Credit: Library of Congress

April 15th marks the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and there will be no shortage of news coverage (or hype) commemorating the event this weekend. The good news is that if you want even more information, facts, images and history, you can take a deep dive on the web to get to the bottom of the historic event. Here’s a roundup of a few sources that we think you might find interesting and useful.

Ancestry.com’s The Titanic Collection

• Passenger Lists
• Crew Lists
• Deaths at Sea
• Titanic Survivors, Carpathia Passenger List, 1912
• Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835–1974
• Record of Those Buried at Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Coroner Inquests and Other Information from the Coroner of Nova Scotia

Note: The Titanic Collection is fee-based. However, a free trial is available through April 15, 2012. You’ll need an Ancestry.com login/password. No no credit card is required to obtain one.

RMS Titanic Online Exhibitions

Titanic: 100th Anniversary (National Archives, UK) You can search passenger and crew lists here.

Posted Aboard the R.M.S. Titanic (National Postal Museum)

Titanic: Facts & Images

Images From The British Library

Images From Library and Archives Canada (via Flickr)

Images From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog

Images from National Archives, UK

Images from New York Public Library Digital Gallery

NOAA Commemorates the 100th Birthday of R.M.S Titanic May 31, 2011

“Titanic” (Encyclopedia Smithsonian)

Titanic at 100 Years (The Big Picture/Boston.com)

Titanic’s Final Photographs by Father Frank Browne (BBC)

Titanic Inquiry Project Full Text (Searchable) of the U.S. Senate and British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiries

Titanic in a New Light (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

The Titanic Sinking: Infographics and Timelines

R.M.S. Titanic and MS Oasis of the Seas: a Comparison (CBC) – The World’s Largest Cruise Ships Then and Now

Remnants of the Disaster to Be Auctioned (AP)

Titanic By the Numbers (History.com)

Titanic: Faces of the Crew (BBC)

Titanic Interactive Timeline and Route Map (History.com)

RMS Titanic: Videos

Titanic At the National Archives (NARA, U.S.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video: Titanic 86th Anniversary (via C-SPAN Video Library) Recorded April 13, 1998

On the 86th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, two authors discussed their books. Father O’Donnell is the author of The Last Days of the Titanic: Photographs and Mementos of the Tragic Maiden Voyage, published by Rinehart. Mr. Kuntz is the author of The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, published by Pocket Books.1

Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler (Twelve; October 1, 2008) author Brad Matsen talked about his book with deep-sea divers and shipwreck investigators, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, both of whom assisted Mr. Matsen in writing the book

Finally, on Sunday April 15, C-SPAN will Air and Stream on C-SPAN 3: “Report Into The Loss of the RMS Titanic” (Video Preview).

The Titanic sank into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg 100 years ago on April 15, 1912. Of those onboard, 1,496 perished and 712 were saved. To mark this centennial anniversary, author Samuel Halpern spoke at the National Archives about the findings of a modern day report into perhaps the 20th century’s most storied disaster at sea.

For more info and to begin searching, here’s a collection of direct links to some helpful material.

Since the database became available on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) last week I’ve heard from a few people asking me about when you’ll be able to search the 1940 Census database by name.

Here’s precisely what NARA has to say:

The 1940 census has not yet been indexed by name, so you must search the census by location or enumeration district. There are initiatives underway to make the 1940 census searchable by name, including a community volunteer project. If you’d like to help make the 1940 census name-index available for free you can sign-up as a volunteer at the1940census.com.

While NARA has tools to help users locate records by enumeration (where someone lived), it’s still not nearly as fast or efficient as searching by name. 

Ancestry.com’s 1940 Census Search

While NARA works to build a name index, Ancestry.com is gradually rolling out a name index for the 1940 census out to the public. Ancestry.com announced that they now have all 3.8 million scanned 1940 U.S. Census page images available, and have released a searchable name index for two states with the others to come.

The first two states available for name search are Delaware and Nevada. A good start, but a lot of work left to do.

The 1940 Census index is free to search via Ancestry.com from now through the end of 2013. You do need a login/password, but registration is simple (e-mail address only) and does not require a credit card. You can access the Ancestry.com 1940 census databasehere.

Looking For New York City Residents

In conjunction with the census release, the New York Public Library has developed a tool named Direct Me NYC 1940 that let’s you locate people by name and address, using a database of 1940s residential telephone directories.

It’s called WatchKnowLearn.org and it’s being developed for K-12 students and educators.

While I don’t fit directly into either of those categories I like to think of myself as a “lifelong learner” and for that reason WatchKnowLearn has become an essential reference tool for me, perfect for a quick knowledge “tune-up,” learning about something new, or even for a bit of reminiscing about my days watching Saturday morning cartoons (remember when cartoons weren’t 24/7?) with a animated version of a well-known fable.

The Content

WatchKnowLearn includes information and direct links about more than 32,000 “educational” videos from disparate sources around the web. The selection and curation is done by editors, many of them educators and education professionals like school librarians. WatchKnowLearn also has a media review panel consisting of several hundred members.

With so much video material out there (and much more to come), the focus at WatchKnowLearn is quality over quantity. Having experts reviewing and adding metadata to each entry is not only useful especially when it comes to educational material but also a major time saver.

Searching & Browsing

Searching the database is simple, as you might expect it to be. Since all videos include appropriate age-specific metadata you can limit your search from the outset for kids of a particular age using a slider found to the left of any search box.

All entries also include subject info that is hyperlinked so you can quickly review other videos within that subject.

While searching works well, for me the browse tool is not only useful but also makes discovery fun. Score one for serendipity.

The directory is organized hierarchically with top-level subjects including mathematics, language arts and life skills. Selecting any of them reveals many subcategories.

A Bit Of WatchKnowLearn History

Jimmy Wales is the well-known co-founder and face of Wikipedia. The force behind WatchKnowLearn happens to be the lesser-heralded co-founder of Wikipedia, Dr. Larry Sanger (he left the project several years ago). He also founded another crowd-sourced encyclopedia project, Citizendium. Dr. Sanger has led the development of WatchKnowLearn from about 2007-2010. Funding comes from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.

WatchKnowLearn’s advisory board also includes influential Harvard scholars Lawrence Lessig and Chris Dede, among other notables. As you can see—this is a serious resource for online learning.

A Few More Facts About WatchKnowLearn

• Most videos in English but Spanish and Chinese language interfaces are being developed and are now accessible on the site.
• Educators can create “ classrooms” to help organize video collections specifically related to the needs of their students.
• Nearly 16 million videos have been viewed via the WatchKnowLearn database.

Now, go forth and explore WatchKnowLearn and make sure to share this valuable learning resource with friends, family and colleagues.

You can also keep up to date with new developments at WatchKnowLearn News via Twitter and Facebook.

So, here’s a collection of direct links to databases, record books, searchable archived video and other material direct from the official information source for the Final Four, the NCAA.

Men’s Tournament

1. 2011-12 Men’s Basketball Statistics. Here, you’ll find four different types of data categories:

• Individual stats
• Individual game highs
• Team stats
• Team game highs

For rabid fans, many of these statistics can be downloaded in a number of formats including HTML, ASCII, PDF and CSV.

2. Men: Game by Game Stats for All Division One Teams

3. Men: Final Four Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

4. Men: Basketball Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

5. Men: Archived National Statistics (Since 2000 Season)

6. Men: Archived Team/Player National Ranking Summary (Since 2002 Season)

7. Men: Coach/Student-Athlete Lookup

• Find a specific coach’s all-time or year-by-year win-loss record (search by name)
• Find a specific student-athlete’s career or year-by-year statistics (search by name)

8. Men: Team-by-team yearly statistics

• Find a team’s year-by-year statistics
• Find a team’s year-by-year game results

9. Men: Searchable Video: NCAA Vault

• Video clips and complete tournament games from the NCAA video archive.
• The “Vault” launched a little over a year ago.

A compilation of links to several of the databases listed above is available here.

Women’s Tournament

1. 2011-12 Women’s Basketball Statistics. Also featuring four different types of data categories:

• Individual stats
• Individual game highs
• Team stats
• Team game highs

Again, many of these statistics can be downloaded in a number of formats including HTML, ASCII, PDF and CSV.

2. Women: Game by Game Stats for All Division One Teams

3. Women: Final Four Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

4. Women: Basketball Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

5. Women: Archived National Statistics (Since 2000 Season)

6. Women: Archived Team/Player National Rankings Summary (Since 2002 Season)

7. Women: Coach/Student-Athlete Lookup

• Find a specific coach’s all-time or year-by-year win-loss record (search by name)
• Find a specific student-athlete’s career or year-by-year statistics (search by name)

8. Women: Team-by-team yearly statistics

• Find a team’s year-by-year statistics
• Find a team’s year-by-year game results

A compilation of links to several of the databases listed above is available here.

Can’t Get Enough Madness?

• Official NCAA 2011-2013 Men’s & Women’s Basketball Rule Book (153 pages; PDF)

• Official NCAA Court Diagram

• If you’re a sports stats and facts junkie the ESPN Stats & Info Twitter stream is a must. This stream covers many sports and comes from ESPN researchers.

• The NCAA Stats Twitter stream can alert you to database updates

• Announcer Information

Enjoy the madness!

Without further ado, here are the first four (of many more to come).

C-SPAN Video Library

• Cost: free
• In three words, amazing, important, essential
• With a few exceptions just about every program that have aired on C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN3
• More than 170,000 hours of content, back to 1987
• Advanced search interface
• Important to remember that C-SPAN carries more than what goes on in the Senate and House of Representatives
• Hours and hours of author interviews, political rallies, interviews with newsmakers and journalists and much more
• Most programs are full text searchable using mechanically generated transcripts
• People search allows you to quickly see if a person has appeared on the network and then link directly to the program(s)
• Example: Larry Page (he’s appeared on C-SPAN Twice)
• Many programs are embeddable
• Most programs appear in the archive within a day or two (if not sooner) of airing.
• The C-SPAN Video Library won a prestigious Peabody Award in June

Old Maps Online

• Cost: free
• Officially launched last week
• One search, centralized access to multiple digitized historical map collections
• About 60,000 maps available today, with more than 120,000 maps by end of 2012
• Keyword search, focus by date using slider, search by map
• Material included so far:
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Historical Map Library
  • British Library, Map Library
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
  • Moravian Library, Mollova mapová sbírka

Archive-It

• Cost: free to search; fee for institutions to subscribe
• Archive-It is a fee-based service from the Internet Archive that works with non-profits, schools, governments and others to crawl and archive sites and pages they specify
• Many of the collections are available to all
• Close to 1,700 collections currently available
• Example: Archive of NASA Social Media
• Collections are updated regularly with new material
• Unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable

Road 2.0: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions

• Cost: free
• Provided by Duke University Libraries
• More than 30,000 digitized images, with search/browse capability
• Most images are of outdoor signs from between 1930s and 1980s
• Advanced interface allows you to search by company, product and date

Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web.

Well, they have and that’s what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a few week’s ago, I’m a frequent W|A user and long-time admirer of the company and it’s founder, Stephen Wolfram. I think they’ve scored again.

The service has an introductory rate of $4.99/month with a reduced rate of $2.99/month for students. The company offers pricing for the enterprise. So, what does this initial launch offer?

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Key Features

• Ability to Analyze Your Own Datasets Input of upload a data set and let Wolfram’s technology automatically recognize and analyze the data. For example, a timeline of your email, your credit card expenses, or a data set obtained from Data.gov.

• Data in more than 60 file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. From an XLS spreadsheet to an HTML document to the audio in a WAV file. Image files (in many formats) can also be analyzed. As you would expect, many science and math formats are also included.

• Access to extended keyboards like the one available with the Wolfram|Alpha mobile apps.

• Visualized and interactive results using the CDF (computational data format) that Wolfram launched last July.

What’s not available today is the ability to publish and compare, comment on or share results. According to Stephen Wolfram, these options are forthcoming.

I’ll can say now that while some of what Wolfram|Alpha Pro has to offer might not be for everybody today it very likely will be in the future as the amount of data available to analyze (personal data and publicly available datasets) continues to skyrocket.

In other words, Wolfram|Alpha pro is getting in on the ground floor of personal data analysis with a powerful but at the same time very easy to use tool that will appeal to everyone as data analysis moves out of the lab and office and into just about everyplace else.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: On February 8th, Stephen Wolfram posted more details about this Pro offering on their blog.

FAA Mobile Web App

• Since it’s a mobile app nothing to download
• Lookup aircraft tail numbers, get airport status, and several tools for aviators
• Learn more
• Direct link to FAA Mobile App

New From The IRS: Exempt Organizations Select Check

• Learn if an organization has tax exempt status or if that status has been revoked
• Data sets can also be downloaded
• Learn more
• Direct link to Database

USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

• From the U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Use Zip Code for local info
• Learn more
• Direct link to Interactive Map

Interactive Access to CDC’s HIV and STD Data

• Uses GIS Software
• Download/export data
• Interactive charts, graphs, and of course maps
• Learn more
• Direct link to New Interactive Resource

National Archives Transcription Pilot Project

• Crowdsourcing from the Feds!
• Help transcribe about 1000 pages from 300 documents
• Documents date back to late 18th century
• Learn more
• Direct link to Pilot Project

Maplight.org Company Pages

• MapLight is an excellent resource for political contribution info
• New “Company Pages” feature aggregate contribution data, recent articles, positions on legislation and more
• Currently available for U.S. Congress, California legislature, and Wisconsin legislature
• Remember, this is a beta resource. Pages for some companies not yet available.
• Learn more
• Direct link to Company Pages Interface

Global Think Tank Directory

• From the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania
• More than 6500 institutions included in the directory
• Search or browse by continent and country
• Direct link to Global Think Tank Directoryy

So, queries like:

• Tom Brady Joe Flacco Passing Yards
• 49ers 2011
• New York Giants field goal attempts, field goals made
• Chicago Bears Record 1985
• Ray Lewis Tackles
• Detroit Lions vs. Denver Broncos Passing Yards

all return results that often include visual elements like a graph.

Statistical data for every NFL team and every NFL player back to 1985 are available and the number of statistics and the combinations you can create are endless.

What’s available? This page lists all of the categories of stats available. A guide like this is something new for Wolfram|Alpha and I’m very happy to see it. Hopefully, more of these guides are in the works.

Where Is The Data Coming From?

It’s one thing to provide access to statistics, but it’s quite another to make sure they come from a reliable source.

Wolfram has partnered with STATS based in Chicago’s northern suburbs. STATS is the leading provider of sports data. It’s you follow a sport or sports, play in fantasy leagues, or just look at the latest scores, you’ve seen and used their services.

STATS has been around since 1981 and I’ve been watching them grow ever since. The STATS first office was only a few blocks from where I grew up. Currently, the company is owned jointly by the Associated Press and News Corp.

The one caveat (at least for now) is that NFL statistics are NOT real-time or near real-time. In other words, if you’re watching the games on Sunday, the stats accessible via Wolfram|Alpha will not be updated after every completed pass, made field goal, etc. Currently, NFL data is updated weekly.

Hopefully, this will change by next season and real-time data will be available. Also, I would love to see all-time statistics included in the database. For example, all-time NFL rushing leaders, all-time Chargers passing leaders, all-time Bears vs. Lions record, etc.

Wolfram will also be working with STATS to provide the same type of info for other sports including baseball and basketball.

Wolfram|Alpha’s Largest Hurdle

I said even before Wolfram|Alpha launched that the company’s biggest challenge is not the technology or data sources. They’re experts in this area and continue to do a great job.

The biggest obstacle Wolfram faces is marketing. Marketing Wolfram|Alpha in a time when most people live in a Google or Bing-centric world, is a serious challenge. Of course, this is challenge is one for many companies.

Luckily, after many years, I’m slowly starting to see more people open to trying something different and adding more tools to their search toolkit.

Of course, what search tool you use and when you use it all depends on what you’re looking for and your information need. More and more often, Wolfram delivers not only the data you need but also visualizations and related material.

Comparing Wolfram|Alpha to other search tools can be unfair. It’s not a general purpose search tool but rather a “fact engine” or interactive reference resource that you can query using natural language using data from curated and trusted sources.

I speak from experience that once people understand what Wolfram can and cannot do then see practical examples of what Wolfram has to offer, they’re often hooked.

By adding NFL statistics (and soon more sports statistics) Wolfram|Alpha has powerful ammo to reach out to new users with and not only provide them authoritative American football statistics but also show them all that their product has to offer.

Exciting!

An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named PolitickerUSA can save you a lot of time and effort informing you as to what members of congress are tweeting about right now.

In one location you can quickly access the non-stop real-time stream of tweets from Senators, Reps, President Obama, governors, and a few of the republican presidential candidates.

You can also filter the entire PolitickerUSA stream of tweets using a hashtag or word into the filter box. You do not have to click <enter>.

But Wait, There’s More

Here are a few other things you can do with PolitickerUSA.

1. Clicking any word or hashtag in a word cloud will run a search on Twitter for that hashatag or word.

2. Politician Trends allows you to quickly isolate and visualize the latest tweets from a specific politician.

3. A table of all politicians accessible using PolitickerUSA is available linking to their Twitter stream and providing their handle.

Kudos to the PolitickerUSA developer Brian for making the site available. You can read more about how he built the site here.

Almost 3,000 of these publications are open access so the full text is quickly and directly accessible on the web for free.

For many years, professionals, academics, students and others have used services that alerted them when new issues of scholarly/academic (peer-reviewed) publications were published or about to be published.

If you’re not a researcher or academic these publications can still be useful to alert you to what’s likely coming in the future or how the technology or idea is being implemented. You can also learn the names of researchers and where the research is taking place. You can then often utilize the web to learn more about the reseacher and the organization their affiliated with.

Even if you don’t have the time to read the full text of the articles themselves, being able to scan the abstracts that are almost always provided for free can be helpful.

Using JournalTOCs: Nuts and Bolts

Although it’s not always necessary I suggest register for the service (free). Registered users have all of the publications they’re following backed-up on the JournalTOCS server and can also use the site to view material.

Discovering and finding finding publications to be notified about, and setting up alerts is straightforward. You can search (title or ISSN) or browse by publisher or subject.

As you spot titles you would like to follow, check (or tick) the box next to the title. Next to each title you’ll find a direct link to the publication’s home page and another link if you simply want to grab the RSS feed to add elsewhere.

All of your selections (of course they can be edited as needed) are listed on a personalized page that is accessed using the pulldown in the upper-right corner of the page. Just click on your login name.

From this page you can also save and export a complete list of followed journals as an OMPL feed to use in a newsreader app. This page also has a check box that toggles (off by default) a feature that will send alert notifications to the email address that you used when you registered for JournalTOCS.

Each table of contents alert is hyperlinked to either the abstract and bibliographic information and/or the full text of the article.

But Wait… There’s More

You can also use JournalTOCS to keyword search for bibliographic information (and in some cases full text) for each article listed in all alerts.

To do a keyword search of all articles in the database, select “for Articles by Keywords” radio button directly below the search box on the homepage. It’s worth mentioning that this a search of metadata and not of the full text.

Learn more about searching and browsing the database here.

New Journals Added

Although one of the founders of JournalTOCS, Roddy Macleod, is now retired from the Heriot-Watt University Library, he continues to work on the project and regularly adds new titles to the collection. As Roddy adds these titles to the database he posts updates on his personal blog. Here’s an example of a recent update.

By the way, JournalTOCS accepts suggestions about new journals to add to their database on this page. Publications must meet the following selection criteria:

• Scientific and scholarly journals that publish peer-reviewed research papers are covered.
• The journal must have an editor, an editorial board and a peer-review system.
• The journal must publish TOC RSS feeds for its most recent issues.

APIs? You Bet!

JournalTOCs has several free APIs available and many don’t require registration. Details here.

Final Comments

JournalTOCS is a very valuable service that also happens to be free. As we said at the outset even if you don’t normally ready scholarly publications, using JournalTOCS can let you take a few spare moments to quickly get an idea about projects, tools, and ideas that you might see sometime in the future. Plus, reading this type of material (sometimes the abstracts can be enough) might spark a new idea or fuel a discussion with friends and colleagues.

If you want to read the full text you might be able to find free versions (often preprints) of the articles on the Internet using services like Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar, SSRN, arXiv, and many others. In some cases, you might find a copy on the author’s personal homepage or the homepage for the organization their affiliated with.

If the final version of the articles (or preprints) are not on the open web, you might be able to access for free from a local public, academic, or special library. Many libraries offer access to many remotely accessible databases with full text articles available 24X7x365. We will talk how this works in an upcoming post.

Finally, a growing number of academic journals are now “open access” and the full text material articles are free for everyone to access and read.