Some More information resources

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the amount of literature and information that is available "out there". What I discussed is a drop in the bucket, really. The Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php) contains not only the texts from the Library of Congress, but a full library (70,000 books) from Cornell University, Project Gutenberg, the Open Content Alliance and other collections. Pubmed.gov (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/) provides access to a vast collection of medical articles. In some cases, only abstracts are available. Generally, you can get the full article, frequently for free. In fact, the National Institutes of Health is working on providing electronic access to all articles published by NIH researchers, which will increase access to medical information. Another example of a search-able collection of articles is ERIC (http://www.eric.ed.gov/), which provides search-able access to thousands of education related articles, many for free.

Collections of articles and texts are not the only thing available. There are many other search-able databases with a wide variety of information, some more complete than others. Even the less complete ones, show the potential of these efforts. For instance, Drugs@FDA (http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/Scripts/cder/DrugsatFDA/index.cfm) is meant to provide the information that the FDA has on each medication that has been approved by the FDA. Unfortunately, this is not as complete as one would like. While every drug can be found, not all of the information that the FDA is actually available on line. Once you've done a search, though, it's easy to see how useful this could get. Drugs.com provides information from the consumer section of the Physicians desk Reference and Information from the FDA (in fact, in some cases, it shows more information than the FDA's own web site.) EDGAR (http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml) is the SEC database of public information and filings of publicly traded companies. And, Guiestar (www.guidestar.org) makes it easy to find a wealth of information about a vast number of non-profits in the US. Much of that information overlaps what is available in many states, such as New York State's Charities Bureau website (http://www.charitiesnys.com/home.html)

There is a vast amount of really valuable information in various forms on the internet. Lets make sure to use it.