dec08c.indd I n t e r n e t R e v i e w s Joni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Access: http://www.loc. gov/chroniclingamerica/. Chronicling America is a prototype Web resource with two major functions. The fi rst allows users to search and view newspaper pages from select American newsprint sources ranging from 1880 to 1910. The second func­ tion allows users to find directory information about American newspapers published from 1690 to the present. This long­term collaborative project is sponsored by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Library of Congress (LC). Chronicling America has selectively digitized historically signifi cant pages from particular regional newspapers. Currently, only newspapers from California, District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Min­ nesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah, and Virginia are included in the news page search results. This project intends to digitize 100,000 newspaper pages a year through 2011. Searching for information under “View Newspaper Pages” will retrieve full pages from portions of issues. Segmented editions of papers contain historic information of local events. Since only portions of newspapers are scanned, search results seem disjointed and searching does not function like digital newspapers from larger vendors. The OCR machine­generated text was a little tricky to read, but the draw zoom box and zoom features were very useful. Overall this source has an incredible wealth of historic digital images and newspaper articles. The “Find” portion of the Chronicling America Web site is a more comprehensive Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public ser vices and collec tion development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette. edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@willamette.edu directory of print newspapers from 1690 to the present. Included in the directory are approximate­ ly 140,000 titles from 900,000 separate library holdings. Researchers can locate newsprint by state, county, city, or date published. Another facet of the directory is that it offers users the ability to limit their search by the categories of “Ethnicity” or “Labor.” Newspaper records have an “About this Newspaper” section pro­ viding holding information, subject headings (when available), geographic coverage, and publisher information. Sources also have MARC records for library use. Chronicling America is an excellent searchable directory of newspapers. LC, NEH, and NDNP have plans to build the directory holdings and searchable digital pages as well as improve the overall usabil­ ity of the site. Persons looking for regional primary research materials will not be disap­ pointed.—Molly Susan Mathias, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, mathiasm@uwm.edu Intute. Access: http://www.intute.ac.uk/. Intute is a consortium of seven British universities with partners from many other universities, libraries, associations, and so­ cieties. The site reviews, evaluates, and indexes educational and informational Web pages from around the world. Launched in 2006, Intute states that it “exists to advance education and research by promoting the most intelligent use of the Internet.” Through its “Virtual Training Suite,” Intute provides tutorials written by subject specialists. Intute can be searched or browsed by subject. There are also separate pages for the subjects of arts and humanities; health and life sciences; science, engineering, and technology; and life sciences. The advanced search allows one to narrow a search to re­ sources such as e­books, full­text journals, blogs, case studies, specimen databases, and primary sources. A quick search of the word “Cuba” in all subjects returned government December 2008 741 C&RL News http:http://www.intute.ac.uk mailto:mathiasm@uwm.edu mailto:cdrost@willamette.edu http://www.loc pages (“Cuba” from the CIA World Factbook), journals (Revista cine Cubano), organiza­ tions (the RAND report “Cuba after Castro: Legacies, Challenges, and Impediments”), news (“Cuba after Castro” from the Financial Times), and a travel and tourism portal (Do it Caribbean). Unfortunately, some searches also returned Wikipedia articles. One of the most useful features of Intute is the list of guides, or “Subject Booklets.” Each booklet outlines useful Internet re­ sources in its subject, and the booklet topics are as varied as “Internet Resources for Environmental Engineering” and “In­ ternet Resources for Fashion and Beauty.” Whether or not the resource pages in these booklets are accessed through Intute, the lists are beneficial to general and academic researchers. In addition to presenting a database of Web pages, Intute provides services, such as blogs, on their subject areas, a database of departments at all UK higher education institutions, job listings, and RSS news chan­ nels. Other projects Intute is involved with are eBank, The Higher Education Academy resource catalog integration, Informs, and Internet Detective. The academic and entertaining inter­ mingle in search results. While not all the indexed resources are scholarly or can be used for educational research (such as the tourism page above), there are enough re­ sources for scholars and academicians to use to make this site bookmark­worthy.—Delores Carlito, University of Alabama-Birmingham, delo@uab.edu Pe w R e s e a r c h Ce n t e r. A c cess: http:// pewresearch.org. Established in 2004, as a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, one of the nation’s largest philanthropic foundations, the pur­ pose of the Pew Research Center (PRC) is to collect and disseminate information on cur­ rent issues, attitudes, opinions, and trends. The work of PRC is carried out by seven separate and distinct projects or divisions, which receive funding and support from the parent organization. This site provides a central gateway to the work of PRC as well as the research activities of each of the units, which include the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The other divisions are the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, Social and Demographic Trends, and the Pew Hispanic Center. PRC is a dense but exceptionally well­ designed, organized, and maintained site, with numerous access points for searching and browsing the vast array of data, publica­ tions, reports, analyses, commentaries, and information sheets generated by PRC and its various projects. Easily identified by slightly different branding, pages are similarly structured with current and archived full­text reports, datasets, graphs, and other relevant statis­ tics. From the main PRC page, visitors can quickly peruse latest research fi ndings, sign up for e­mail newsletters and RSS feeds, check out top stories and trends, and take current events and personal opinion quizzes. Many of the features are also available from individual project pages. Navigational points throughout the site make it easy for a visitor to become absorbed in the information but not get lost or run into a dead end. Self­described as a “fact tank,” PRC strives to serve as a neutral broker of expert and nonpartisan information, much of which is gathered by telephone polling surveys on a variety of topics of major public and social interest. Widely read and cited by journalists, academics and policy makers, Pew project research looks at questions of popular and current interest, then quickly distills the data into easily digested formats, while consistently and clearly describing the methodologies used to gather and ana­ lyze. The results are credible, interesting, and readily fi ndable.—Linda Frederiksen, Washington State University-Vancouver, lfrederiksen@vancouver.wsu.edu C&RL News December 2008 742 mailto:lfrederiksen@vancouver.wsu.edu http:pewresearch.org mailto:delo@uab.edu