ResearchBuzz

A big thank you to Barclay Blog, who pointed me to the Foreign Information by Country page by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

This resource is not something like the CIA World Factbook, which in itself contains a great deal of information on each country. Instead this site aggregates links to country information throughout the Internet. For example, Take Belize, for example. There’s one image (the flag) which links to the World Factbook entry for Belize. After that it’s all (well-annotated and titled) links.

They’re divided into categories. The Belize page has categories for Belizean Government Information (many of the links from Belize itself), country profiles (CIA, BBC, and many more), articles and databases, diplomatic relations, health, and peacekeeping and military information. Finally at the end of the list there’s suggestions for searching the library catalog and related categories.

Some categories had just a few links, while others — like the country profiles category — had well over a dozen. I am in awe of how much time this must have taken.

ACRLog: There’s More to “Finding” Than We Thought. Eye-opening.

A Flickr collection of search patterns. Thanks Bloug!

Press Release: WonderHowTo now has more than 100,000 videos.

New federated search blog.

Open Source subject guides.

RIT: establishing image quality criteria for museums.

Filed under “Will be useful”: how do I get rid of Grub?

Flickr covers the Battle of the Oranges.

Blogoscoped: avoiding Google Calendar spam.

All the kids are doing it! Barnes & Noble recently announced Quamut.com, a how-to Web site. The twist here is that some of the how-tos are available as HTML and PDF and on laminated booklets in the stores… (Quamut is apparently derived from Latin and is pronounced kwómut. I guess they’re never going to do radio advertising.)

Start at http://quamut.com/. You’ll see the that the thousand or so topics that are currently available (plans are to add “hundreds of new titles a month”) are divided across five categories: House & Home, Hobbies & Leisure, Money & Business, Computers & Technology, and Mind & Body. There’s also a free Quamut. Today’s is writing an essay. You can read it online or you can download the PDF. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see pointers to a Quamut Wiki (Ooo! How to deep-clean your keyboard!), recently-added Quamuts, and a tag cloud.

I decided I wanted to look at the Quamut on making sushi. The Quamut is divided into several sections, from Sushi and Sashimi Basics to How to Make Scattered Sushi (Chirashi). Each section has copious illustrations but are a bit on the short side. (Which is okay when there are over a dozen sections in one Quamut.)

Looking at the HTML version of the Quamut is free. (It’s ad-supported.) If you want to download a PDF of the material, it’s $2.95 — at least all the ones I looked at are $2.95.

I think some of these topics work better as Quamuts than others. The most popular Quamut at the moment, for example, is a set of shortcuts for Excel 2007. I can see that. On the other hand, the Quamut on investing in mutual funds was only an overview and, while it was good enough to teach me what questions I need to ask, was really only a jumping-off point to more in-depth materials.

It’s kind of hidden, but there is an RSS feed of the newest Quamuts available. I’m not sure I’d buy any of the PDFs, but there were plenty of interesting topics here.