MakeUseOf » research tools

5 Interesting But Useful Ways Of Using Wikipedia For Information Junkies

Saikat Basu — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:00:59 +0000

Wikipedia has put knowledge at our fingertips. Granted that we can scour the web and pick up usable information using a search engine, but Wikipedia’s value lies in the fact that it has collated, organized, and condensed it all for us. Or nearly all, because human knowledge is vast and I think Wikipedians aren’t out of their jobs just yet.

There are many ways to look at and browse through Wikipedia. From browser extensions and plugins to web apps that make browsing Wikipedia more than a scholarly exercise. The vast bank of human knowledge stored within Wikipedia pages also makes for some interesting uses – some which you might not even consider seriously. But checking out these five useful ways of using Wikipedia could be worth your reading time.

Search Wikipedia for “Experts”

It is safe to assume that Wikipedia contributors or Wikipedians know what they are talking, or rather writing about. You can pick any topic and search for a “subject matter expert” you can contact. Let’s say I am searching some information on ‘Arteriolosclerosis’. Clicking on the View History link takes you to the page where revisions from Wikipedians who contributed to the page are listed. Click on the user name to learn more about the contributor, and then click on Talk to leave him a message.

But remember that Wikipedia should be just a starting place for your research and not the end point. The Golden Rule still applies: Don’t believe everything you read on the web. If you are looking for sensitive information, especially related to health and medicine, Wikipedia “facts’ should be corroborated by professional opinion and hard facts.

Get the Bigger Picture with Wikipedia Statistics

As the page itself says, it’s almost impossible for a human to grab all of Wikipedia. So, the statistics page was conjured up to give a bird’s eye view of what’s happening within the boiler rooms of this online encyclopedia. For instance, Wikitrends tells you at a glance what’s trending on Wikipedia. Uptrends and downtrends are available across languages and time spans. Reading the top stories could help you connect the dots as to why the stories are gaining popularity.

Wikipedia as a Foreign Language Dictionary

I came across this old article (dated 2009) which explains how you can use Wikipedia for language translations. You can take advantage of the Wikipedia language sidebar to go to the foreign language specific page and get the equivalent word or term. Of course, it might be a synonym and not an exact translation, but even then Wikipedia and its multi-lingual versions offer an offbeat language learning tool.

Wikipedia as a Time Capsule

Did you know that Wikipedia has a Timeline of the far future? This timeline among all the other timelines that are listed in Wikipedia covers events from just about eight thousand years from now to the farthest edges of future time. It is based on scientific predictions, astrophysics, and plate-tectonics among other things. The List of Centuries breaks down each millennia and century (from 4rth Century BC to 40^th Century AD), into its major events – social, political, and technological. You can literally track time using the vast storehouse of information on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia for A Few Laughs

Everything’s not serious about Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a page devoted to deleted articles with freaky titles; because, as the page so eloquently puts it – Wikipedians too loose their minds occasionally. It’s a real pity that the articles stand deleted and only the titles remain. Topics like “Butt munchers” and “Dog Fart Neutralizing Thong” would have made for an interesting read.

In some quarters, Wikipedia may not be taken as a credible source. But as a jumping off point for further exploration, it more than serves its purpose. We have taken a close look at Wikipedia over the years. Have we missed some tip, some unique way to use Wikipedia more effectively? Give us your take if you use it in an interesting way.

Quickly Research, Organize, & Automatically Cite Information Using Citelighter

Saikat Basu — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:01:38 +0000

There are web highlighter tools and then there are citation tools. Both are different types of study aids. A new Firefox plug-in, or let’s accurately describe it as a Firefox toolbar combines the two and gives us a personal research organizer and citation recorder called Citelighter (Beta).

I personally hate installing extra toolbars in my browser, and not only because they take up screen real estate. But the potential usefulness of Citelighter piqued my interest enough to overcome my reluctance. Citelighter is not merely for students, because with its information gathering features, it could be handy across the board for bloggers, writers, office workers, even stay-at-home moms.

How does a citation tool help us?

Citation is defined as a short note recognizing a source of information or of a quoted text. You can call it a reference. If you are still confused, just open up a Wikipedia entry and head below to the section called References. A citation also similarly acknowledges previously published works and in case of the web, links to it. There are various styles for publishing citations in research papers and on the web. But we will not go into that. For us, it’s more useful to learn what we can do with a citation and research tool like Citelighter.

Citation is the best way to avoid charges of plagiarism or copying.
Information is reusable. Crediting the source of the original information helps everyone because a reader can go back to the source and dive deeper into the material.
Citations help to respect intellectual property rights of the person who created the source text in the first place

Organizing information with Citelighter

Citelighter is described as a fully automated bibliography, citation, research, and internet highlighting tool. It works as a Firefox plug-in. Citation is in public beta now, but is gradually progressing towards maturity as a full-fledged academic research tool.

Let’s see how it automates the whole process of collating information and preparing a research paper (or any paper).

1. To get started, register with an email account or Facebook Connect. Next, you have to download the Firefox plug-in which shows up as a toolbar after you restart the browser. The screenshot in the next point gives you an idea of how it looks after an install on Firefox.

2. Start a project. You can also set a due date for project completion and set reminders. The next steps are pretty simple.

3. Surf the web and start collecting information from webpages. Citelighter does not yet work on PDF files, but with webpages it’s a smooth flow.

4. Highlight all relevant information with the mouse by selecting the text as you would with a highlighter pen and clicking the Capture button.

A small sub-toolbar drops down and gives you an option to edit the capture or add extra comments. Citelighter automatically captures the information, but as you can see in the edit box below, you can fine-tune your capture by adding a lot of citation worthy info.

5. As you keep collecting the info, you can press the View button anytime to see all that you’ve saved. It’s arranged in points. The View window is where most of the information organization takes place. You can drag & drop to reorder all the data you have collected. You can click on Comments and type in more information required for your paper or notes.

6. Scroll down and you see all the bibliographic information neatly recorded as per the order you collected the information. You can customize it according to the three styles presently on offer right now – APA, MLA, and Chicago.

7. Once you’ve completed your research, press the Export button to send all the organized data (or selected ones) to a MS Word document, Google Docs, email, or printer.

8. The My Projects page (accessed from home icon on the toolbar) lists all your projects. You can use the search bar to search for specific text stings within all your projects listed here.

Footnotes…

Citelighter is a quick research tool to collect and organize your research notes. It works well on webpages, but it’s still not tuned for PDFs. That may go against it, but these are still early stages and the project is evolving. It just might be the premium feature when the developers start offering it in paid and free flavors. Browser extensions for Chrome and Safari are also in the offing. Citelighter is also putting a points system in place for more community participation.

When it comes to citation and bibliography tools, I like Citelighter for its speed and ease of use. What about you? Which research tool would you recommend?

Organize Your Research With The New Standalone Zotero

Yaara Lancet — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:31:05 +0000

Everyone in the world of research, and many people outside of it, knows that a good citation manager and PDF organizer is a must if you want to keep track of all the papers you’ve read and accumulated. For the past two years, I’ve been using Zotero to organize my research for articles. Zotero is a Firefox add-on in which you can save citations and links to PDFs and access them at any time.

One of Zotero’s biggest cons is that it works only within Firefox. This means you have to be running Firefox and use it to save the articles you find. As long as I was using Firefox, this was not a big issue, but when I switched to Chrome for a while, it became quite cumbersome. Not to speak of the fact that I had to load Firefox every time I wanted to look at my database (which can be a lengthy process at times).

This is why I was delighted to find out that Zotero have come up with Standalone Zotero Alpha (Windows, Mac and Linux) and with Chrome and Safari connectors for it. Note that this project is still in alpha, so it is not perfect by any means. These new versions came out in February, so hopefully we’ll see some updates soon. Now let’s see what it can do to organize your research.

Standalone Zotero

In order to get Standalone Zotero you’d need to head over to the project’s website and download the version of your choice. If you want to connect it to Chrome or Safari, download the relevant connector as well.

After installing, if you’ve used Zotero before, clicking “Yes” will synchronize your Zotero library into the new version, and you’ll have all your articles available immediately.

For those of you who’ve been using Zotero in Firefox, the standalone version will look very familiar. It is pretty much the same thing we’ve been using in Firefox, but it stands for itself. It’s so similar in fact, that it was hard to find the differences. But one big thing is apparent – I don’t have to run Firefox anymore to use Zotero. Hurray!

Browser Integration

But Zotero is not much good if I can’t look for articles in my browser and add them to Zotero from there. I’m disappointed to say that this part of the new project is still in its infancy and is not working very smoothly, but I’m sure things will only get better from the alpha version. So what works and what doesn’t?

I first tried the Chrome connector. This is just another Chrome add-on which you can download from the Zotero homepage.

Differently from the Firefox version, which allowed me to save citations directly from Google Scholar search, in Chrome I had to click individual links and could save them only from there. When I click these links, I got an icon on the right side of my address bar which I could click to save the article in Zotero.

Even this didn’t work all the time, as I kept getting this error:

Even though I got this error every time I saved an item, some of the items did actually get saved, and I could see them and access them from Zotero. This might be a translator issue and will hopefully be fixed soon.This error kept jumping up regardless of whether I was actually trying to save something or not, which soon become quite annoying. If you want to read more about the developments of the Chrome connector, you can look at the Zotero forum.

In Firefox, things became a bit funny. First of all, you cannot run Standlone Zotero and the Firefox Zotero simultaneously. You need to choose, one or the other.

But surprisingly, after disabling the Firefox version and trying to use only the standalone version, I didn’t get the save icons in Firefox at all. When I closed the standalone version and enabled the Firefox version again, everything worked fine. The conclusion – if you’re using Firefox, you might do well sticking to the good old Firefox Zotero for now.

MS Word Integration

One of the most useful features in Zotero is the MS Word integration. I used this to enter citations and created a bibliography for my whole thesis, and I don’t know what I would have done without it. Standalone Zotero comes with the MS Word integration already built in. Previously, you had to load Firefox for the sole purpose of using the Word integration. Not anymore!

The add-on itself seems to be unchanged, meaning you can still enter citations, create bibliographies, edit them, etc.

Bottom Line

I was very excited to try this new version of Zotero. This alpha version sure feels like alpha, especially in Chrome, and if you’re new to the business of PDF organizers and you’re not using Firefox, you might want to search elsewhere for now.

But if, like me, you already have everything in Zotero and enjoy using it, this new version is a sparkle of new hope, which already provides some very much needed improvements. I can’t wait to see future versions and to have the Chrome integration working better.

What do you think of the new Zotero? Think it’s worth a spin to organize your research? Tell us in the comments.

Use Snapify To Browse Additional Information Sources While Searching For Something Online [Chrome]

Jeffry Thurana — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:31:49 +0000

Most of us use the web to look for information and with the amount of information available online these days, it seems that we can find almost anything as long as we know how to search for it. The problem is, one piece of information often leads to another and following those leads often distracts us from what we were looking for in the first place.

It would be nice if we could take a look at those additional information sources while still anchored to the story that we originally searched for. Thanks to Snapify, you can. This Chrome extension will help you summon more resources about specific information online without leaving the page you are currently on.

Select & Snap

First, visit Snapify’s Chrome extension page and click the install button. You can tell Snapify has been installed by looking at the icon on the toolbar next to the URL box. If the icon is colorful, it means that Snapify is active, while a grey tone indicates that the extension is inactive. You can activate or deactivate the extension by clicking on the icon.

After activating the extension, you can use Snapify by selecting any text on any webpage. A blue “Snap It!” button will appear near the selected text. Clicking this button will open a pop-under window with more information about that specific word.

However, you can only use Snapify on fully loaded webpages. If the page is still loading, the Snapify button won’t appear next to your selection. So wait another few seconds until the page has fully loaded.

Snapify will try to give you the most logical results of your search. So if you select a word, you would most likely get the definition of that word. Other than the default search result, you can get more refined results by selecting one of the search sources on the left side of the window.

For example, I tried to look up “Refurbished“, then I clicked on the YouTube icon in the result window. The result is refreshed with videos about refurbished items, such as unboxing a refurbished MacBook.

If you are a Wikipedia lover, Snapify gives you quicker access to the tool – as Wikipedia is the first entry in the search results.

Other than Wikipedia and YouTube, there are also other sources such as Twitter, RSS feeds, Picasa, and Google Maps.

Another possible use of Snapify is to look for additional information about a person. When you read an interesting article on the net and want to find out more about the person who wrote it, just select the name and let Snapify do the rest. You can find more articles from the person, their other blog(s), and maybe even the location of their home on a map.

When you want to follow up on one of the results, just click on the link and the page will be opened on the same pop-under window. But there’s also the option to open the result in a new tab if you want to. You can also “like” the page on Facebook and/or share it via Twitter.

Diving Into The Options

There’s a little bit of customization you can do with Snapify from the options window. To access it, go to the “Window – Extensions” menu.

Then scroll down to the Snapify entry and click the “Options” link.

Within the window, you can enable or disable external links, native browsing, and images detection. Click on the green checkmarks to change the preferences.

You can also “blacklist” some sites so Snapify will not work within those sites. To add sites to the list, click on the “Add site exceptions” tab, type the address in the URL field and click Enter. Repeat the process to add another one.

You can easily remove a site from the list by clicking on the red “Remove Exception” link.

If you do a lot of searching and researching on the web, Snapify is a small useful extension which will save you several steps. Try it out and tell us what you think about it in the comments below.

Get Statistical Information At Your Fingertips With The WolframAlpha Toolbar [Firefox]

Danny Stieben — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:31:20 +0000

I have to admit that I’m generally not much of a fan for toolbars. In fact I hate them, thanks to their spam-related nature. Even those that weren’t spam and actually tried to do something good for you weren’t on my nice list either. I just felt like the features weren’t of any real use. For example, Google PageRank on the Google Toolbar was cool, but completely useless to the average Internet user.

However, there happens to be a very elite number of toolbars that do make it into my nice list, and the one we’re talking about today is one of them.

About The Toolbar

The friendly folks over at the incredible service known as WolframAlpha have produced both a toolbar for Firefox and an extension for Chrome, where the latter has less functionality. Either way, having a quick and easy way to get certain information from WolframAlpha is a valued item for those who need its information the most, such as math, nutrition, or geography students.

Installation

Installing the toolbar is easy, just like with any other extension. You can ignore the “experimental” label that is displayed along with the extension, as I’ve found it to be perfectly fine. After you restart Firefox, your new Wolfram toolbar will appear. If you wish, you can move this around so that it doesn’t take up a new row of space.

Features

The toolbar isn’t made up of a whole lot. The Wolfram logo acts as a button to go straight to the Wolfram website. This page isn’t going to be of too much help, as its more of a page where Wolfram can sell its products, which it integrated into its freely available services.

The search box will search for information across a number of its websites, which you can choose from. The WolframAlpha option should be familiar, as it’s the service that brings up all the statistical information for math and many other subjects of interest. Entering anything in the search box with WolframAlpha chosen will be like entering something on the website directly.

You can also search through the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. This service lets you search for any number of demonstrations for fields that WolframAlpha is capable of computing with. There is nothing much you can do on the site itself, other than browse through the different demonstrations and download .CDF files. I’m sure there’s a program somewhere out there that knows what to do with those files…

You can also search through Wolfram MathWorld, which is a large collection of math resources, all of which appear to be fairly complex. However, for those who can make something out of all that information, it is definitely another handy resource to have.

The Wolfram Mathematic Documentation Center offers plenty of help for using Mathematica (the engine powering WolframAlpha) to its fullest extent. There are a handful of tutorials that you can search through, thanks to the toolbar.

Finally, there is also WolframScience, which lets you, as it sounds, look through all the science resources that it offers.

Note that choosing a site to search on within the search box sets the default, although clicking on any of the buttons on the right while something is entered in the search box will start a search on the site you clicked on.

Conclusion

WolframAlpha is possibly one of the most useful services out there, and I can’t deny that I use it quite a bit. Having this nice toolbar to search for a solution to my newest problem in a split second is a wonderful comfort. This toolbar is definitely worth having, and if you don’t have much experience with WolframAlpha yet, you should play around with it!

How To Link MS Word 2010 To OneNote & Use It For Writing Linked Notes

Saikat Basu — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:31:47 +0000

I speak of myself alone when I say that Microsoft OneNote gets treated like a poor cousin while MS Word and MS PowerPoint walk away with the greater share of the attention. MS OneNote isn’t a sideshow at all but a very useful package in its own right. It’s perhaps the only place in the MS Office suite where you can offload everything – from documents to images, and now even audio commentaries. You don’t even need to tell it to save as it does so automatically.

We had seen earlier how MS OneNote 2007’s screen clip and OCR tool could be used to collect information. MS Office 2010 adds another by letting you link MS Word 2010, and MS PowerPoint to OneNote 2010.

The Linked Notes Feature and the Uses We Can Put It To

The direct benefit of the Linked Notes feature is that you can take notes in a docked OneNote window on your desktop while you work side-by-side in the other programs. This linking allows you to refer back to either the note or the main document by clicking on the link. Quite simply, you don’t have to copy-paste information manually. You can use the Linked Notes feature to work with MS Word 2010 (or PowerPoint) and OneNote side-by-side. Plus, you can use Tags on OneNote (like, Remember for Later; To-do etc) to flag the notes or even assign an Outlook Task to it.

In fact, the PowerPoint blog has a very nice explanation on the uses to put Linked Notes to.

This free ‘exchange’ of information makes for a great information management and research aid. But how do we set it up? Let’s try out with a demo.

Let’s Make OneNote and MS Word Work Together

Launch MS Word 2010. Please note that the document needs to be saved in Word 2010’s DOCX format. The Linked Notes button can be found on the Review tab of the Ribbon.

OneNote opens up and displays the Select Location in OneNote dialog box. You can click and expand the notebooks to pick a location to save the linked notes.

With a click on the OK button, you can start your note taking. When you select the note, a small Word icon (or a PowerPoint icon if you are working there) appears to indicate the link with the document in context. Of course, like in the earlier versions too, if you copy-paste any content from places like web pages it appears with the source link as reference.

To show the other side of how these two Office programs work together, close both the linked note and the main Word file. Open OneNote and the saved note. Click on the little Word icon or the little link icon on the upper-left to get to the connected Word document.

Managing the Linked Note Window

One of the easiest ways to take quick notes is by clicking the Dock to Desktop button on the View tab in OneNote 2010. Dock to Desktop allows you to take notes while working from any program on your computer. To reiterate again, if it’s Word or PowerPoint; your notes will be stored in context.

Clicking the Normal View button on the View tab closes the linked note taking session.

If you want to remove any of the linked notes, click on the chain link button on the upper-left and click on Delete Links on This Page.

The ‘in context’ linking handshake between OneNote and MS Word or PowerPoint is a great help when you are looking to extend your research with extra notes and external resources. It takes away some of the headaches involved in organizing notes and puts it all within the reach of a mouse click.

Do you use this new feature of MS Office 2010? If yes, how useful do you find it?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

7 Websites That Will Help Your Career With Company Information & Anonymous Job Reviews

Saikat Basu — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:31:41 +0000

Time was when jumping into a job was very much like stepping into a dark alley. You really didn’t know what you were getting into. Company information came in from the grapevine and hearsay. Getting a job was the prime need; work culture and the question – is this a great place to work – came much later.

But thanks to the information age, the web is the best career tool you can have at your disposal. Type in a company name and you are sure to get more than a few hits which will give you a peek into what a company is about. After all, there are people talking on the web: both disgruntled ex-employees and the contented ones. Take LinkedIn for example; it’s a great tool to find out the raves and the rants.

Going beyond LinkedIn, let’s check out seven more career websites that collect company information and job reviews.

Vault.com

It is one of the preeminent career websites on the web but unfortunately it is not totally free. The free Basic membership gives you company and job overviews; access to discussions and newsletters; and job listings. The topic specific blog is a nice place to do some career related reading especially the Career Advice blog. The discussion boards are a mine of information and you can pick up some valuable pointers thanks to the comprehensive filters the site provides to sift through the messages. Even the Basic account gives you enough hints with its overviews and company rankings.

Ping My Company

The career related website’s ‘disclaimer’ reveals its true purpose (as you can see on the screenshot). Just a scroll down the comments gives you an idea of the companies that are doing well in the employee’s eyes and the ones that aren’t. As a ‘Pinger’ you do not need to get registered and can contribute anonymously your feedback on the company you are working for or never want to work for. Green colored comments show approvals and the red ones augur disapprovals. It’s also a forum for companies to respond to the issues raised by the community.

Rateyourjob-Rateyourboss

It was difficult for me to gauge the popularity of the site, but at least it’s pretty much updated with rants against the guy who is above you on the job ladder. This site does not require a log-in and you can browse or read comments on quite a few jobs and bosses. Of course, the comments are bound to be majorly subjective.

JobBite

You can use the alphabetical listing or the search bar to dive into the index of companies and learn about their work cultures. Each company gets a salary rating along with an organizational one on this plain Jane website.

Wovox

Wovox says it in photos and pictures. It is an assemblage of workplace photos and reviews that enables you to get a good idea of the workplace you might be employed in. Snoop around the site and look at pictures, watch videos, and read reviews. Discover a company and its culture.

Career Leak

This website lets you research employers, job description, and companies. Find out salary information, and get interview tips. The job reviews and salary information are first person accounts by people who are (or were) employed in the companies.

Glassdoor

Glassdoor is a salary comparison website but alongside all that anonymous sharing you also get an idea of the job and company. You can trawl through the job listings or narrow down to the company of your choice. The site has a U.S. focus for now, but it could start covering international workplaces soon. The number of reviews stacked up for the popular names is quite impressive and that really makes for accurate ratings on the site.

Job aspirants can also look through JobVent to see if anyone is blowing steam over their prospective employers there. Then there are the good ‘old fashioned’ social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn that you can use for some serious company research. We have covered quite a few job and career tools in the past. From job search to job tips, the web gives more power to the guy who is beating a path through the corporate hallways. Have you ever researched a company on the web before signing on the dotted line?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

3 PDF Document Management Tools For Organizing Your Research

Jessica Cam Wong — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:30:45 +0000

The web has seen its fair share of research-friendly tools grow over the past years, which makes sense, considering more people are actively engaging online, uploading documents and photos, publishing blog posts, and more, simply expanding online information. Among these tools, are some very popular services, including Diigo, the Firefox-only Scrapbook, Google Books, and other quality research tools, which can help you organize your findings when you research for cars, for homework, for verifying or debunking science claims, and a whole lot more.

When you’re in the market for researching academically though, there are dedicated services that will definitely simplify your life. We’re not just talking about bibliographic reference managers (such as BibMe) or catalogue managers like Libra, which help you keep track of your gigantic book, DVD, song, etc collection. What we will discuss are tools that help you keep your PDF article library neat and catalogued for use when you have to compose your research paper, so read on to find out which services stand out in this category.

Mendeley [Cross-Platform]

Mendeley is a renowned scientific research management tool and academic social network that helps you index and organize research papers and PDF documents into a personal digital library of sorts. Not only can you organize your PDF library, but you can also highlight and annotate your PDFs, as well as sync documents across platforms since Mendeley is available for download on Windows, Mac and Linux, and on iOS. Mendeley also has a great web app, which you can use to add notes to a PDF file, as well as edit metadata. What’s cool is that Mendeley extracts bibliographic information, such as PubmedIDs, from your PDF documents, which helps you keep a tidy personal database, complete with searchable information of many kinds.

Zotero [Cross-Platform Firefox Addon]

The open source Zotero not only helps you build bibliography and keep track of your references, it also provides a place for you to organize your PDF article library. Like Mendeley, Zotero can sync citations and entries across operating systems and mobile platforms. It also permits the user to bookmark, highlight and add sticky notes to pages, assemble a no-fuss mailing list, index full-text from PDFs, etc. Zotero not only stores PDF files, it also can store files, images, links, and entire web pages.

Benubird PDF [Windows]

Benubird PDF is part Windows Explorer shell replacement, part collection manager. You can use this program to group specific files into collections or even use the Smart Collection feature to automatically group files into virtual folders according to rules you set. By default, there are four empty collections ready for you to make use of, namely, Finances, General, Personal, and Work. You can also put files together into a zip archive from within this program and select specific folders to keep track (“Watched Folders”), as well as what files to show. In this screenshot, I chose to have Benubird monitor my Dropbox folder’s PDF files only.

Filtering files of a certain format isn’t the only unique feature that Benubird possesses, as it also allows you to add tags to any file and edit the PDF details (metadata) without having to open up your PDF reader. Despite the fact that Benubird froze up several times during my test, it is a pretty robust tool to help you organize your PDF collection better. You should definitely check it out (or see the cross-platform Shoka, which is another PDF library manager) if you constantly deal with a huge collection of PDF documents.

If you’re just collecting PDF-based research articles, Mendeley and Zotero are probably the best choices to help you keep an organized library, as they also pick up bibliographic information. If you’re looking for just an easier way to manage your PDF documents only, try Benubird.

What do you use to organize your research and manage your PDF document collection? Let us know in the comments.

Image Credit: Shutterstock – Spectral-Design

7 Websites For Biographies Of Famous & Inspirational People

Saikat Basu — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:31:01 +0000

We are all interested in what the next man is doing. Biographies give us a historical look into the lives and times of famous people. Reading up on biographies can be about general knowledge, about research, or simply about inspiration.

A Google search and Wikipedia is usually our top two stations when it comes for searching for information on famous people people and events. Wikipedia is concise and informative and in most cases it would suffice for biographical information. But if you are doing some in-depth digging (for fun or research) for biographies of the famous and historical, it pays to have a few more resources in your kitty. Thanks to the goldmine of information on the web, it is easy to cross-reference and cross-check all your information before you start citing it.

Here are the top seven sources for you to visit if you are interested in the biographies of the who’s who.

Biography.com

This is probably the most fun and multimedia rich site out there when it comes to reading up on what famous people have done with their lives. The site is the online vehicle of the Biography channel (Bio). Just like the channel, the site is also a mix of biographical information and fictional content. The site is a bit celebrity heavy. Perhaps, the most fun part of the website is the games and the quizzes. The lineup includes some titles like Celebrity Dead or Not, Where Are They Now, and Design Your Depp among others.

S9 – The Biographical Dictionary

The biographical dictionary has some of the characteristics of Wikipedia; it is editable by the users and they also can contribute to the biographies on the site. You can use the search bar or browse through the listings to find a biography. The search page also has a Spelling Wizard to help you out with famous names. The biographical information is presented in a concise timeline format. Before exiting the biographical dictionary, test yourself on the Master Biographer Challenge quiz.

Omnibiography

The directory of biographies gives you 110,000 biographies searchable by name, by country, or alphabetically. The listing is quite broad in scope with the biographical page containing links to external information and YouTube content too. Be warned that some external links may be broken or in some other language. You can also submit your own link which has some biographical data.

Encyclopedia of World Biographies

The simply organized encyclopedia on famous and historical personalities is very readable with an alphabetically arranged Wikipedia like presentation. You can also add your own information through a form.

Time 100

Time magazine’s yearly poll on the most influential people of the year is an interesting read because it’s about the contemporary generation who are shaping the world we live in. The current year’s poll is still running and you can read up on 204 influencers who may be leaders, artists, innovators, icons or heroes.

Academy of Achievement

The Gallery of Achievers is a very neatly designed source chronicling some of the notable personalities who are shaping our world. The site itself is inspiring because you can use tools like Find Your Mentor which helps you to find an achiever who has faced challenges similar to your own. You can follow the famous by their careers too on the Academy Careers page.

Women’s History Month (Library of Congress)

An exhaustive resource on women who have impacted history through the ages. The site prepared by the Library of Congress pays tribute to some of the greatest women in history with multimedia content and other exhibits. Check out the images and the slideshows for some cool educational content.

Biography websites are an important educational tool just like some of the reference and research tools we have covered earlier. Do you read up on biographies of famous people online? Mention your favorite hero and the link to their biography in the comments.

Image Credit: Striatic

6 Places To Read Old Newspapers & Archived News Online

Saikat Basu — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:31:23 +0000

It might be old and stale, but dated news still has its uses. Does the image of a guy who keeps stacks of yellowing newspapers in his attic seem somewhat out of the ordinary? It might be an obsessive disorder, and rummaging around in that pile may not appeal to us, but that pile could be a storehouse of valuable information.

Searching through old newspapers is not only about history but also has practical applications for genealogists. Old newspaper records lead to names of places, individuals and obituaries.

That aside, a casual student of history can check back and see how the world perceived a momentous event. Say, how did the depression happen and how does it relate to the recent recession?

Thanks to digitization of data, we no longer have to search haphazardly through reams of newsprint. All we need is a search engine and of course, a site that lets you read old newspapers. Here are six:

Trove (Australia)

You can think of it as Open Source to a wealth of information. It might be Australia centric, but that takes very little away from the information that The National Library of Australia site supplies for free. The portal has a long lineup of newspaper ‘titles’ which you can select individually or even refine by state. Further filtering by year and date gives you access to a digitized format of the paper. You can also download it as a PDF.

Times Machine – The New York Times

The “Times Machine” is a browser that can take you from the very first issue of the newspaper (September 18, 1851) to The New York Times of December 30, 1922. It is limited if you consider the number of years it covers, but it still covers a significant piece of history when you see that the time period covers something like the First World War.

Chronicling America

With the help of this huge archive of historical newspapers held by the Library of Congress, you can view pages from newspapers belonging to 23 states. The aim of this project (The National Digital Newspaper Program) is to chronicle the newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 by all states in America. There is also a directory that lists information on newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present. You can use the very flexible filters to view newspaper pages from a place and time, using keywords to locate specific places, people, and events. The archive can presently serve up 3308613 pages.

HistoryBuff

This is a site that does not store a continuous archive of old newspapers, but rather a more selective collection that presented important events in American history in the last 400 years. The site is meant for students and educators who want to look at how news has been published since the early days of newspapers. The selection of old newspapers covers the periods from 1700 to 2004. Remember, these are selected news items and not complete newspapers.

The Newspaper Genealogy Archives

The coverage of news items remains selective but the countries covered broadens with newspapers from the U. S., England, Scotland, Ireland & Australia. The site is meant to be a free resource for genealogical & historical research. The archives cover news items from the 18th- through early 20th-century newspapers. The news items are less about globally significant events but of personal announcements (births, deaths, company formations etc) that can be used to trace genealogical clues amongst the citizens of five related countries.

Google Archive Search

By default we head to Google for our entire search. Try out Google News Archive Search to search for that bit of news in the whole historical haystack. The News archive search can also automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods that’s really useful for spotting news trends.

Thanks to these online digital archives, news can be preserved for posterity and made available with a click. There’s a lot more trawling you can do on the web…like, check out this Wikipedia page for a complete lists of online news archives from around the world. A lot of these publications have searchable indexes. If you are a history buff, then old newspapers are a valuable tool to trace the footfalls of history.

Would you agree that no news is old news when it comes to history?

Image Credit: Wikipedia