November-December 2013 CyberSelection: Digital Public Library of America

Digital Public Library of America is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for November-December 2013.

After decades of visioning and two and a half years of planning, DPLA (http://dp.la; the Digital Public Library of America) went live on April 18. I have been waiting to see what this site would include and what it would look like ever since it was announced, because I viewed the project as the closest that the U.S. could get to a project on as grand a scale as Europeana (http://europeana.eu), the digital library, museum, and archive of Europe. DPLA launched with 2.4 million items, and as of this writing claims nearly 4 and a half million items from libraries, archives, and museums. That is only a hint of things to come, I trust, but it is enough to test the aims, organization, search capabilities, and other aspects of the site.

The full text of the November-December CyberSelection will be available in February 2014.

October 2013 CyberSelection: Collins Dictionaries

Collins Dictionaries is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for October 2013. 

The Collins dictionaries, in various editions, seem to be the most popular paperback carry-along among my colleagues in Spanish language classes. A year ago, I bought Collins Spanish Idioms, a paperback of barely 200 pages, and started reading meaningful and literal translations of common idiomatic expressions. Only recently did I read the fine print in my book of idioms and discover that Collins operates a free site with lots of resources for language learning and reference (www.collinslanguage.com/easyresources). And it was only after I explored that page a couple times that I discovered Collins Dictionaries (www.collinsdictionary.com) with its tagline "Always Free Online."

The full text of the October CyberSelection will be available in January 2014. 

September 2013 CyberSelection: Nobelprize.org

Nobelprize.org is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for September 2013.

The 2013 Nobel Prize awards will be announced the second week of October; applications for the 2014 prizes are already being accepted. The official Nobel Prize site (http://Nobelprize.org) unveiled a new look "adapted to multiple screens" in June, and now you can access it easily from a smartphone or tablet. An incredible amount of data about Nobel Prize winners--and their accomplishments--is available on the site, easily browsable and searchable. Nobelprize.org is a treasure trove of understandable information about some of the most important knowledge and culture in the world.  

The full text of the September CyberSelection will be available in December.

July/August 2013 CyberSelection: Travelers' Health

CDC Travelers' Health is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for July/August 2013.
  
Travelers' Health

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel 

By Susanne Bjørner

I sat in the "international travel office" at my local hospital recently, answering questions about where and how I would be navigating around in Malaysia and Vietnam on my summer vacation after the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) World Library and Information Congress in Singapore this August. The doctor across from me--always curious whether I would be on a bus, train, boat or plane--knew exactly where there were jungle threats or possibly infectious bodies of water--even telling me of rivers and streams in my route that I didn't know about yet. After he determined which inoculations and preventive doses I should take, I asked him where he got his up-to-date detailed information about diseases currently affecting very specific parts of the world.

Some from WHO (the World Health Organization), he said, and some from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). It was all assembled on his computer screen, which was turned away from me, and I determined to go looking for the site when I got home. I don't think I found exactly what he was looking at during the interview, but I found an extremely useful site with lots of background, tips, and advice on what to do to stay safe while traveling, and what to do if you do fall ill.

Where Are You Going?

The main page of Travelers' Health (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/), with a new design launched in May, offers information For Travelers and For Clinicians; you select a destination from a dropdown menu. I didn't expect to find much risk of exotic discomforts or diseases in the highly populated metropolitan area of Singapore, but that's where my journey was starting out, so under For Travelers, I selected Singapore. I could have indicated some special conditions listed in checkboxes to receive more targeted help:

• Traveling with Children
• Chronic Disease
• Cruise Ship
• Extended Stay/Study Abroad
• Immune Compromised
• Pregnant
• Mission/Disaster Relief
• Visiting Friends or Family

None of these applied to me, however, so I clicked Go, and a page on Health Information for Travelers to Singapore appeared (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/traveler/none/singapore ); it had a small map locating Singapore among its surrounding southeast Asian neighbors. The content on this and all destination pages is divided into five standard topics, listed to the right of the map with internal page links:

• Vaccines and Medicines
• Stay Healthy and Safe
• Healthy Travel Packing List
• Travel Health Notices
• After Your Trip

Vaccines and Travel Notices

Vaccines and Medicines recommends visiting your doctor for immunizations 4-6 weeks before travel. It says that all travelers should be up to date with routine vaccinations like MMR (measles-mumps-rubella), diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus vaccine, varicella (chickenpox) vaccine, and a yearly flu shot. It further recommended vaccination against hepatitis A and typhoid, especially if you are "staying with friends or relatives, visiting smaller cities or rural areas, or if you are an adventurous eater." (I have twice in my life suffered the consequences of being slightly too adventurous.) Finally, it provided information about three other diseases (hepatitis B, rabies, and yellow fever), that might be a problem for some travelers under certain conditions.

Small colored icons in each section provide visual cues of how to protect yourself (Get vaccinated; Eat and drink safely; Keep away from animals; Reduce your exposure to germs; Avoid sharing body fluids; and Avoid non-sterile medical or cosmetic equipment). Each of the diseases and vaccines is hyperlinked to pages with more information. The Routine Vaccines page (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/diseases/routine) is a goldmine of links and data on standard vaccines for children and for adults (flu, Td/Tdap, HPV, shingles, pneumococcal, and meningococcal, as well as hepatitis A and hepatitis B).

Before following up on other travel information on the Singapore destination page, I moved on to Malaysia and Vietnam to check their Vaccines and Medicines data. Both introduced me to two diseases not mentioned concerning Singapore: Japanese encephalitis and malaria. Basic information is given in the Vaccines and Medicines section, but I also clicked the link on each disease to see the extended page for each disease. Both these serious diseases can lead to death; there is a vaccine for Japanese encephalitis, and you can take prophylactic medicine against malaria. The best prevention for both is to avoid rural areas and prevent insect bites.

I had to scroll down to see special Travel Health Notices on each destination page. There were no notices for Singapore, and the one notice for Malaysia, for sarcocystosis, pertained to a limited geographic area that I am not getting close to at all. Vietnam is a different story: "As of November 4, 2012, the Vietnam Ministry of Health has confirmed that approximately 134,929 people in 63 provinces have had hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) since the beginning of 2012." The CDC has placed a Watch Level 1 warning, advising to "Practice usual precautions." The usual precautions, plus the cause and symptoms of HFMD, are detailed on an expanded page (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/watch/hand-foot-mouth-disease-in-vietnam), linked from the warning.

Staying Healthy and Packing Right

The redesign of the CDC Travelers Health site in May moved some very helpful information to more prominent places on each destination page. The Stay Healthy and Safe section offers advice relating to nine key behaviors:

• Eat and drink safely
• Prevent bug bites
• Stay safe outdoors
• Keep away from animals
• Reduce your exposure to germs
• Avoid sharing body fluids
• Know how to get medical care while traveling
• Select safe transportation
• Maintain personal security

I clicked Prevent Bug Bites to open that section and found that I am right in assembling a long-sleeved and long-legged white and beige wardrobe for this trip. I also found specifics on tick and mosquito repellent, including specific brand names of several that meet the recommendations. Permethrin-treated clothing was mentioned as worth consideration, with a link to a page (http://npic.orst.edu/pest/mosquito/ptc.html) from the National Pesticide Information Center informing that the U.S. military has been pre-treating clothing with this pesticide for 20 years, and giving details on its proper use.

Each of the topics above can be opened or closed for viewing, and the resulting customized page copied or printed for individual study. Also on each destination page is a Healthy Travel Packing List with a handy checklist for Medicines and Medical Supplies (for existing conditions, special prescriptions for the trip, and OTC products), Supplies to Prevent Illness or Injury (with specifications on sunscreen and water purification tablets), First-Aid Kit, and the all-important Paperwork. You probably won't need all the items listed, the CDC acknowledges, but it doesn't hurt to consider them.

Other Navigation and More Data

So far we have only looked at the For Travelers section and some places to which it is linked. There is also a For Clinicians section, directed to healthcare professionals, but freely available to anyone. The destination pages here are very similar to those in the For Travelers view, but with a section on Non-Vaccine Preventable Diseases, some more detail, and more of an advisory focus.  

At the very top of Travelers' Health is an A to Z list so you can open an index of topics available; and at the top right is a search box where you can limit a search to Travelers' Health or expand it to All CDC Topics.

A left column on the home and most other pages also contains important links by which you can approach the data differently: There are Destinations, Travel Notices, Find a Clinic, Disease Directory, and Information Centers for travelers, clinicians, and travel industry.

There is also a link to the Yellow Book homepage (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/page/yellowbook-home-2012). This title is published by CDC and issued in print every two years; it is the comprehensive resource that collects most of the information that is reproduced elsewhere. Travelers' Health does such a good job of repackaging the data in useful doses that I thought the full book would be of interest only to professionals. I was wrong. A detailed table of contents

(http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2012/table-of-contents)

links to specific information about myriad topics, including altitude illness, jet lag, motion sickness, and travelers' diarrhea--all under the "self-treatable conditions" chapter. But there are other interesting specialized topics covering a variety of situations, including:

• Medical Tourism
• Obtaining Health Care Abroad for the Ill Traveler
• Travel Health Insurance & Evacuation Insurance
• Air Travel
• Death during Travel
• International travel with animals
• Immigrants Returning Home to Visit Friends and Relatives (VFRs)
• US Military Deployments

Whether you are off to exotic places for your summer vacation, or just want to know what insect repellent or hand sanitizer to buy, the first place to check is CDC Travelers' Health. And that map that my travel medicine specialist was using at the hospital, which I thought was for professionals only? I may just have found it, referred to in an appendix of the Yellow Book. Check out HealthMap (www.healthmap.org).

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

June 2013 CyberSelection: E-Commerce Times

E-Commerce Times is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for June 2013.

E-Commerce Times (www.ecommercetimes.com) covers the world of business online, and because, as it says in its tagline, "e-business means business," it covers all of business. It is the flagship of several components of the ECT News Network (www.ectnews.com/about/), which also includes LinuxInsider, TechNewsWorld, CRNBuyer, and MacNewsWorld (www.ectnews.com/about/advertising.xhtml#publications).

Cyber first mentioned E-Commerce Times in June 2000--back before all businesses were online--and again in July/August 2006. The site has changed in response to technology and markets over the years but retains much of its original focus, quality, and content.

Today's News

The bulk of the visible site space goes to top stories--four or five are posted each weekday, but a single story is usually added on the weekend, as well. When I started researching the site in depth in March, the big story was FCC Chair Genachowski calling it quits. Over the next ten days, stories covered the Blackberry Z10, Zynga and Facebook, the debut of Marin Software on the NYSE, Nevada's licensing of London-based 888 Holding to offer online gambling in the state, Yahoo's purchase of the Summly newsreader app, a Walmart in-store locker pickup service for online purchases, Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads, lots of speculation on Michael Dell and the activities of Facebook, and much more.  Most of the stories originate from E-Commerce Times, but occasionally one of the featured stories is from another ECT News Network publication.

To the right of the featured story line-up, shorter title lists from the other four ECT publications appear; rolling over the title brings up a text box blurb of the article. At the top of the right column there is a link to This Week on ECT News Network, which displays a page of linked headlines from each of the five publications. Another link from the main page, Most Popular, gives a page of linked "top ten" lists for the last 24 hours, the last week, and the last thirty days.

You don't have to go to the website to receive notice of the latest news, of course. A series of free newsletters is available for email delivery: the daily E-Commerce Minute, which, unlike some other technology site newsletters, really can be scanned in a minute, and Tech News Flash, which is a similarly formatted daily newsletter from the TechNewsWorld side of the ECT network. There is also an ECT News Network Weekly Newsletter,       and an Editor's Pick publication. RSS feeds are provided for E-Commerce Times and TechNewsWorld.

Alerts & Searching

Another link at the top of the right column leads to News Alerts (www.ectnews.com/about/newsalerts/) where there is a comprehensive description of how this free service works. If you scroll all the way to the bottom of this page you will also see the only search tips I was able to find on the site:

+virus +worm (finds articles with BOTH the word "virus" AND the word "worm")

virus worm (finds articles with EITHER the word "virus" OR the word "worm")

virus -worm (finds articles that contain the word "virus" but NOT the word "worm")

"computer virus" (finds articles that contain the exact phrase "computer virus")

You enter alerts on a separate page that is linked to your account. (Subscribing to newsletters and alerts requires registration--free, easy, and unobtrusive enough so as to be non-memorable). You can choose between daily or real-time alerts. Within minutes of setting up four, some as daily, some as real-time, I received my first email. Unfortunately, the four were grouped, but for each story, there was a notation telling which keywords were matched in that article. Within the email, a short teaser is given for each story, then you are pushed to the web for the completion. The email also tells you which ECT network publication the alert is drawn from.

Search functionality is fast but basic, in a single box that supports AND, OR, NOT, and phrases, and apparently searches all text words. Results are automatically sorted in relevance order but may be changed to date (newest first) and are displayed in pages of 20 items. Through a couple laborious tests (publication date searching is not supported) I deduced that content from as far back as 1999 is available. It is not easy to get to, however, as the jump list to subsequent pages only offers 6 pages at a time. It takes a long time to jump to page 6 and then 11 and then 16 and so on until you get to whatever page number contains item number 6158 for apple or 5517 for windows.

Article Tools

Every article in E-Commerce Times carries an impressive range of article tools. First, for browsing, there is the convenient A A text size icon at the top right. You can click on the larger A once or more to increase the size of the text, and on the smaller A to decrease size. All article text except the lead paragraph responds to the command. You can also click on a Print Version link to get the full article on one page without display ads (the clearly marked text ad that invariably follows the lead paragraph does not go away, however). Text size may be changed on the Print Version page, too.

On both the Print and the original article pages there is a link labeled "Get Permission to License or Reproduce this Article." A single click takes you, via a new window, to Copyright.com from the Copyright Clearance Center. You land at a pre-filled out form for the requested article, and an array of options where you indicate how you want to use the article. Click once more and usually you have a price instantaneously. Elsewhere (www.ectnews.com/about/reprints.xhtml) you can find information on how to buy multiple reprints from ECT for promotional purposes. Here also is a copyright notice and linking information (www.ectnews.com/about/link-to-us.xhtml#rss) that clearly indicate that E-Commerce Times means business when it comes to its intellectual property rights.

Other options for sharing notice of the article (not the text) abound on article pages. Icons to the left encourage sharing via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and a host of other networks. You can email a link to the article to up to five recipients at a time with a minimum of hassle--entry of a robot-discouraging security code is required, but it is only four characters in length and more legible than many.

The site encourages online commenting on individual articles via a TalkBack icon: "Be the first to comment on this story," and you can select from among several icons to lead your comment: an exclamation mark, flame, light bulb, question mark, thumbs down, or thumbs up. Comments are moderated and "gratuitous promotions or advertisements" are not permitted.

More Research and Services

Additional ways of delving into the deep archives of E-Commerce News stories are available from the navigation bar at the top of all pages. Major sections are offered in these categories:

• Business
• E-Commerce
• Enterprise IT
• Mobile
• Security
• SMB (Small and Mid-sized Business)
• Social Media
• Trends

Several of these have subcategories; Mobile includes BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), Carriers, M-Commerce, and Mobile Advertising sections. The layout of these archived stories differs from that in the current news presentation, but you still see the title, date, and lead paragraph for each selection.

A Research section opens to a list of several in-depth research reports (BYOD Deployment and Windows 8 Deployment, for two examples). You need to fill out a form to download the PDF versions of these reports, but they are free.

Finally, the Reader Services tab at the right end of the navigation bar is the place to control your account, newsletters, and alerts. It also leads to useful site maps for E-Commerce Times and its sister publications, a description of an affiliate program, and Discussions.

The Discussion link opens to a lively set of discussion boards. (www.ectnews.com/perl/board/mboard.pl). In addition to two general forums (Open Discussion and Wide World of Technology) there are Article Talkback forums for each of the five ECT publications. Threaded software and various views make it easy to follow the discussion. I checked five pages (out of more than 100) of subject headers, and found that "The High Cost of Free Shipping" had generated 11 comments. Clicking on the header reveals a link to the full story and to each of the comments. "Priceline: Flawed or Fraud" had garnered 82 comments, the most recent in February 2013. The article itself was published in 2001! Another post "Please respond all of you who have been suspended by ebay wrongly" was started in 2002, apparently not linked to a specific article; 280 had responded. Note that discussions are part of the content covered by the ECT search function, and results can be filtered by Articles and Discussions.

Bottom line: Don't forget E-Commerce Times for information, analysis, and customer opinion on the online business of any enterprise in the past decade.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

May 2013 CyberSelection: Disabled World

Disabled World  is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelection for May 2013.

Today, about 1 in 5 people worldwide are living with at least one disability, and most people will experience a disability of some form during the course of their lives. So says Disabled World (disabled-world.com/health/#ixzz2MNSvG2XY), launched in 2004 as a source of independent news articles and reviews about all types of disabilities and assistive devices. Disabled World (disabled-world.com/) offers advice and information for those with chronic or genetic disabilities, as well as disability through accident, illness, or the natural process of aging. Daily news comes from press releases, journalists, and organizations. No medical or health expertise is claimed, although contributors may have extensive experience in the subjects covered. The site is managed and content curated by two individuals, Lynn and Ian Langtree, based in eastern Canada.

Terminology

What is "disabled"? An article attributed to Wikipedia, titled "Disability or Disabled--Which Term is Right? (disabled-world.com/definitions/disability-disabled.php#ixzz2MNbf2yBf), discusses the sensitivity in the U.S. and U.K. toward various terms covering "functional limitations that affect one or more of the major life activities, including walking, lifting, learning, breathing, etc." It acknowledges the effects of laws in various countries and the preferences of groups representing affected people themselves, and comes down unequivocally for "disabled persons" living with various conditions of "disability."

The definitions don't stop there. Indeed, there is a whole page, Glossary and Definitions of Disability Health and Medical Terms (disabled-world.com/definitions/), which lists general and specific glossaries. Links are provided to glossaries of conditions (paraplegia, quadriplegia, and hemiplegia, for example) as well as to the bureaucracy of disability ("Disability Alphabet Soup: Sorting Through the Maze of Legal Abbreviations") and to terms that are useful when buying assistive devices ("Stairlift Glossary of Terms"). Each glossary gives its date of publication and author; those glossaries that are not authored by Disabled World itself are often provided by representatives of professional or commercial organizations, but affiliations of authors are disclosed.

Navigation

Though I often use Ctrl+ to increase the size of type on websites, I am still able to read without screen reading software. Therefore I don't know whether the Disabled World site meets all current standards of visual accessibility, but I find it clear and easy to read (without increasing the font) and easy to move around. Across the top of the homepage are several tabs: Disability Information, Medical, Health, Travel, Sports, News, Community, Videos, and Products. Immediately below these large topic areas is an A to Z list of All Topics; there are hundreds.

The homepage itself gives top space to its mission statement, definition of disability, and several links to informative articles for those who are "newly disabled by accident or illness." Further down are headlines for the most recent news. When I checked in early March the top stories were:

• Handheld Talking Graphing Calculator for Visually Impaired, from Orbit Research
• Wireless Brain Sensor has Many Applications, from Brown University
• Helping Speech and Stuttering in Children with Down syndrome, from University of Alberta
• 30% of Adults Receiving Government Assistance Have a Disability, from U.S. Census Bureau
• Sequestration Cuts Will Have Devastating Impact on People with Disabilities, from National Organization on Disability

Each story was shown on a full page with the ability to print, email, add comments, and post comments or a notice to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Related content that had previously been published in Disabled World was also identified, and in some cases additional information was provided. The sequestration article, for example, gave a brief description of the sequestration battle, labeled as a "definition."

All story pages also contained ads from Google Ad Choices. Although the spots--at the top right of the article, the bottom middle, and the bottom right--are clearly labeled as advertisements, they are tiresome and not particularly pertinent (but most Cyber readers are probably not plagued by the limited selection presented to me: "Work from home in Spain," "Save money; live overseas," and virtually anything printed in Spanish). Such annoyance is the price we pay for "free" sites.

Assistive Devices

The most interactive sections of Disabled World are Products, Videos, and Community. Click on any of these tabs from the main pages and you will get a new top navigation bar that lets you choose from among just those three. I went looking for Products. The Product page (products.disabled-world.com/) immediately presented thumbnail photos of 60 devices--writing instruments, playing cards, light switch enlargers, large button universal TV remotes, arm extender reachers, and more. Click on a product picture to go to its page, and then click again for more information. Purchases are made from the supplier, not from Disabled World, but Disabled World has approved the merchants (products.disabled-world.com/suppliers) and apparently reviews them, as one source had been declared "no longer recommended" on the supplier page.

I soon realized that there is a product category listing in the right column of the product pages (it replaces those annoying ads). The most efficient way to review products is to click on the product category name. If you are new to caregiving or disability status yourself, you will benefit from browsing the categories and be intrigued by the many different types of assistive devices currently sold. The Dressing Aids category, itself just one of over 20 categories, opened up to all sorts of dressing, grooming, and bathroom aids. Of course you would go here for bathroom grab bars, long-handled sponges and brushes, wipes and other toiletry supplies, but did you know you could buy zipper pull-ups, special jewelry fasteners, adaptive nail clippers, and an "autodrop eyedrop guide" if you can't see well enough to hit the mark when inserting your own eyedrops? The pages on canes and cane accessories (products.disabled-world.com/category-444.html) show a huge variety of decorative and adjustable ones, in addition to the more prosaic, and are just the thing to examine if you are trying to help someone accept the use of a cane for the first time.

Disability Videos

As I was looking at some of the Mobility Products photos (products.disabled-world.com/c/11/mobility-products.html) I realized that I needed more description than I could get from a flat page. That's when I remembered the Video tab. On the Video homepage (videos.disabled-world.com/) I found a selection of thumbnail images of "recently viewed" and "new" video clips with title; clicking through to the individual video page lets you view the video itself and presents information about it, statistics, and related links. The Disabled World collection of short video clips (all free) includes demonstrations of assistive technology, classroom discussions of disability topics, general health topics, and inspirational videos of sports. Quality varies: some videos are professional, some are homemade. Many use Flash format and will not display on an iPad. Videos for those with hearing disabilities include British Sign Language (BSL), American Sign Language (ASL), and captioning.

As with assistive devices, there is a detailed subject list of nearly 40 categories to the right. Some of the topics that benefit especially from a video treatment include the following:

• Accessible Homes and Ramps
• Adaptive Driving and Hand Controls
• Apps for iPhone Android and Mobile Devices
• Disability Travel Films
• Lifts Hoists and Transfer Devices
• Sign Language Videos

Community

Click on the Community tab from the main menu or the Disability Community tab from the submenu and you come to Disability Community Q & A, where almost 100 questions have been asked and answered in just two months. Registration is required to participate here. This new community replaces an older forum, and reference is made to Disabled World's Facebook presence (facebook.com/Disabled.World) and the fact that most users keep in touch that way.

In addition to Facebook you can set up an RSS feed of the daily news or catch up on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DisabledWorld). Although I find it annoying that every time I viewed a device or article or video on Disabled World, I was asked to comment, it is obvious that Disabled World has been successful in creating its social community and is working to spread the word.

A Pearl of a Site

Because it is broad in scope, covering every type of disability and touching on regulations and culture in several English-speaking countries of the world, it should not be expected that Disabled World be totally comprehensive, and it is not. It is, however, an excellent starting point for those new to this world. It provides immediate practical help and makes you more aware and sensitive to issues of disability. Experienced searchers will recognize it as a research pearl. It speaks to you in language you understand and meets some needs right away. If you must extend your research, you will be able to do so much more efficiently because of the awareness of issues, resources, and terminology that you have gained in Disabled World.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

April 2013 CyberSelection: Country Insights

Country Insights is the CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research CyberSelecton for April 2013.

Country Insights (intercultures.ca/cil-cai/countryinsights-apercuspays-eng.asp) is a product of the Centre for Intercultural Learning (intercultures.gc.ca), a part of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, formerly Canada's Department of External Affairs. The Centre provides intercultural and international training to personnel in government departments and agencies, NGOs, and private sector organizations. For more than 200 countries of the world, the Country Insights website offers a short factual Overview, Country Facts, and Cultural Information. Cultural Information is the heart of the site, with data provided in these categories:

    Conversations

    Communication Styles

    Display of Emotion

    Dress, Punctuality & Formality

    Preferred Managerial Qualities

    Hierarchy and Decision-making

    Religion, Class, Ethnicity, & Gender

    Relationship-building

    Privileges and Favouritism

    Conflicts in the Workplace

    Motivating Local Colleagues

    Recommended Books, Films & Foods

    In-country Activities

    National Heroes

    Shared Historical Events with Canada

    Stereotypes

In each category, a "local" perspective is offered, followed by a "Canadian" perspective. Background information about the individual authors is given at the end of each Cultural Information page; usually the local interpreter was born in the named country or lived in it for many years, and also has living, study, and/or work experience in Canada. Likewise, the Canadian interpreter most likely is a Canadian native who has spent substantial time in the named country.

North American Perspectives

For some Cyber readers, a Canadian perspective is natural, but the majority are located in the U.S. Are there important differences between these two perspectives that will affect interpretation of the entire site? To find out, I selected United States of America from the dropdown list of countries. The United States of America page (intercultures.ca/cil-cai/overview-apercu-eng.asp?iso=us) immediately revealed, in the Overview section, the diversity of the country. Factual information is given for Language(s), Religion(s), and Ethnic Group(s); there were multiple entries in all categories.

I clicked on Conversations, the first category of Cultural Information, and the full cultural page was revealed (intercultures.ca/cil-cai/ci-ic-eng.asp?iso=us#cn-1). The question posed in Conversations is, what is safe to talk about when meeting someone for the first time? I was relieved to read that "At first meeting in a business setting the standard topics of conversation that are acceptable in Canada would apply in the US—likewise for social first encounters." Communication Styles covers how much space is usual between two people, handshaking, kissing, eye contact, facial expressions, and tone of voice. The Canadian interpreter says that "In the US, much like in Canada, the personal bubble seems to range between 2 to 3 feet" and that "As in Canada, people are not very tactile at first encounter." Both the local and Canadian interpreter commented that Americans are direct and want you to come to the point and not beat around the bush. Both interpreters also indicated, in the Display of Emotion section, that norms for display of affection and anger are similar in the U.S. and Canada.

Dress, Punctuality & Formality concentrates on the workplace environment; both interpreters noted that requirements vary greatly depending on the size and type of workplace, but that use of first names is common. I was surprised to read that "many people will consider you late if you don’t arrive 15 minutes early," but then decided that in a work situation where people do coffee, Facebook, and personal email before starting work, that may be true. Sections on Preferred Managerial Qualities and on Hierarchy and Decision making follow; here it is good to scroll down to read the background of the interpreters, in order to understand more about the environments they have worked in. A Disclaimer at the bottom of the page remarks that "Although cultural informants were asked to draw on as broad a base of experience as possible in formulating their answers, these should be understood as one perspective that reflects the particular context and life experiences of that person."

Subsequent sections give perspectives on religion, class, ethnicity, and gender in the workplace and on work environment questions including these:

How important is it to establish a personal relationship with a colleague or client before getting to business?

Would a colleague or employee expect special privileges or considerations given our personal relationship or friendship?

I have a work-related problem with a colleague. Do I confront him or her directly? Privately or publicly?

What motivates my local colleagues to perform well on the job?

The greatest revelation here was the surprise displayed by the Canadian perspective on encountering the U.S. health insurance "system" and the lack of a one-year paid maternity leave.

Further questions ask the two interpreters to recommend books, films, television shows, foods, and websites to learn the culture of the country, activities to pursue while in the country, who are the national heroes, whether there are shared historical events that might influence the relationship between the two countries, and what harmful stereotypes Canadians might have about people in the named country. The dual answers to these questions, while often too specific to draw generalities, do reveal individual opinions and suggestions. The site recommends cultural triangulation, which it defines as "using a variety of media (people, print, literature, television) and several different sources of each before deciding the meaning of something in another culture" to develop your own picture of the culture.

Beyond North America

Probably the greatest value of this site is for those cultures that are much more different from the one you come from than are the differences between two North American countries. It is easy to browse full reports by country, using the country name dropdown and then clicking any Cultural Information link.

In a lengthy Communication Styles section, for example, the Saudi Arabia page details appropriate and inappropriate distance and  touching norms and practices between men and men, between women and women, and between women and men. I was rather distressed to learn that in China women are expected to "dress up," wearing heels, for work, and in Mexico they not only dress up, but make up heavily. On the Vietnam page it says "Vietnamese prefer to speak in a very indirect manner.… This is different from Canada where, in work situations, it is better to get straight to the point." On the issue of punctuality: "Vietnamese use what translates roughly as 'rubber time'. For example, if you expect people to come to a meeting at 8am, you should invite them for 7.30am."

Time and Time Again

Making comparisons between cultures can be simply done because the subcategories are the same for all countries. I checked Dress, Punctuality & Formality for several.

South Africans also do not follow "first world standards" of punctuality and deadlines. "Many meetings do not start (or end) on time. Allow enough time in your daily schedule to take care of each event running over by at least an hour." In Mexico, the local interpreter advises one "to set up deadlines a week before the 'real' deadline" but the Canadian one says that "The … mañana mañana approach to life does not apply to deadlines, and while meetings might start 10 minutes late, much later than that is not the norm. It is considered rude, however, to show up for social engagements on time." And then, "there is always regular time and "Afghan time" which is 30–45 minutes after the designated time. The Afghan people generally are very hard workers but deadlines are really not of high importance. They may start 30 minutes late but rarely leave on time and often work 2-3 hours overtime." In Finland, on the other hand, "Lateness in attending meetings is not well received. Punctuality is a virtue. Deadlines are taken seriously. Working overtime is almost a norm in some sectors (but be mindful of the unionized work environment).  Always inform if you will be late."

Country Insights is a wonderful site to find the "soft" but vital information on how to deal with people from different countries, whether you are working with them or just visiting. There are some disappointments: a few of the countries are missing the Cultural Information (they do have the Overview and Country Facts, which assembles external links to History, Geography, Culture, Politics, Economy, Media, and a Map). Many pages have not been updated in three or four years. I would love to see a section added that gave suggestions for email communication with the culture in question.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

March 2013 CyberSelection: Doing Business

Doing Business 

The Doing Business Project (www.doingbusiness.org), from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (http://www1.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/corp_ext_content/ifc_external_corporate_site/about+ifc), focuses on business regulation and enforcement in countries around the world. By analyzing regulation applied to small and medium-sized companies throughout their life cycle, the project has developed objective measures of regulation and annually publishes comparative data across countries and across time. Through its publications, Doing Business aims to encourage countries to move towards more efficient regulation; it offers measurable benchmarks for reform; and it serves as a resource for researchers and others interested in the business climate of each country.

A clear and uncluttered homepage invites you to "Explore Economy Data" in two ways. First, you can select an economy, which generally means a country. They are all there, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Alternatively, select a topic:

Starting a Business

Dealing with Construction Permits

Getting Electricity

Registering Property

Getting Credit

Protecting Investors

Paying Taxes

Trading Across Borders

Enforcing Contracts

Resolving Insolvency

Employing Workers

The topics are all areas that represent areas of regulation in most countries and constitute the factors (except for Employing Workers) on which each economy is ranked in the annual reports. Since 2003, Doing Business has published a report each year that compares all economies on these factors and computes an "Ease of Doing Business" index. Doing Business 2013: Smarter Regulations for Small and Medium-Size Enterprises, was featured as I researched this site in early January and placed Singapore at the top of the ranking as the economy in which it is easiest to do business--for the seventh straight year. Poland was named as the "most improved."

Exploring the Singapore Economy

I selected Singapore from the dropdown list of economies and immediately the "Ease of Doing Business in Singapore" page (www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/singapore) appeared. Singapore is identified by Region (East Asia & Pacific), Income Category (high), Population (5,183,700), and GNI per Capita in US$ (42,930). Then the page notes the Doing Business 2013 rank (1), the 2012 rank (1), and the change (0). Following is a Topic Ranking grid, listing the ten individual topics on which the economy is ranked, with current and prior year rankings, and the change. Singapore was ranked no. 1 in Trading Across Borders this year and last, but that was the only no. 1 ranking it received. It falls to no. 12 for Getting Credit and Enforcing Contracts, and down to 36 (its lowest ranking) for Registering Property.

The bottom part of the page provides a changeable display of each of the ten topics. The default is Starting a Business. You can start a business in Singapore in a single day for less than 400 Singapore dollars; a three-step procedure is outlined. But there is more. Business start-up is ranked against the other Doing Business economies, the regional standard, and an OECD standard in the areas of Procedures (number), Time (days), Cost (% of income per capita), and Paid-in Min. Capital (% of income per capita). If you don't understand what these concepts mean, you can hover over the term and a brief explanation will pop up, with a link to the methodology. Further links to details on starting a business, the methodology that Doing Business uses for this  computation, and a page comparing all economies on this factor are provided.

Move to the other nine topics by clicking on that factor in the Topic Rankings grid or on the tab at the top of the topic part of the page. I examined Registering Property and came away with a better understanding of why Singapore ranked lower on that topic.

Exploring Topics

Any of the topics can be explored in detail by selecting the topic from the drop-down Explore Economy Data menu in the upper right of each page. On the Starting a Business page, the main data is a statistical chart with all the state economies on the left axis, and the factors related to starting a business that we saw previously across the top. In addition to the national economies, there are regional aggregations. Any of the columns can be sorted by clicking on the heading, so it is possible to easily determine that New Zealand ranks first in the category of starting a business.

Here, as on the economies pages, there is a row of tabs. Whereas the tabs in the economies pages lead to alternative topics, the tabs in the topics pages lead to  more information explaining and supporting the mission and methodology of Doing Business. From the default Data view, you can switch to Distance to Frontier, What is Measured, Why it Matters, DB Reforms, Good Practices, Transparency, FAQ, and Other Resources. Reading through these pages provides an accessible tutorial in international business and finance, together with some interesting case histories. For example, Isaac Merritt Singer formed the I.M. Singer & Company partnership with Edward C. Clark in 1851. Clark, however, persuaded Singer to change the form of business to a limited liability corporation in 1863 to protect it from court battles with Singer's heirs--Singer reportedly had more than 20 children!

In the Data view, a Subnational icon appears with various economies; clicking on the Subnational icon for India opens up a new page (http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/starting-a-business/india/) with a similar chart, but detailed for 17 Indian states or union territories. There are subnational pages for the following economies:

China

Columbia

Egypt, Arab. Rep.

India

Indonesia

Italy

Kenya

Mexico

Morocco

Algeria

Pakistan

Philippines

Russian Federation

Full Text Options

There is a lot of data at Doing Business. Much of it can be purchased in print form, but the World Bank's Open Data project (http://data.worldbank.org/) makes most of it available via free download. Click on the Reports tab in the navigation bar below the dark blue on the homepage to find the annual global Doing Business reports. All--back to 2004--can be downloaded for free. Then click on the shaded blue tabs below the top bar to find regional, subnational, and thematic reports, and case studies. Many of the regional and subnational reports are actually pieces of the global reports, but accessing them this way makes it easier to zero in on specific area and also provides bibliographic data indicating the date and original publication.

All the data pages for topics and economies provide print and Excel download options. You can open a read-only copy of the Excel file quickly, or you can choose to save a copy to disk, which then can be manipulated in all the usual Excel ways. It took me practically no time to download, save, and open the file of the Trading Across Borders topical data. For the economy pages, you can refine your output options so you only print or download one or more of the topical pages or an economy summary.

More Discovery

Although the browse methods of discovery are well thought out and work well, there is also a Search Text box at the upper right of each page. Keywords entered appear to be searched as strings with automatic stemming, so entrepreneur finds entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and so on.

Oddly, Advanced Search (http://extsearch.worldbank.org/servlet/SiteSearchServlet?adv=true&qUrl=doingbusiness&ed=rrudb) seems to be accessible only from this rather convoluted URL, or from a link at the bottom of the quick Search Text box results; keyword entries from the prior quick search are not carried through. Using Advanced Search you can limit by language: Chinese (Simplified), English, Estonian, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, or Spanish. The search engine supports all words, any words, or exact phrase searching. You can also specify occurrences of search term(s) to be anywhere on the page, in the title, or in the page URL, and limit to pages that have been updated  in the past 3, 6, or 12 months, or anytime. A format limiter permits searching for one specified format: Adobe Acrobat or Postscript files, Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint formats, Rich Text Format, or any format. Finally, you can change the length of your results pages to include 10 or 20 results.

Doing Business is a superb site, both for the amount of data it contains and makes available for free, and for its numerous means of displaying and explaining the data. Information from the Doing Business project can make you more knowledgeable about doing business abroad, and in time, its advocacy efforts may even make doing business abroad easier.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

February 2013 CyberSelection: AdAge

The print magazine Advertising Age has long been a bible of the advertising industry, but it is also valuable for general company research on most consumer and technology businesses. Cyber last covered the website of Advertising Age magazine (www.adage.com) back in March 2004, as a CyberSelection. I recently reviewed what I had written about AdAge.com, as it was styled then.  Things have changed in the last nine years, of course, but Ad Age has kept up with new technological and marketing techniques as the internet has matured. Its current site uses the brand AdvertisingAge on its homepage, but most places throughout the robust site, it is AdAge.

When I investigated the site again on November 30, the article "Six Things You Should Know About 'The Hobbit' Before It Explodes" was featured. The article noted that it has been nine years since the final installment of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy broke movie box office records and that a new cinematic trip to Middle Earth was now approaching in the form of "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey." Three of the six advertising-related factoids about this impending event:

• Characters from "The Hobbit" have been licensed by Microsoft to appear in Windows 8 ads in the U.S., UK, France, and Germany.
• "The Hobbit" is the first major film to use 3-D technology with HFR (high frame rate)--though only 400 cinemas in the U.S. are equipped for HFR.
• Items like "Frodo's Pot Roast Skillet" and "Gandalf's Gobble Melt" are set to appear on the menu at Denny's in a TV spot tie-in deal.

You can find lots of business and media news like this by scanning the busy homepage, which shows blurbs for five feature articles at the left, and another seven or eight leading to various columns or blogs in the center. The right column shows mostly ads, including house ads: titles and links to Related Content and Most Read stories, and links to Most Commented and Most Emailed. The left column displays an intriguing line of news "From Around the Web" that touches on advertising and marketing topics (New York Times reports that Bazooka gum is discontinuing its comics wrap after 60 years; Reuters notes  Twitter's legal battle over ownership of tweets; and Business Week discusses "The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails."

Search and Read

There is lots of material, and most of it is accessible through the simple Search Advertising Age search box at the top right of each page. Here you can search the contents of each weekly print issue of Advertising Age (back to 1992) as well as online-only content (updated each business day, back to 1995). My search for PeopleBrowser delivered a results screen with six items and included a repeat of the search statement (delicately informing me that I had misspelled the name, and completing the correct search, all within 0.14 seconds). Default order is Most Relevant, but that can be changed to Most Recent or Most Popular with a click. Facets on the left of the screen allow you to Refine Results by the Section in which they appear, Author, or Keywords that are extracted from the full stories. Each result shows a title in large font, its section label, author, date published, and a snippet with the search term(s) highlighted and about ten words before and after the keywords. There are links to More (from that section), RSS Feed set-up, and the Full Text of the article.

Even if you are not a subscriber or registrant on AdAge.com you can proceed to read the full text of articles without any difficulty--to a point. When I hit the Full Text link for the ninth time (I wasn't counting but AdAge was), a pop-up screen informed me that "visitors to adage.com can access 10 stories for free within the calendar month"--and "encouraged" me to subscribe. There are various subscription packages; the least expensive is the Digital Package at $79 per year, which provides online access to published print and online articles, CMO Strategies, podcasts, and full screen video. Access to the print is a separate fee, or you can subscribe to both.

Registration is not the same as a subscription; registration is free and brings its own privileges. You do not need to register to search or display full text items (within your subscription or monthly limit). Registering provides personalized services: you can sign up for a dozen free email newsletters, send email copies of content (if you have viewed it), participate in polls, and comment on stories.

Advanced Search

The AdAge Advanced Search screen (http://adage.com/advancedsearch) has an elegantly simple interface that uses drop-down menus to reveal sophisticated searching options. The first option defines the scope of your Search: "The entire site" is the visible default, but you can also choose from Headlines, Authors, Keywords, or Articles. Then, there is a Keyword box, where you enter one or more words. The Match box is the next option and a drop-down  "All Words" is the visible default--that's what told me I could enter more than one keyword in the box immediately above. But there are other choices:

Any words

Partial words

Best Partial words

Exact Phrase

All > Any

All > Partial

Boolean

If you don't know what some of these choices mean, just hold the cursor over that choice on the drop-down menu and a brief explanation appears. The Boolean explanation (the briefest textual explanation of Boolean I have seen in my life) indicates that AND, OR, NOT, NEAR, and parentheses may be used. Once you select an option to populate the Match box, its explanation appears in text below the box to remind you how you are searching.

You can search "All of Advertising Age" or refine to one or more Selected Sections:

AdAge.com

AdAgeChina

The Print Edition

Data Center

Encyclopedia

Madison+Vine

The Date Range criterion has a cute slider you move to specify within the last one day to the last 365 days. There are also two blank boxes to specify a Specific Range; when you click in the blank, a calendar pops up that you move forward and back like at your favorite travel site. The only problem with this is if you want a really long-ago start date. It gets tedious clicking the back arrow on the calendar.

I tried a number of rather complicated searches and had some difficulties. Where my earlier PeopleBrowser search had been interpreted, corrected, and returned results, my Boolean search for (iPad OR tablet) NOT mini also turned out to be erroneous, repeatedly reporting "1-0 of 0 results" with an empty result screen. I would have welcomed some more direction, but in-context search help is limited to what has already been described above, and the general Help page (http://adage.com/help/) covers topics other than searching. I wrote to a contact name that I found, however, and was impressed to received email back on a Sunday with the advice to use AND NOT in the Boolean search. So, if the system can correct from PeopleBrowser to PeopleBrowsr, why can't it correct from NOT to AND NOT?

Bottom Line

These quibbles aside, however, there is a wealth of information at the AdvertisingAge site, and much of it remains, after nine years, freely accessible. AdAge is an essential site to check for business history and strategy because of its rich archive of the weekly print edition and the huge amount of web-only content. Varied search options make it easy to locate articles on your topic. I am disappointed in the removal of pay-per-view access; I would prefer if AdAge had continued its former offer of single articles for $3 or less, payable by credit card, and even expanded it to a pay-for-a-day option at a rate of, say $10 per day. Still the $79 annual digital rate is lower than the digital+print of nine years ago, even while the archives have grown five times in size.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.

January 2013 CyberSelection: Open Knowledge Repository

The vast knowledge reserves of the World Bank are now available free via a sophisticated open access platform. The new Open Knowledge Repository (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org) was launched in April 2012, two years after the World Bank first made its statistical data available to the public (see Open Data http://data.worldbank.org/). At this second site, more than 2,000 books, articles, reports, and working papers can be searched, displayed in full text, and--here is the icing on the cake--distributed, re-used, and re-mixed for commercial purposes, through the World Bank's commitment to its Creative Commons CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). The Open Access Policy for Formal Publications at http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/04/16200740/world-bank-open-access-policy-formal-publications, implemented in July 2012, details the commitment of the World Bank to making its research freely available to the world at large.

The homepage is clean and simple. Thumbnail pictures and short descriptions of five New Publications are displayed on the large center and right-hand panels. The left-hand panel provides links to Browse, Advanced Search, Other (About, Terms of Use, FAQ), Site Statistics, Resources, social network sites, and RSS feeds. A simple search box is spread across the top of the main panel.

Search and Retrieval

Hoping to learn something positive about economic conditions in the country in which I live, I keyed spain into the search box. Results came immediately, showing 1-10 of 28 items. Each item listed title, author(s), date, and the first three lines of an abstract. I noticed that results are displayed automatically in Relevance order, descending, and that I could change the order to Title or Publication date, and ascending. I could also change the number of items displayed on a page to six other quantities from 5 to 100. I changed the display number to 40, requested Publication date, descending, order, and hit Apply.

The World Bank concentrates on reports of economic development and does a lot of trans-national comparisons. I had to skip over several items in the new results display before I found a citation with a visible mention of Spain. The first Spanish cite was "Corporate Growth, Age and Ownership Structure: Empirical Evidence in Spanish Firms," an article from the Journal of Business Economics and Management in 2011. Other interesting cites included "Public Transport Funding Policy in Madrid: Is There Room for Improvement?" (probably, but I personally think the Madrid transit system works unusually well already) and "Spain: Development, Democracy and Equity," in which the visible abstract reminded that "Spain stands as one of the few countries in the world which have completed a successful transition from authoritarianism and relative underdevelopment to democracy and economic abundance in the last half century."

Metadata Galore

You can get a full record display by clicking on the title in the initial results display. That action reveals the full abstract and a formatted citation, such as this one:

“Boix, Carles. 2004. Spain: Development, Democracy and Equity. © Washington, DC: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/9209 License: CC BY 3.0 Unported.”

An "XML export" link clicked through to a page that showed the full citation, with abstract, with XML coding. I realized that I was beginning to see evidence that the World Bank is serious about allowing and encouraging its data to be distributed by others.

This record indicated the availability of a PDF download (size and name provided) and a link to "Associated URLs." At the associated URL I found a related report, World Development Report 2005, available in eight languages. There was also an indication of the Collection in which this report appeared (World Development Report Background Collection) and a link to a page for the collection.

Then I clicked on the "Show full item record metadata" link and I was blown away with detail--it was like looking at a coding sheet or full MARC record. In addition to six topic identifiers, there were assorted other fields to indicate language(s), dates of acquisition and availability, regions, and a Google Scholar link--and more. I was impressed with the thorough application of metadata and again realized that this content is easily adaptable for use by numerous other databases and aggregators. Viewing the metadata is also a good way to get ideas for searching using the Advanced Search interface, which you can get to by clicking a link in the left navigation column.

Advanced Search

When I went to the Advanced Search page (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/discover) I discovered that this is the page that is automatically shown at the top of the results screen after every search, even those done in the initial search box. In addition to the Sort options (previously mentioned) there are dropdown boxes for Search Scope and Filters. 

The Search Scope categories correspond to the Collections to which each item is assigned. They are:

Annual Reports & Independent Evaluations

Books

Journals

Working Papers

Economic and Sector Work (ESW) Studies

Knowledge Notes

Multilingual Content

Multiple Collections can be assigned to an item, but--this is one of the few criticisms I have of this interface--you cannot select more than one Collection to search at one time. The default search scope is All of the OKR. Information about most of the Collections is available under an "I" icon next to the collection name in the Browse portion of the left-hand panel (not on the search form, but you can view it conveniently by opening another browser window).

Journals includes articles published in World Bank-published journals, but also articles published by World Bank authors in external journals. Knowledge Notes are "short briefs (typically 4-6 pages in length) that capture lessons of experience from Bank operations and research in a succinct and easily digestible format (and usually reference larger works found elsewhere in the OKR)." Multilingual Content indicates works with PDFs in languages other than English; records are in English and therefore must be searched only in English, but the full text of the item is often available in a wide variety of other languages.

Filters (Title, Author, Publication Date, Topic, Region, Keyword, and Country) are available for fielded search. Select a filter and enter the value in the small search box to the right of the filter name. Although there are no instructions on how to do this, some guidance is available from the examples of records shown immediately below the search form. More guidance can be found by examining the rich facet display for any given set of search results. Lists of authors, publication date ranges, topics, document types, keywords, region, and country are given; they include the numbers of matching records within the search together with a link that lets you drill down to limit the results.

Browse Options

Several options are available in the left column for browsing the entire database. Clicking By Publication Date gives the oldest items first. Currently, OKR officially contains publications back to 2005 and will extend back to 2000 by the end of 2013. However, the annual World Development Reports is available starting in 1978 and at least some reports go back to the early 1990s.

It is worth clicking on the Topic browse link to look through the 600+ thesaurus terms that are applied to World Bank publications. There are many more topics than the agriculture, education, energy, economic, and poverty reduction terms that I expected. I became interested in Science and Technology Development--Innovation; Private Sector Development--E-Business; Girls Education; and Accommodation and Tourism Industry, for example.

I was surprised at the breadth of the collection of documents I found at the Open Knowledge Repository, and I was impressed with the ease and elegance of its interface, so much so that I am sorry that the World Bank is not more prolific! I've read that report on Spain's development and democracy that I mentioned earlier and was pleased to confirm impressions I had gathered and learn more about the unlikely development of Spain as a tourist destination under Franco. I also fell across a two-page document titled "16 Things You Didn't Know about Africa," which quickly gave me a much more nuanced picture of African countries. I recommend the Open Knowledge Repository whenever you need information on international economic and development initiatives, or cross-national comparisons in business and social science topics. I also recommend it as a model of an internet database and of commitment to open access.

Susanne Bjørner provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers. Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.