Sometimes Information Wants to Be Free

Let's be honest. It is research season for librarians around the nation, and for most of us, the funding for new online databases was already exhausted by last November. If that's your situation, then don't worry. There's still a wealth of resources that are available for use by your students and teachers…and they're free. If you haven't had the opportunity to investigate those deep Web resources, here are a few that will keep your students engaged while providing teachers with some wonderful tools to add to their instructional curriculum.

The U.S. Department of Census provides a wealth of information all wrapped tightly within the American Fact Finder Web site. It includes general information about the U.S. such as national, state, or local populations; economic conditions; trends within communities; the medium income within a city; as well as quirky information such as the amount of time people within a community spend commuting to work, and even religious and genealogical facts. In addition, the Kids' Corner link provides students with quizzes and games that teach them more about the state they live in and the United States in general. Use the American Fact Finder as a first stop for statistical information.

Companion site: Kids' Corner (factfinder.census.gov/home/en/kids/kids.html).

The American Verse Project is a collaboration between the University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative and the University of Michigan Press. This project is working to assemble an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920.

In selecting verse for this pilot project, standard bibliographies, anthologies, and histories of American literature were consulted, including the 1993 Columbia History of American Poetry, Spiller's Literary History of the United States, Waggoner's American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, and Mattheissen's 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse. These were supplemented by specialized bibliographies of writing by American women and people of color. For the complete list of over 400 American authors, go to: quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/authlist.html. For high school English teachers searching for unique and often missed examples of American poetry for use in the classroom, this online resource is a valuable addition to an instructional Web site and curriculum.

Chronicling America is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. It provides users with the ability to search and view newspaper pages from 1880 to 1910 and find information about American newspapers published between 1690 and the present. Users can read digitalized online pages of newspapers no longer in publication, such as: The Los Angeles Herald, The Colored American (Washington, DC), The Bourbon News (Paris, KY), and The Jimplecute (Jefferson, TX). Users can also search for news articles by city, state, county, date of publication, ethnicity, and more. Chronicling America is a fabulous primary source database that provides many unique perspectives on U.S. history.

The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) is a distributed community effort involving educators, students, and scientists working together to improve the quality, quantity, and efficiency of teaching and learning about the Earth system at all levels. DLESE resources include electronic materials for both teachers and learners, such as lesson plans, maps, images, data sets, visualizations, assessment activities, curriculum, online courses, and much more. The National Science Foundation provided funding for the development of DLESE, which is now operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Computational and Information Systems Laboratory and the NCAR Library on behalf of the education community. Resources can be found by browsing the subject lists or searching grade level (or grade range) and specific science concept. Among some of the unique resources are Virtual Fieldtrips, which provide students with the opportunity to dive with submarines to map the ocean floor, travel to the tops of mountains to learn about volcanoes, step back in time to see Yellowstone National Park, or learn about chemicals in their own homes. Included are national instructional standards as well as evaluation and assessment modules of the projects completed. For educators looking for unique resources to stretch the minds of young scientists, take a look at DLESE.

Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to Southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes 12 thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs. The University Library of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sponsors DocSouth, and the texts and materials come primarily from its holdings. Classroom activities and resources are provided in a separate portal, available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/classroom. Included in this toolkit are digital narratives, images, and ideas for extending the lesson plans. For example, in the lesson entitled "Brown vs. the Board of Education: Rhetoric and Realities," students can listen to a 1974 interview with then Governor George Wallace where he shares his opinions about the power of the judicial branch of the federal government. For history teachers and librarians searching for resources on the history of the South, its people, and the influences that they have made on the rest of the nation, Documenting the American South is an essential resource to supplement any U.S. history textbook.

The Guide to History Resources on the Web is a searchable and indexed database of more than 5,000 U.S. and world history sites. Since 1994, under the founding direction of Roy Rosenzweig, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has used digital media and computer technology to democratize history, incorporate multiple voices, reach diverse audiences, and encourage popular participation in presenting and preserving the past. As a result, the Guide to History Resources on the Web has developed into a deep Web resource for locating unique and often-missed historical resources. The companion site, History Matters, is designed for high school and college teachers and students of U.S. history survey courses and serves as a gateway to resources offering unique teaching materials, first-person primary documents, and guides to analyzing historical evidence. Materials within this site focus on the lives of ordinary Americans and actively involve students in analyzing and interpreting evidence. As a tool for instruction in the use of primary sources for critical thinking skills, the Guide to History Resources on the Web should be included in any high school history research assignment.

Companion site: History Matters (historymatters.gmu.edu).

Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly funded Web site and weekly newsletter serving California, the nation, and the world. Every Thursday, LII sends out a newsletter, New This Week, which features dozens of high-quality Web sites carefully selected, described, and organized by their team of librarians. Topics include current events and issues, holidays and seasons, helpful tools for information users, hu man interest, and more.

Users can subscribe to the newsletter by email or RSS, or read it directly from the Web. Additionally, users can search and browse the Web site for the Best of the Web, which features over 20,000 entries that are maintained by librarians and organized into 14 main topics and over 300 related topics. For anyone searching for an organized place to start research assignments, LII provides quality content organized in a manner that only a librarian could truly appreciate. However, once users begin investigating the resources, it won't be long before they realize that this Web site is definitely worth bookmarking for future research projects.

The United States Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service conducts hundreds of surveys each year and prepares reports covering virtually every aspect of U.S. agriculture. Production and supplies of food and fiber, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages, farm finances, chemical use, and changes in the demographics of U.S. producers are only a few examples.

Even though the majority of students today aren't living and working on farms, the concepts of how food is grown, what animals produce what food products, and the mechanics of farming for specific crops are still being taught across the nation. So even if you aren't involved in 4-H or didn't know what baby goats were called, this Web site (and its companion sites) provides great information for students in K-12. (By the way, a baby goat is a "kid.")

Companion sites: Agriculture for Kids (www.nass.usda.gov/Education_and_Outreach/Lesson_Plans/index.asp) and NASS for Kids: (www.nass.usda.gov/Education_and_Outreach/NASS_Kids/index.html).

Developed by 18 scientific and technical organizations from 14 federal agencies, Science.gov is a gateway to government science information and research results. Currently in its fifth generation, Science.gov searches over 36 scientific databases and 200 million pages of science information with just one query, and is a gateway to 1,850-plus scientific Web sites. Among some of the topics are food, science, technology, astronomy, biology, nature, energy conservation, general science, health, medicine, and science education. Each Web site provides additional resources, guides, links, and other related information for research at the middle school through college level.

USA.gov is an interagency initiative administered by the U.S. General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services and Communications. It got its start when Internet entrepreneur Eric Brewer, whose early research was funded by the Department of Defense, offered to donate a powerful search engine to the government. That gift helped accelerate the government's earlier work to create a government-wide portal. In June 2000, President Clinton announced the gift from the Federal Search Foundation, a nonprofit organization established by Brewer, and instructed that an official U.S. Web portal be launched within 90 days. USA.gov went online on September 22, 2000 under the name FirstGov.gov. To suggest that this site provides more information than can be absorbed in one session is an understatement. It provides every citizen (or visitor) to the United States with resources that address every possible topic from cell phones to family vacations. Companion sites Kids.gov and Teens.gov offer students information, activities, games, and valuable guidance relating to government, education, safety, and daily life. Teachers and librarians will find that these sites also provide lesson plans and guides for utilizing the Web sites in the classroom.