Measuring Worth: Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to 2008

Want to know how far $50 went in 1899 as opposed to 2001? It would take $1,101.37 to buy as much bling in 2001 as you could with $50 in 1899. Historical purchasing statistics like this can be found at Measuring Worth, a private site created and maintained by Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson. From the site's About page>:

The mission of this site is to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal measures.

The data have been created using the highest standards of the fields of economics and history and are rigorously refereed by the most distinguished researchers in the fields. Beginning with the United States and United Kingdom and continuing with Japan and China, we will continue to add series from other countries under the same high standard.

The site provides calculators for the historical relative value of money in various currencies as well as for measuring historical changes in purchasing power, savings growth, inflation rates, as well as daily closing values for the Dow Jones Industrial Average dating back to 1896. Plus more statistics and calculators.

Rigorously researched, this site is a great place to find historical economic data, especially if your library does not have access to historical Wall Street Journal issues and data.

NETRonline: Real Estate Information and Public Records Research

Resource Shelf just posted about the new historic aerial photography feature of the NETRonline (National Environmental Title Research) site. While the searchable and zoomable aerial photographs are very cool, I was happy to be directed to the NETRonline site, which I had never seen before. NETRonline is an information portal for property information, deeds and titles, and various other public records for counties in all 50 states that make their information available over the web.

The site has four main sections: the Property Data Store, where property information such as property reports, parcel maps and document images from county governments can be found (if available). Prices vary on the reports, but are quite reasonable for most searches ($5 for a parcel report; $60 for an ownership and encumbrance report).

The Public Records Online Directory provides links to county government websites that contain public records in all 50 states. Selecting a state and then a county brings up links to the websites of relevant taxation, assessment, registry and other record-holding offical bodies in that county.

NETR's Environmental Resources Directory lists state, local, commercial and non-profit agencies and groups that monitor for and cleanup environmental pollution that could impact environmental and property value.

Lastly, the historic aerials section of the site houses historic and current aerial photography for a large coverage area of the 50 states.

NETRonline will also do criminal record searches and other background checks on individuals for a fee.

Yale University Avalon Project

The Avalon Project is a digital library from Yale University's Lillian Goldman School of Law that provides linked full text of documents relating to law, history, economics, politics, dipolomacy and government. Documents range from the ancient (4000 BCE) to important legal documents of the 21st century, and include the Athenian Constitution, The Mayflower Compact, all of the Hague Conventions, and the Executive Order that established the Department of Homeland Security. You probably have to be a pretty big dork to get excited about these documents, but I trust that readers of this site are into that kind of thing in the first place.

Project Diana is a document collection of the Avalon Project that makes landmark human rights cases and documents available publically. The International Military Tribunal for Germany houses full-text testimony and documents of the Nuremburg trials.

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) is a volunteer-run organization whose mission is to further disseminate economics research around the globe. RePEc's main offering is a decentralized database of working papers in economics, journal articles and software components related to economics. RePEc does not provide full-text to the indexed materials; only citations are made available via the database. However, if a paper is freely available via an institution with an open access mandate or one that otherwise provides free access to its economics working papers, a download link will appear next to the citation. In many cases papers can be obtained via interlibrary loan at your local library or through a document delivery service like Ingenta.

RePEc pulls together an impressive range of economics citations from over 1000institutional publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the World Bank and MIT Press.

The RePEc database can be accessed in several ways. The IDEAS interface is hosted at the University of Connecticut's Department of Economics. In addition to citations, IDEAS also contains information about over 11,000 economics institutions, 20,000 economics authors, and 24,000 New Economic Papers (NEP) reports on 85 different economics subfields.

EconPapers is another search interface for RePEc. Working papers, journal articles, software items, books, book chapters and author profiles are searchable through EconPapers.

Citations in Economics provides citation statistics and information about papers and authors listed in the RePEc database.

Black Americans in Congress 1870- 2007

A recent Congressional document, House document 108-224, is a history of Black Americans in Congress 1870 - 2007. The entire book is available digitally in both .pdf and .zip format at the GPO website.

I regularly get requests for biographies of famous African Americans, and this is yet another great resource for students of American history of all ages. The material is comprehensive; the book is 803 pages long and has full biographies of the 121 African Americans who have served in Congress.

University of Minnesota Human Rights Library

Much research on human rights is done by government-funded agencies and non-governmental organizations. While material published in academic journals, news/magazine outlets like Foreign Affairs, governments and large international organizations such as the United Nations is findable through academic and public databases, there are hundreds more organizations dedicated to stopping human rights abuses that actively conduct, publish and disseminate research as grey literature. The University of Minnesota Human Rights Library has created a wonderful resource for finding this literature as well as provided a core library of over several hundred human rights treaties and other primary documents. The Library also offers a metasearch engine that allows users to search across multiple large human rights websites, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, at the same time.

The Links to Other Sites section contains a comprehensive listing of over 4,000 links to other human rights organizations around the world. Documents are available in nine different languages, and a mobile/PDA version of the site is available.

Computer Science Technical Reports

While many individual university departments make their computer science technical reports publicly aviailable under the open archives model, it is only the New Zealand Digital Library that harvests and makes searchable in one place reports from nearly 300 different institutions. Instructions for advanced searching are available in the help section. An excellent resource that saves the trouble of identifying and searching individual repositories for up-to-date computer science information.

COPE: Cytokines and Cells Online Pathfinder Encyclopaedia

I am partial to science reference and research both personally and professionally, so today's resource is another free scientific reference site for researchers: Horst Ibelgauft'sCytokines and Cells Online Pathfinder Encyclopaedia (COPE). COPE is an independent bioinformatics project to create an electronic copy of the now out-of-print Dictionary of Cytokines (1995). Since this site is a labor of love, and the author teaches medical students in a developing country, financial help by site users is appreciated.

This resource provides great value to cell biologists, immunologists, molecular biologists and all researchers who study cytokines.

COPE is regularly updated and currently contains over 22,000 entries on various cytokine molecules. This page outlines data organization and search strategies for locating information in the database.

Subdictionaries of other molecule types are also incorporated into COPE's offerings, including a dictionary of angiogenesis, a dictionary of eukaryotic cell types, a dictionary of hormones, and a virulance factors dictionary.

OneLook Dictionary Search With Reverse Lookup

OneLook Dictionary Search is a search engine that crawls hundreds on online dictionaries. The dictionaries range from the general to the highly specialized, and are browsable by topic area. Search results are presented as links to third-party dictionary sites.

Another feature worth taking the time to learn is the Reverse Dictionary. This is a wonderful tool for discovering new and related words and vocabulary terms that relate to a particular concept. The Reverse Dictionary does not return perfect results; OneLook creators encourage you to rephrase your query if your results are not relevant, and the Reverse Dictionary works through "a motley assortment of statistical language processing hacks."

Advanced searching with wildcards and filtering by meaning allow for powerfully targeted query results.

Open Library Project

The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive and partially funded by a grant from the California State Library. The goal of the Open Library is to provide one web page for every book ever published. So far the library has collected over 30 million searchable bibliographic records (20 million are available), built a database to store them, and made available over one million full-text digitized books.

Book records come from a variety of libraries, publishers and other digital content repositories. Another goal of the Open Library is to create a new metadata schema for bibliographic records: the project has a working group for those interested in discussing the metadata to be included in the records beyond MARC data.

The Open Library, true to its name, is an open project and is actively soliciting volunteer help from librarians, programmers and book enthusiasts. I'm curious to see where this project goes and whether the futurelib metadata schema achieves widespread adoption in the library and book publishing industries.

CiteSeerX Beta

Today's reference site is CiteSeerX, a scientific (primarily computer and information science) digital library and search engine from Penn State University. In addition to over one million articles in its database of articles, CiteSeerX provides a suite of discovery tools to assist researchers in finding the most relevant literature, including citation rankings and impact ratings.

Advanced search provides a variety of search fields and sorting criteria. Results can be sorted by number of citations, recency, relevance and date order.

CiteSeerX provides a number of search and discovery features beyond just indexed content: autonomous citation indexing, reference linking, citation context, related content and query-sensistive summaries are only some of the advantages of the CiteSeerX interface.

Go to town, searchers.

no post tomorrow

There will be no post tomorrow 6/15/09 as I will be traveling all day.

OSTI.gov- federated science search

Happy Friday! Today's resource is a redesigned information portal from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the Department of Energy (DOE). The OSTI website recently underwent a redesign and now sports features such as tagging options for pages on the site and a Science Showcase discovery area, as well as a Web 2.0 tools including an RSS feed, search widgets, blog and bookmarking tools. Hat tip once again to Danny Luce for informing me about the site redesign.

What's really exciting about the OSTI site, however, is the powerful federated search capabilities. OSTI has partnered with Deep Web Technologies to provide federated search capabilities across multiple databases containing scientific information. This eliminates the need to search each database by hand, and also the need to know which databases contain the information you are looking for- a single query searches all sources of federal science information at once. OSTI provides three federated search engines on its site: the Science Accelerator, which searches DOE publications (including some archival materials), the US scientific information search engine at Science.gov, and a new Global Science search engine that searches global scientific repositories for reports and data.

OSTI also makes DOE datasets available for discovery by researchers with the DOE DataExplorer.

OSTI records are also searchable via the Open Archives Initiative union catalog OAIster. The Library Tools allow librarians to download both MARC and OAI records into their own catalogs.

I think the new website is a valuable addition to the library community, and really furthers OSTI's goal to accelerate the discovery of scientific information by researchers and the general public. Great work!

While exploring OSTI's new site, I clicked through to Deep Web Technology's site and saw some additional federated search products that are also very helpful. Many are already familiar with Scitopia, a deep web federated search engine that searches government science data, patents and the papers of over 15 societies that collectively provide over 150 years of science and technology scholarship. ScienceResearch is another deep web science search engine. Biznar, a global business search engine, and Mednar, a medical search engine, were also developed by Deep Web Technologies. Free browser plugins for each of these sites allow you to search these engines directly from your own website.

Tree of Life Web Project

Did you see the wonderful article in the New York Times this week about the echidna? Did you want to take one home? Me too.

In case you are interested in learning more about monotremes, or any other living creature, the Tree of Life Web Project can provide an overview, pictures and a bibliography of additional resources about the animal/plant/fungus/algae/slime mold/bacteria of interest.

The Tree of Life Project is an NIH-funded "collection of information about biodiversity compiled collaboratively by hundreds of expert and amateur contributors. Its goal is to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct. Connections between Tree of Life web pages follow phylogenetic branching patterns between groups of organisms, so visitors can browse the hierarchy of life and learn about phylogeny and evolution as well as the characteristics of individual groups."

Additional teaching resources for students and teachers are available in the learning section of the site, including ways individuals and classrooms can contribute to the Tree of Life Project.

Another major resource documenting information about life on earth is the Encyclopedia of Life. While the Encyclopedia is a separate resource, the Tree of Life and Encyclopedia share resources, software tools, and coordinate their efforts to avoid content duplication. Tree of Life focuses more of phylogenetic relationships between species, while the Encyclopedia focuses on pages about individual species.

Health Resources: Grey Literature

The health information universe is a constantly changing and growing body of knowledge. While much exists online and in health databases, there is a wealth of one-off, technical, government-sponsored and non-profit research being conducted that is not indexed by any major databases. This research is called grey literature. Discovery and harvesting of grey literature has become easier with the explosion of web publishing in recent years; still, it is difficult and time consuming to search for organizations that publish the material you are interested in, not to mention the task of gathering, internally indexing, and updating the material.

To help librarians and researchers discover and find grey literature, I'm sharing a few resources today that can help with your search.

First, the New York Academy of Medicine (the second largest medical library in the U.S. open to the public, outside of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda) publishes a report of grey literature they collect. In addition, the Academy maintains a blog about current urban health awareness featuring the latest reports added to their catalog. For health care policy reports and analysis, the Academy of Medicine maintains a resource in partnership with the Kaiser Family Foundation called Health Policy Picks.

In addition to reports in the Academy of Medicine's collection, a very helpful list of organizations that produce grey literature in the health field is maintained at the library's website.

The Duke University Medical Center Library also maintains a listing of sources of grey literature.

Another tack to take when searching for unindexed material is to access the CRISP database. CRISP is a database of federally funded biomedical research projects being conducted at universities and other research institutions, including those funded by the NIH and FDA among other agencies. For thsoe searching for clinical trials, CRISP has added two indexing terms: Clinical Trials, Phase I and Clinical Trials, Phase II/III/IV.

The University of New Mexico maintains a website of resources of grey literature in the health sciences as well as another listing of organizations that produce grey literature relating to health.

GreySource is a web-based selection of resources that explicitly refer to the term "grey literature" on their sites. Contains materials in languages other than English.

While this is only a brief introduction to grey literature searching, I hope it serves as a starting point for finding reports and research not represented in major indexes. Happy searching!

Openjurist.com

Today's resource is a new site that makes public domain legal data searchable: Openjurist.com. Open Jurist is a legal database of U.S. Supreme Court opinions and, more excitingly, United States Courts of Appeals opinions (via the Federal Reporter), which, to my knowledge have never been available online outside of LexisNexis Academic Universe and Westlaw. FindLaw has some Federal Court of Appeals opinions online, but only from 1995 to the present.

Another non-subscription case law resource is AltLaw, a project of Columbia Law School's Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School. AltLaw also contains searchable and browsable opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, but only has opinions from the second and third series of the Federal Reporter, whereas Open Jurist also includes the Federal Reporter, first series dating back to 1890.

Great new developments in making public domain knowledge truly public and accessible! Hat tip to our government documents librarian Danny Luce for letting me know about Open Jurist.

RSAP: Research Society for American Periodicals

Today's resource is the wonderful list compiled by the Research Society of American Periodicals (RSAP). "The RSAP is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars interested in American magazines and newspapers. It publishes the journal American Periodicals, sponsors panels at the annual meeting of the American Literature Association, and has a free moderated discussion list."

The Research Resource Page on RSAP's site links to a wealth of digitized 19th, 20th and 21st century American periodicals, zines and other alternative literature. Larger digitization projects like Cornell and Michigan's Making of America collections are featured, as well as smaller local, historical, ephemera and genre collections.

Brooklyn Public Library has digitized nineteenth-century editions of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

The Library of Congress recently added a beta search to the Chronicling America collection, which shows highlighted search terms in digitized thumbnails. More newspapers are regularly added to that collection as well. UPDATE: The Library of Congress blog just announced more changes to the Chronicling America site today. Notable improvements are new date range search capabilities and persistent URLs for bookmarking.

For anyone looking for historic newspapers for primary sources, the RSAP's resource list is an excellent place to start.

Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events: Pre-1620 to 1920

Today's site is another American literature site: Brief Timeline of American Literature and Events: Pre-1620 to 1920. The site is compiled and maintained by Donna Campbell, a tenured associate professor of English at Washington State University. A timeline, a brief history of literary movements, and biographical sketches of American authors are featured. The author also provides bibliographies of seondary works about various authors.

A great resource for students of American literature and anyone interested in more information on a particular author or major literary movement.

A to Z Teacher Stuff

Teachers oftentimes come to the library looking for lesson plans and other materials to assist in their class planning. This is a guest post written by my colleague Deborah Pecora introducing a great resource for teachers:

For educators or home schooling parents the site A to Z Teacher Stuff is loaded with thousands of lesson plans, downloadable materials, ideas from other teachers on successful lessons, science experiments and projects, games to name a few options. It is well organized by tabs at the top of the page: themes, lessons, tips, articles, discuss, store, pintables, subject, grades and search that each give material for grades K-12. The site includes information for family involvement and special education lessons. Do you need help creating a word search puzzle or would you like to create your own handwriting practice sheets? A location does these for you in seconds. Also included is a site of “webquests” - topical subjects and lesson plans for children of all grades to learn or practice using websites. Books and materials to purchase online are available. From poetry to science all areas of education are included.

Nineteenth-Century American Children & What They Read

Greetings from Brooklyn on a perfectly sunny yet not too hot nor windy beginning of summer day!

Today's site is the charming work of Pat Pflieger, the creator of Nineteenth-Century American Children & What They Read. The site is a treasure trove of transcriptions of major works of children's literature from 1800 - 1872, inlcuding books, magazines, and articles about children. Also included are annotated bibliographies and scholarly writings about Victorian children's literature and its impact on American culture. A subject index and title list provide additional browsing support.

Focusing heavily on the seminal children's literature magazine of the time, Robert Merry's Museum, the site's contents paint an entertaining, informative and oftentimes cringe-inducing portrait of the American Victorian worldview as it was re-packaged to influence and educate the next generation.

Selections:

The Slave's Friend, a children's magazine published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830's.

Diary of a Little Girl in Old New York

1902 Encyclopedia

Today's reference site is the 1902 Encyclopedia. 1902 Encyclopedia is a digitized and searchable version of the 1902-03 Encyclopedia Britannica (10th edition). The text is not presented as page images but rather as type on the screen, with scanned images from the original pages presented alongside the text.

Famous 19th century thinkers and scientists wrote many of the articles for the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica. Thomas Huxley wrote the entry on Darwin's theory of evolution; William Morris contributed an article on the history of mural decoration. More famous entries are listed on the contributers page.

AcademicInfo.net

It is sometimes difficult to select the right resources for this blog. While I don't want to highlight the completely obvious sources of reference information, I also don't want to focus on information and collections that are too specialized or obscure. So today I'm sharing a comprehensive site that contains subject guides suitable for educators and librarians on a host of topics: AcademicInfo.net.


Of special interest to librarians are the Subject Guides compiled by the site's editors. Ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Zoology Societies, including everything in between, AcademicInfo can provide answers and resources for a wide range of reference questions.

AcademicInfo is also a clearinghouse on information about distance learning and online education.