ResearchBuzz

First the cemetery index, now this. You GO, South Dakota! The South Dakota State Historical Society has added the “Biographical Index of South Dakotans”, an online index of biographies written on South Dakotans from 1897 to 1930. Like the cemetery index, this index was completed a while ago but is being made available online for the first time.

The index is available at http://www.sdhistory.org/arc/bioindex/biographicalindex.htm. There are a little over 7100 names listed in the index. The site has a key to the index (which lists the dozen books found in the South Dakota State Archive library which are referenced in the index) and an alphabetical index, from Casper G Aaberg to William Zwicky. The lists contain only the name of the person, the book number where they’re referenced (see the key) and the page on which they’re referenced.

There are no instructions on how to request copies of the biographical information, but the books are held in the archives and at various libraries throughout South Dakota. I did a search for Memorial and Biographical Record — Black Hills region in WorldCat, and after a little adjusting (Worldcat didn’t like the — part) I found what I think is the book in eight different libraries in the US, from the NYPL to the Harvard University Library to yes, libraries in South Dakota.

Hey! Check Amazon for books on South Dakota.

Annoyed Librarian: How to Library Blog. Wince.

I have never seen the term fine-grained RSS feeds before, but I like it. (Fine-grained feeds seem to be feeds that are narrow, based on particular sections or aspects of a site, but which are not keyword based.)

FeedBurner’s blog can has update.

Google Maps now allows you to choose miles or kilometers.

Blogger and GrandCentral, sittin’ in a tree.

ALL the angles: can Microsoft Use AltaVista Without Buying Yahoo?

Storing health records in Google. Um, ick.

Adding a local section to your Google News page.

Thanks to Infomancy for talking about the Obsolete Skills Wiki, available at http://obsoleteskills.wikispot.org/ .

It’s just what it sounds like - a wiki devoted to skills that are no longer useful or necessary. The skills list is at http://obsoleteskills.wikispot.org/Skills and includes things like “Adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV set” (actually that’s still being done at my mother’s house), “Clamping roller skates onto hard-soled shoes with a skate key”, “Harness a team of oxen”, and “Using a 16 mm film projector”. Some of the skills are more ironic — I know that people still send letters and some unfortunates still have to thread paper into dot-matrix printers.

Some of the skills listed have merely “seed articles” — basics in preparation for a larger article — while some of them are extensive. You too can learn the whys and wherefores of adjusting the tracking on a VCR, or the finer points of parking with curb feelers.

There’s not a lot here yet, but I look forward to it filling out. We obsolete so quickly…

Hey! Check Amazon for books on Wikis.