INFORMATION UPDATE "Helping Businesses Find the Facts" November/December, 2001 Number 27 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. ============================================================ Some Information Update readers noticed that the November issue did not come out at the beginning of the month, as usual. Well, Fall and Spring are the conference seasons in the information business. Your editor spent the first week of November attending Internet Librarian in Pasadena, CA and will spend the first week of December at Online Information, 2001 in London, UK. Hence, this combined November/December issue. ------------------------------------------------------------ IN THIS ISSUE ------------------------------------------------------------ => Do It Yourself - The Wayback Machine => Did You Know? - Competitive Intelligence => Notes, News and Announcements => Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information ------------------------------------------------------------ DO IT YOURSELF - The Wayback Machine ------------------------------------------------------------ Fans of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show will remember The Wayback Machine. Dog-genius Mr. Peabody and his "boy" Sherman traveled through history in Mr. Peabody's "Wayback Machine." http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/ Holy smokes, now The Internet Archive has created a Wayback Machine to make its archives searchable. http://www.archive.org/index.html Information Update readers will know that nothing is perma- nent on the web. A site you visit today may not even be there tomorrow, and if it is, it could be vastly different. What happens to the information that was once on these changed pages? Well, it may just be lost. Or, it may be archived in the Internet Archive. "The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) public nonprofit that was founded to build an 'Internet library,' with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format." Collaborating with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, Internet Archive hopes to assure free and permanent access to public information. To attest to the need for this kind of archive and search engine, note the message found on the website at the time of this writing: "Warning: Service intermittent. We apologize for not anticipating the usage this service is receiving. We are working on adding servers..." Things seem to be work- ing fine at the moment. I visited the archive special collection on September 11. Archived pages come from the White House, the Defense Department, and U.S. newspapers and foreign newspapers in France and England. As of March, 2001, the Internet Archive had stored 100 tera- bytes of information on 10 billion pages covering the web from 1996 to now. As a point of reference, one thousand copies of the Encyclopedia Britanica is 1 terabyte. Twenty million books (not counting pictures) in the Library of Congress represents 14 terabytes. A terabyte is a million megabytes or about a trillion bytes or exactly 1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. http://www.archive.org/xterabytes.html FYI - The Google search engine http://www.google.com also searches archived web pages. These are two sites worth bookmarking for future use. ------------------------------------------------------------ DID YOU KNOW -- Competitive Intelligence ------------------------------------------------------------ Why would lawyers need competitive intelligence? Are they going to research other lawyers to keep up with the compe- tition? Maybe, but that wouldn't be the primary use of competitive intelligence techniques for lawyers and law firms. Due diligence is the term used by most lawyers to describe the "homework" they do to prepare for a case or protect their client's interests. Lawyers need to know about pro- ducts, companies, people, finances, and a whole lot more to represent their clients. There are hundreds of places to look for the needed information, so it takes a skilled and knowledgeable researcher to track it down. For more infor- mation, visit http:/shamelinfo.com to review the list of sources presented recently to a meeting of law librarians. For more help with your competitive intelligence needs or due diligence research, contact Shamel Information Services. 858-673-4673 ------------------------------------------------------------ Notes, News, and Announcements ------------------------------------------------------------ Information Update editor, Cynthia Shamel was recently interviewed by Hal Kirkwood for the Special Libraries Associ- ation Business and Finance Division Bulletin. Hal and Cynthia discussed the business of an independent information professional and the role of mentoring in business success. Kirkwood, Hal. "A Conversation with Cynthia L. Shamel," B & F Bulletin, Fall, 2001, pp.53-55 Visit the Shamel Information Services web site for a copy of the handout given to attendees at the San Diego Association of Law Librarians Fall seminar. Online Information, 2001. Olympia, London, UK, December 4-6. Happy Holidays to all Information Update readers! ============================================================= 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://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 and a Special Libraries Association, San Diego Chapter member. Telephone: 858-673-4673 Toll Free: 800-330-9939