Reference

Career

Pardee Career Collection

http://library.bu.edu/search/a?searchtype=t&searcharg=pardee+career
“Pardee Career Collection, a special collection of circulating books related to career development and job search. Many of the 41 books currently in the collection have been recommended by staff from the Feld Career Center at SMG, but are available to all students and staff at BU. The books are shelved in Section 11 of the Reference Collection, next to the non-circulating career books, and can be borrowed for two weeks at a time. You can find a listing of these books by typing ‘Pardee Career’ in the Title field of the Library Catalog” (November 16, 2010)

Factual Information

True Knowledge

http://www.trueknowledge.com/
“True Knowledge is building the first internet-scale platform for answering the world’s questions. …new kind of search experience …by asking …in a way that is completely natural …as if they were talking to another human being.  Instead of a list of links that may or may not be relevant to the query, the user experience is an immediate, perfect response, giving them exactly the information they are after.  Our unique semantic technology has been many years in development. …can combine existing knowledge to infer new facts and answer questions it has never seen before.  …database of facts: a unified representation of the world’s knowledge containing factual, common sense and lexical knowledge. We can already answer trillions of questions and as this knowledge base grows, we understand and answer more and more.” Other than answering “When did Roger Williams die?” I have not had much luck with this search engine today.  Learned about this when this search engine was used to determine that April 11, 1954 was the “most boring” day of the twentieth century and the BBC Morning Update featured this.  See http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/true_knowledge/~3/8CN2Qm5pTNA/most-boring-day-in-history.html (November 26, 2010)

Law

Global Legal Information Network

http://www.glin.gov/search.action
“…public database of official texts of laws, regulations, judicial decisions …contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations.” (August 6, 2010)