Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR). Karen Blakeman
Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is an electronic newsletter that includes reviews and comparisons of information sources; useful tools for managing information; technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. Many of the articles will have already appeared on Karen Blakeman's Blog at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/
The latest issue: September 2013, Issue No. 115
Selected content:
[Some] top tips from the latest business information workshop:
- OFFSTATS – Official Statistics on the Webhttp://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz
Excellent starting point for official statistical sources by country, region subject or a combination of categories. All of the content in the database is in the public domain and available through the Internet. - GMacker http://gmacker.com/web/content/gDateRange/gdr.htm
Google's Verbatim in the search options menu on the results page is great. Google's date option from the same menu is great. But you cannot use both together. You can use the daterange: command, though, with Verbatim but it's complicated. GMacker is a much easier way to do it. Type in your search on the GMacker page, select your dates from the calendars and click on ‘Google Search'. When the results appear on Google simply apply Verbatim in the usual way. - Domain Tools http://www.domaintools.com/
A useful tool for identifying who owns the domain name of a website. - Zanran http://zanran.com/
This is a search tool for searching information contained in charts, graphs and tables of data and within formatted documents such as PDFs, Excel spreadsheets and images. Enter your search terms and optionally limit your search by date and/or format type. - News alerts, news curation services and automated newsletter generation.
Use Google alerts, RSS feeds and newsletter generation sites such as Paper.li ( http://paper.li/ ) and Scoop.it ( http://www.scoop.it/ ) to keep up to date and share news with colleagues. - site: command
Use the site: command to focus your search on particular types of site, for example site:ac.uk, or to search inside a large rambling site. You can also use -site: to exclude sites from your search. - Numeric range
This command is unique to Google. Use it for anything to do with numbers – years, temperatures, weights, distances, prices etc. Simply type in your two numbers separated by two full stops as part of your search. A good way of limiting your search to pages or news covering a company's activities over two or three years in the past. - DataMarket http://datamarket.com/
A portal to thousands of free and priced datasets. Free to search, and create charts and visualisations of the free data.