution Web site, but it is very useful for finding details of British Standards, and if you are a BSI Subscribing member you can order copies online. You can search this catalogue by keyword or phrase or BS number, and browse for Standards by scanning through the section indexes. This is particularly useful as there are a number of different series available, such as the Automobile Series, Aerospace Series, and Marine Series.
A welcome additional aid to literature searching, and therefore a Nice Web Site.
URL: http://www.chemsoc.org/
Chemsoc is a new site for chemists and the home of the international chemistry societies' electronic network. There is a great deal of information available at this site, from an Information Arcade, and a Chembytes magazine (with a Careers on the Web section), to a Conference & Events listing section.
Chemsoc is attractively designed, with a number of small graphics to illustrate each section. Altogether, a Nice Web Site.
Roddy MacLeod
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Publisher: H& S Media, Inc., 3400 Dundee Road, Suite 245,
Northbrook, IL 60062.
Frequency: Monthly
Subscription: $34.95
ISSN:
1097-4024
Email: cassb@webguidemag.com
Web: http://www.webguidemag.com/
Web Guide Monthly is an attractive and glossy American magazine which is aimed at those who use the Internet for leisure purposes. Unlike some other leisure market titles, however, it does not stress the sensational or the bizarre, but rather shows readers how to use the Internet in a constructive way as an aid to planning a trip, for example, or as a way to get information about hobbies or personal development.
As well as several articles on such topics as National Parks, which include lists of official sites, camping directories, map resources, and travel guides, and on learning a foreign language, there are annotated lists of web sites on such subjects as arts & literature, business and finance, history, and science and technology. The sites listed are mostly the large ones that feature in many similar magazines, with the addition of some more unusual resources. Completing the magazine is a directory of 700 of what the Web Guide Monthly considers are the best-rated sites. Its nice to see a popular magazine which, as one letter to the editor pointed out, you would be happy to let your children read.
If you know of other Internet journals or journals with regular significant sections about the Internet which have not been mentioned in The Internet in Print section, please let me know at: R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk
Roddy MacLeod
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BIDS is a UK provider of networked information services for higher education and research. The Latest BIDS News Bulletin (Spring 1998) is available at:
URL: http://www.bids.ac.uk/news/spring98.html
RSC datasets are now available on the Web!! The databases are: Analytical Abstracts; Chemical Business NewsBase; Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology Abstracts; Chemical Safety NewsBase; Mass Spectrometry Bulletin.
BIDS ISI now has a new anhanced version, which includes Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP) database, which was previously only available via telnet to BIDS.
ATHENS and the change of usernames. Please note that old, original BIDS style usernames of the form: Ixxxyyy (where xxx denotes your site, eg, IHWCHE) will not be accepted by the ATHENS authentication system after 31 August 1998. They must be replaced with the new ATHENS style usernames (which can be from 6 to 20 characters). If you are still using an old style username, you should look out for announcements from your local support service to tell you what your new usernames will be and how to collect them. Members of Heriot-Watt University can find details at our Athens Authentication Service pages.
A week-by-week listing of new information resources on the NISS (National Information Services and Systems) Information Gateway selected by experts in the subject area is available at:
URL: http://www.niss.ac.uk/welcome/whatsnew.html
BUBL has retained a strong library element, but now provides a subject-based service to the academic and research community more generally, this via the BUBL LINK Subject Tree. The latest news from BUBL is available at:
URL: http://bubl.ac.uk/news/
The latest Additions and Updates to EEVL (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library), The Gateway to UK Engineering Information on the Internet, are available at:
URL: http://www.eevl.ac.uk:4321/whatsnew/
The latest additions to SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) are available at:
URL: http://sosig.esrc.bris.ac.uk/roads/whats-new.html
The latest issue of Edina (Edinburgh Data & INformation Access) Newsline can be found at:
Edina has been selected by the JISC to host the Compendex Service for the UK higher education community. The service will be run in conjunction with the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) and is due to be launched on 6 December 1998.
URL: http://edina.ed.ac.uk/newsline/
CHEST aims to obtain quality commercial software, datasets, training materials and other IT products for the Education and Research Community at low prices and attractive licence terms. The latest news from CHEST is available at:
URL: http://www.chest.ac.uk/news.html
MIDAS (Manchester Information Datasets and Associated Services) is a National Datasets Service based at Manchester Computing and funded by JISC, the ESRC and the University of Manchester. It provides UK academics with online access to strategic datasets such as UK Population Censuses, large government and other surveys (including the GHS, LFS, FES, BHPS), macroeconomic time-series databanks, spatial data including satellite images and digital map data, and scientific databases including the Beilstein Crossfire System.
The latest news from MIDAS can be found at:
URL: http://midas.ac.uk/news.html
RUDI (Resource for Urban Design Information) is a multimedia information resource for research and teaching in the field of urban design in the Western cultural context. The latest news from RUDI can be found at:
URL: http://rudi.herts.ac.uk/new.html
UK's independent gateway to high quality biomedical Internet resources. The latest sites added to OMNI can be found at:
URL: http://roads.nott.ac.uk/whatsnew/whats-new-uk.html
And:
URL:
http://roads.nott.ac.uk/whatsnew/whats-new-world.html
Electronic Development and Environment Information System. A gateway to information sources on development or the environment. What's new on Eldis can be found at:
URL: http://nt1.ids.ac.uk/eldis/wnew.htm
Netskills aims to help the UK HE community make effective use of the Internet for teaching, research and administration. The latest news from Netskills can be found at:
URL: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/publicity/updates/
Biz/ed is a dedicated business and economics information gateway for students, teachers and lecturers.
URL: http://www.bized.ac.uk/homeinfo/whatsnew.htm
The latest issue of the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) Newsletter can be found at the top of the newsletter index page at this site.
URL: http://ahds.ac.uk/public/newslind.html
Mailbase provides electronic discussion lists for the UK higher education community.
URL: http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/news/
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The time is not far away when it should become possible to connect to the Internet from anywhere in the world. Teleworking from a desert island may become more of a reality than a dream. With this in mind, Internet Resources Newsletter has asked Sheila Webber, who lectures in the Department of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde, and is a specialist in business information resources:
What would be your Desert Island Web Sites?
10 sites are allowed for the desert island bookmarks, and because a teleworker on a desert island cannot be expected to labour all the time, the final selection can be something leisure-related.
1.
Mailbase
I suppose I ought to try and keep in touch with the UK library and
information scene whilst I'm shipwrecked, and looking at the archives of
lis-link, lis-iis, lis-ukolug etc. at Mailbase would give me the illusion of
doing so. I unsubbed from lis-link a while ago because I found the volume of
traffic too much, and instead I look at the archives periodically (although now
they've introduced a Digest feature at Mailbase I'll consider subbing again).
2.
News.com
I get their free daily email
of headlines about the internet and computing industry and a couple of times a
week I'll see something worth going to the site for. Although they chop up the
articles into smallish chunks (which is irritating), I like the 'Printer
friendly' version you can get of each page, the way they hyperlink to the sites
they mention, the links to older related stories and the 'email this to a
friend' function.
3. Alta Vista or
Alta Vista Northern Europe
Although I moan about the inadequacies of search engines (e.g. the
lack of customer support), I also find them invaluable. Alta Vista is still the
one I default to, although some of the others (Excite, HotBot, SearchUK, Yahoo!
etc) I find better for certain types of search. I like the fact that you can
specify quite complicated boolean search statements in Alta Vista Advanced
search, as well as using the relevance ranking option on Simple search. I also
find the Translator feature useful. There's a good large search box on Advanced
Search, so that you can see the statement you've typed in and thus spot typos
etc. (I find the way that the 'search' boxes on some of the search engine home
pages have got smaller and smaller annoying.) I prefer the US version of Alta
Vista. With the introduction of charges on JANET for using US sites, I know I
ought to be using the Northern European one. However, the two sites seem to
produce different results, and the Northern Europe ones aren't always better.
4.
Business Information Sources on
the Internet
I understand that a small amount of self-promotion is
excusable, so here it is. I do use this page as my home page, and as a jumping
off point for all the business-related sites I want. In fact I don't use the
actual 'bookmark' function on my browser much at all. I've created various
list-of-links pages for classes I teach or articles I've written, and I tend to
keep those (relatively) up to date and use those instead, or I type in the urls
directly.
5.
International Federation of Library Associations
(IFLA) or mirror
I find this site
particularly useful for the conference papers. There are a good number mounted
full text from each annual conference. The papers are presented by a truly
international roster of speakers, and so you get a broader perspective than you
do in many journals. I find the site very good when I'm creating virtual
'information packs' for students on a variety of library and information topics.
There are other resource areas such as Metadata (excellent links on Dublin Core,
XML, PURL etc., even MARC .. though it's a BIG page) and a Library Humour
database (Q: How many library managers does it take to change a lightbulb? A: At
least one committee and a light bulb strategy focus meeting and plan. (Oh well))
6.
Financial Times
This has much useful
information, as you might expect. There are stock prices, inflation indicators,
a good list of links to stock exchanges around the world, news stories, a
searchable archive etc. Most of this is free, if you register: there is a priced
service to search the full range of stories from the FT.
7.
Online Inc
Producers of the
journals 'Online', 'Database' and 'Emedia professional', they have the complete
text of a few articles from each issue, news snippets, and special features
(like the one on Dialog Pricing). There are good practical articles in each
issue, and I look at the printed copies that my library takes, but it's nice to
have material online. As well as benefiting from pre-publication items, I can
also hyperlink to relevant articles when I'm creating web material for my
students.
8. Telephone Directories
on the Web
This is a long-established listing of yellow pages sites
worldwide, and you can sign up for an email to be sent to you when the site is
updated.
9a.
Railtrack
If I was on a
desert island, I'd have a keen interest in getting off it again. I could pretend
I was back in the UK planning another journey stuck outside Preston on an
unventilated Virgin train or...
9b
BAA Glasgow
arrivals board ... imagine I was zooming into Glasgow airport. At least I
could get some satisfaction in noting that flight XYZ from Exotic Destination
was coming in 2 hours late yet again.
10.Zarzuela!
I was told that I could only have ONE leisure choice, which is frankly a
bit mean. If I was stuck on a desert island I'd want something to take my mind
off the creepy crawlies and the fact that I couldn't swim. What to choose? The
sites that spring immediately to mind are Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 (yes I AM
a nerd), and the Sporting Life horse racing site (up-to-date news on runners,
riders and results.) (Please note that I have cultural interests as well, but I
like to read books on paper, see plays in theatres, and listen to classical
music on CDs or live in concert halls.) In the end, I think it will have to be
my husband's world-beating site about the Zarzuela, just in case he ever comes
across this article ;-) Zarzuelas are a type of spanish opera/operetta:
neglected outside Spain but getting more attention because a) they've got lots
of good tunes and b) Placido Domingo (whose parents earned a living singing in
Zarzeulas) has been championing them.
Sheila Webber is a lecturer in the Department of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde. She lectures in areas such as: marketing of information and library services, online searching, business information resources, and library management. She has given external seminars on search engines and business information on the internet (see choice 4 above) and has been heading a project on Business use of internet information. In her 'spare time' she is trying to research the topic of pricing of online information (for a PhD). For some years Sheila has been active in the Institute of Information Scientists, and formerly was on the management committees of the UK Online User Group and the European Bureau of Library Information and Documentation Associations. She is also now a member of the American Society for Information Science, getting involved in the European Chapter and presenting a paper at this year's Annual Meeting.
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301.243 TAP Web: http://www.growingupdigital.com/ Growing up digital: the rise of the net generation by Don Tapscott McGraw-Hill, 1998 337.142 DIR Directory of online European information Landmarks, 1998 371.425 KRE Net that job: using the World Wide Web to develop your career and find work by Irene Krechowiecka Kogan Page, 1998 658 BUR Navigating business information sources: a practical guide for information managers by Maria E Burke and Hazel Hall LA Publishing, 1998 This excellent book is not just about business information on the Internet, but quite a lot of web sites are mentioned.
How to Find Health Information on the Internet
by
Bruce Maxwell
Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1998
Review
Bruce Maxwell is the author of several books about finding information on the Internet. His other titles include the valuable How to access the Federal Government on the Internet (reviewed in Internet Resources Newsletter, Issue 45 and How to Access the Government's Electronic Bulletin Boards. Both the Table of Contents, and the Introduction of How to Find Health Information on the Internet are available at his web site for those who would like to examine them in detail.
This is a well presented book of 332 pages. The admirably detailed Table of Contents, which stretches to 10 pages, reveals that it is split into four main sections: 1. Directories, Search Engines, and Reference Sources, 2. Conditions, Diseases, and Illnesses, 3. Prevention and Treatment, and 4. Health Care Issues. Over 600 resources, including web sites, mailing lists, and newsgroups are described in varying amounts of detail, under many headings such as Allergies, Cancer, Infectious Diseases, Children's Health, Sports Medicine, and Smoking.
Maxwell estimates that there are currently more than 10,000 Internet sites of one kind or another which offer health information, and he has attempted to list the best and most authoritative resources. His criteria for inclusion are that a resource should offer a large quantity of useful information, provide information that appears reliable, not charge for access, be stable, and be reasonably easy to access. Subscription-based resources are excluded, and this means that some substantial and important sites, such as the American Hospital Directory or Embase, pharmacological and biomedical literature database from Elsevier, are not described.
Given that the various popular search engines index so many sites, is such a book necessary? The answer is definitely yes, bacause, firstly, the search engines list resources indiscriminately (and in very large numbers), and secondly, because it is very difficult to tell from a long list of search results whether the resources are authoritative or useful. It must always be remembered that there is a large amount of dross on the Internet. Bruce Maxwell is an investigative journalist rather than a doctor or medical researcher, but his experience as a net researcher allows for confidence in his choices. In the Introduction he also gives some advice on how to judge the quality of health information on the Internet, which is very important for this particular subject.
Whilst this is a very useful book for helping the lay-man/woman find health related sites, it must be stated that it is biased towards the American market and American resources. I was disappointed not to find OMNI, the UK's gateway to high quality biomedical Internet resources in the list of resources described, as this is the first site I would turn to for guidance towards medical resources. It is a reflection of the net's bias, rather that the book's, that there are more references in the index to Repetitive Strain Injury (3), than polio (2), rabies (1), or leprosy (0), with malaria, the big killer disease, receiving only one more (4).
RM.
A complete list of new books added to Heriot-Watt University Library is now available from the Library News page.
URL: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/news/news.html
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The Ramblers' Association is a registered charity (no 306089) which promotes rambling, protects rights of way, campaigns for access to open country and defends the beauty of the countryside.
URL: http://www.ramblers.org.uk/
URL: http://www.scotlands-top-hostels.com/
URL: http://www.syha.org.uk/
URL: http://www.lochaber.co.uk/highlandhostels/
URL: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~insports/
Online magazine
URL: http://www.motoring-uk.co.uk/
URL: http://members.aol.com/skiscot/ssthome.htm
Details of consumer magazines on sports, hobbies, outdoor, etc.
URL: http://www.linkhouse.co.uk
A guide to the best places, budget travel, hostels, web sites, information sources, books and more.
URL: http:
//www.fortunecity.com/boozers/harrys/444/scotland.html
Camp America provides an opportunity for young people to work on summer camp in America.
URL: http://www.gjd.dircon.co.uk
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