ResearchBuzz

The Penn Libraries have announced Philadelphia Neighborhoods: Histories, Plans and Futures, a database of neighborhood-based reports issued by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission between 1946 and 1990. This database, which contains text, maps, and photographs, is available at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/PhilaNeighborhoods .

There are several ways you can explore this exhibit. You can browse the reports, get a map overview and explore that, or search by keyword. I don’t know much about Philadelphia so I browsed the map, picking Mount Airy neighborhood in the Upper North district. There were five reports on this area. I picked one of them at random and got a link to a new window with a image set of the report. paging through it, I could read most of the text on the report, but had to click on the images to get details and handwritten notations.

For people who might want to get research off this site for historical purposes, I’d add one tool: the ability to enter a Philadelphia e-mail address and get pointers to which district and neighborhood that is.

The State of New Jersey has launched a Web site that allows its citizens to compare prices for 150 drugs at pharmacies across the state. You can try it at https://www6.state.nj.us/LPSCA_DRUG/index.jsp .

To search, you’ll need to specify a medication type (the 150 most-prescribed drugs are available), its strength, and a city or zip code. I searched for 250 MG Amoxicillin capsules in Trenton.

The results provided a list of costs, both by unit and for x number of capsules in a prescription. I saw prices as low s 34 cents each and as high as 60 cents each. The price results also include the name and address of the pharmacy and the date the prescription was filled. From the results page you can also look for different strengths/dosages for the same drug as well as follow links to general information about the drugs. I was surprised about the wide variety of prices for the drug. Useful.

Yahoo has a post on its blog about ways to do advanced searching. I didn’t know about a couple of these tips, while some others are good to be reminded of.

I did not know about the square brackets search. If you search on Yahoo and enclose your search words in square brackets (like [three mice]) your search will only find the words in that order. In this example, you’ll find “three blind mice” but not “mice of three”. I had trouble finding examples where this worked well; I finally found that [pepper dr] got about 1/3 the results of dr pepper. Even searches like [Ricardo Lucy] found only slightly less results than Lucy Ricardo. You’ll have to do some experimenting to see where this search works best.

You might remember that Yahoo does have a syntax for searching by filetype. It’s extremely awkward, but it is a syntax. To search by filetype, search use originurlextension: before the name of the syntax. For example, try originurlextension:hamburger or originurlextension:tab. (The extension, as you can see, does not necessarily have to be a standard extension.)

And, of course, Yahoo defaults to AND — that is, it’ll search for all the terms you specify. You can choose between terms to find instead by using OR in your search — stuffing OR potatoes for example. Check out all the shortcuts on the blogpost. You’ll learn, or at least remember, a thing or two.