INFORMATION UPDATE "Helping Businesses Find the Facts" October, 2001 Number 26 A Monthly Publication of Shamel Information Services mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com ============================================================ Welcome to INFORMATION UPDATE, the free monthly newsletter for business and healthcare professionals. For subscription information, refer to notes at the end of this newsletter. ============================================================ ------------------------------------------------------------ IN THIS ISSUE ------------------------------------------------------------ => Do It Yourself - A Most Excellent Adventure => Did You Know? - Citation Searching Offers Answers => Notes, News and Announcements => Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information ------------------------------------------------------------ DO IT YOURSELF - A Most Excellent Adventure ------------------------------------------------------------ This week I learned about a fascinating project called the Degree Confluence Project. The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories are posted on the project website . The project was started in February, 1996 by Alex Jarrett. In learning to use his new global positioning system (GPS) device, he thought it would be cool to locate places represented by a round number in latitude and longitude, such as 43°00'00"N 72°00'00"W. (2.0 miles NNW of Hancock, Cheshire, NH, USA) Alex took pictures, posted them to his personal website, and the project just snowballed from there. So the idea is to visit and document with pictures each point on the globe where a line representing a whole degree of latitude crosses a line representing a whole degree of longitude. Personally, I'm thinking of taking on Uganda. There are 16 points of confluence there, and none have been charted. Even if you don't plan to track down one of these points on the globe and go there to take pictures, it is fun to visit the web site and take a virtual world tour. ------------------------------------------------------------ DID YOU KNOW -- Citation Searching Offers Answers ------------------------------------------------------------ What is citation searching? In essence, it means to search the list of references given at the end of a published research paper. Citation searching is important in the scientific literature, since the results published in one paper are often based upon earlier published works. Those works need to be credited in the works that come later. Suppose we want to find examples of research projects that used recently adopted standardized guidelines for evaluating results. In this case the guidelines do not have a commonly accepted name. They are just referred to as the inter- national standardized guidelines for response criteria. It is hard to reference these guidelines when they are described in such generic terms. The guidelines were published and discussed in a prominent peer reviewed journal. The search strategy, therefore, was to locate published papers that included reference to the article which discussed the guidelines. The thought was that studies using these standardized guidelines would make reference to the journal article which described these guidelines. This strategy proved very effective. Approximately 8-10 very relevant studies were located through citation searching. This is the kind of powerful, professional searching that gives businesses the information they need. The databases and the searching skills needed for this type of project are available to you through Shamel Information Services. We are ready to work with you to meet your information needs. ------------------------------------------------------------ Notes, News, and Announcements ------------------------------------------------------------ The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Chris Sherman and Gary Price is now available for purchase. Information Update readers will find this an invaluable resource. Purchase information at Drug Safety & Surveillance 2001, October 17-19, 2001 Hilton & Towers Arlington http://www.iirusa.com/drugsafety/index.cfm/ Internet Librarian, November 6-8, 2001, Pasadena, CA http://www.infotoday.com/il2001/default.htm ============================================================= Information Update articles are now searchable on the web. Visit http://www.shamelinfo.com and click on "Newsletters." From that page you can enter your search terms to locate articles from past issues of Information Update. Give it a try and let us know what you think. The Shamel Information Services web site at http://shamelinfo.com contains Information Update archives. Just click on "Newsletters" and check for any issues you might have missed. -------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE -------------------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions to INFORMATION UPDATE are free. You may subscribe or unsubscribe by sending a message to: mailto:InfoUpdate@shamelinfo.com with SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Copyright 2001 Shamel Information Services Please feel free to forward this issue to colleagues, in its entirety. Other uses without permission may violate copyright. Online archives at http://www.shamelinfo.com/newsletter.htm =============================================================== Cynthia L. Shamel, editor Shamel Information Services Poway, California mailto:cshamel@shamelinfo.com Ms. Shamel is on the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Information Professionals http://www.aiip.org, a Special Libraries Association, San Diego Chapter member and a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals http://www.scip.org Telephone: 858-673-4673 Toll Free: 800-330-9939