Four Seriously Cool Information Resources

As a librarian, researcher and frequent blogger, I’m constantly coming across incredibly useful online information resources that are most effectively searched using their own site search tools, rather than relying on general-purpose engines to surface their valuable content. I plan to start writing about these on a regular, ongoing basis, using a bullet-point format that highlights the most useful features of each resource, rather than doing in-depth reviews.

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