WebStuff

By the time we mentioned Resource Shelf last week, Shirl Kennedy had posted a new Resource of the Week, Houghton Mifflin's Reader's Companion to American History. We won't try to excerpt her detailed description of what's available there for history lovers and how to get at it. Read her description, and then go play with it.
       Another great resource for history buffs is, well, historybuff.com, among other things a collection of digitized historical newspapers. Go to primary source material, the online newspaper archives, then browse around the date folders. You might find a gem like the death of Enrico Caruso on August 2, 1921 ("'Golden Voice is Stilled in Italy"). This link came from Sites and Soundbytes, the blog of the Caestecker Public Library in Green Lake, Wisconsin. They also have a KidsLit blog.
       One of our colleagues found a mapping site that does a somewhat whimsical list of world cities. Once the city is displayed you can change the language to English, and navigate around the map of the city by clicking on a compass rose. Still looking at the world, there's a fabulous project at Geograph British Isles, an attempt to involve as many people as possible ("...a free and open online community project for all") in getting a geographically representative photograph from each square kilometer of Great Britain. Delicious browsing here. Can you imagine if there were a project like this for the US?
       There is no thread to this post, just some more sites that could have gone into the post last week about the pleasures of the web. What, you've got work to do and information to find and no time for pleasures? A while back Sarah Houghton, the Librarian in Black, reminded us about the Infopeople Search Engine Chart. Dense with information about finding information. Do you need just one little trick for improving your search results? Put quotes around your phrases, then choose the phrases carefully, and by golly you can find ANYTHING.