Friday, December 19, 2008

News from Library@EPA


We would like to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

From today the library has stopped issuing the old Library Updates. From now on we will use this spot to let you know what is happening in the Library.

To keep yourself informed about what is going on at Library@EPA you will need to subscribe to this Blog by selecting either the email option or the RSS feed option on the right.

We plan to update this each Monday, but should there be something we need to alert you about more quickly e.g. when our search engines or other resources become temporarily unavailable, we will notify you via this spot at a non-scheduled time.

We look forward to seeing you and or hearing from you all in the New Year

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Walk Score

Although the about information on this site claims it is set up to investigate the walkabalilty of North American site it also allows the user to check out the Walkability of a neighbourhood in many places around the world including Australia. Use it to find out how walker friendly your own neighbourhood is or to locate great places for a walking holiday.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

ARROW Discovery Service

The number of records in the ARROW Discovery Service has reached over 250,000. Each of these metadata records link to research outputs held in 26 university repositories across Australia and includes theses, preprints, postprints, journal articles, book chapters, music recordings and pictures.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Turbo charge your Google Search

If you wish to maximise your internet searches just check out the tips on this page.

This is just one great sample of the tips there
"The Place holder *
10. Use a placeholder word.
The "*" essentially represents a placeholder word (aka wildcard), and there a number of ways to use it. For example, if you're trying to look up a conference, but you only remember the first and last word of the conference, you can enter "nonprofit * conference" to look up conferences that include an additional word. Or think of "*" as a fill-in-the-blank test for Google. Enter * founded the Red Cross to learn who started the organization. In addition, if you want to search for terms that don't appear next to each other, add a "*" between them to indicate that one or more words should separate them." – Firth Gowan in Turbo-Charge Your Google Search viewed on Techsoup

EPA Fugitives

This site has bee n set up by the United States EPA as a new web-based tool to help track down and apprehend those accused of violating environmental laws and evading arrest.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Energy [r]evolution

The energy [r]evolution is an independently produced report that provides a practical blueprint for how to half global CO2 emissions, while allowing for an increase in energy consumption by 2050. By dividing the world into 10 regions, with a global summary, it explains how existing energy technologies can be applied in more efficient ways. It demonstrates how a ‘business as usual’ scenario, based on IEA’s World Energy Outlook projections, is not an option for environmental, economic and security of supply reasons.

57 Useful Google Tools You Never Heard of

As the name implies, this article lists a wide variety of search tools available on Google which show that Google has all sorts of uses most users don’t know about.

Environmental Auditing

This site contains an index, and links to Environmental audits conducted worldwide. Users can search by country or browse through and extensive subject listing. It also contains studies and guidelines related to environmental auditing.

Australian National Dictionary

This was the result of a joint initiative of the Australian National University and Oxford University Press. This free online dictionary of Australianisms has been donated to the nation by Oxford University Press.