What did he say? Part 2

Following on from my earlier post, another really good source for speeches is the ABC’s website. You’ll find here all sorts of speeches – from the latest Boyer Lectures to Elizabeth Evatt’s address marking the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights to Malcolm Turnbull’s speech at the National Press Club on the Labor Government’s first year in office

What did he say?

Listening to President Obama’s Inauguration Speech on the ABC web site this morning reminded me of a request the LGAQ Library had yesterday in relation to a speech Prime Minister Rudd made late last year.
At the moment, President Obama’s speech is everywhere on the internet and in the print media. If you didn’t see it live, you can download a video file, an audio file or the full text. But what about in a month’s time, a year’s time? How easy will it be to find that speech?
And how do you go about finding copies of speeches, press conferences and announcement that our own politicians make?
The Queensland Parliament Website provides tools to search Hansard, Committees, Tabled Papers and Members’ Speeches, so you can find, for example, all the speeches Anna Bligh made in 2008.

To find records of speeches by Federal politicians, you need to visit each individual’s website. Links to those websites can be found here. By clicking on a Member’s photo, you’re taken to their contact details. Follow links to their personal pages, or ministerial pages, where you’ll find further links to their speeches.

Another way to access speeches, media releases, transcripts of interviews is via individual government department websites.  Federal and Queensland government departments provide links to public statements by their Ministers.

Finally, you could always search YouTube for video footage of speeches made by particular politicians.

Watching Local Government

The LGAQ Library subscribes to the electronic bulletin put out by iDea. It is often a terrific source for publications and resources about Local Government. This week, thanks to the bulletin, I discovered a gem of a site – Local Government Channel - which provides videos of news, projects, conferences and research pertaining to Local Government. Admittedly, the content is UK focussed, but the site offers lots of ideas and strategies that could easily be used here in Australia.

Site of the month

Sustainability is fast becoming the criterion by which all projects are being measured. Your Development is an Australian website that provides online resources for developing sustainable, urban residential developments. You can access a huge range of fact sheets and case studies and keep up with the latest industry news. Find information on all sorts of issues – transport, place making, water – and for all stages of your development. Developed in partnership with the CSIRO and the Australian Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts, the content has been created by industry experts and leading researchers, thus ensuring high quality information and ideas.

Finding meaning on the internet

In the middle of writing a report and forgotten how to spell a particular word? Or reading a paper containing unfamiliar words? In the past, we would have reached for the trusty dictionary and simply looked the word up. But, these days when even the LGAQ Library doesn’t have a dictionary on its shelves, what to do?

There are, of course, many online dictionaries – Dictionary.com, Your Dictionary and AskOxford to name but a few. However, unless you have a few of them bookmarked, you have to go search for one, then choose which one to use, then navigate around the site, type in your word, click on the result to finally get the definition. Tedious! So here’s a quicker way of doing it.

Simply type define:term into the Google search bar. You’ll be presented with a list of definitions from a variety of sources. Links to related phrases are also provided. How easy was that!

Still searching

I referred to ‘metasearch engines’ in my last post and some of you may be wondering what they are. In essence, they are programs that search across several search engines at once. Since the internet is too large for any one search engine to index completely, by using a metasearch engine you will obtain more comprehensive results. Using metasearch engines also saves you from having to repeat your search in multiple individual search engines.

Next time you need to search the internet, try one of these metasearch engines:

• Clusty: displays results in categories, or clusters, thus helping narrow down your search
• Dogpile: suggests related searches as an aid to narrowing your search
• Ixquick: searches across 14 search engines and databases. Ranks results by number of search engines the site is indexed by.

One of my favourite metasearch engines is Kartoo, which displays search results in a visual map, showing related websites. Hover your mouse over a website and an image of it with a short description is displayed on the left. Also displayed are a list of terms that you can click on to use to drill down to narrow your search. Give it a try and see what you think.

Going beyond Google

Like most people, my search engine of choice is Google. It’s the world’s largest search engine, accessing over 8 million web pages. If Google can’t find what I’m looking for, it doesn’t exist, right?

Wrong. There’s a whole other internet out there that Google just can’t reach. It’s called the deep web, invisible web or hidden web. Invisible because most search engines can’t see it. And it’s about 500 times bigger than the internet we all know and love.

So, what’s in the invisible web? Contents of searchable databases such as library catalogues and article databases. There’s a wealth of information held in these databases that you’re missing out on by only using Google or other similar search engines.

The good news is that accessing the invisible web is easy. You can ‘google’ for databases on a particular subject by typing, for example, ‘plane crash database’ into the search bar. Once you’ve accessed the database itself, you can then interrogate it for the information you’re looking for.

There are also some dedicated tools out there that specialise in searching the invisible web. Try some of the following next time you come up emptyhanded with Google.

• Clusty: a metasearch engine ie it searches several search engines at once
• Librarians Internet Index: sites compiled by real librarians, not a computer
• Infomine: excellent for academic research
• Directory of Journal Articles: free access to full text articles from over 1,000 journals in the humanities/social sciences and science fields

Thinking about Local Government

There are some excellent organisations doing some very interesting thinking about local government issues. You’ll find a wealth of materials on their websites – research reports, discussion papers and policy papers – tackling such issues as governance, cost-shifting, intergovernmental relations and much more.

Visit some of these sites to discover the latest thinking in Local Government:
New Local Government Network - a British think tank committed to making local government more relevant to local people
iDea: Improvement and Development Agency - UK based organisation aiming to provide best-practise advice and ideas to local government
Localis - aims to develop and create new ideas for local government
Social Market Foundation - produces commentary and articles on government and governance
Institute of Public Affairs – Australian think tank concerned with public policy
Australian Policy Online – offers easy access to much of the best Australian social, economic, political and cultural research available online.

 

 

It’s the economy s*****

Looking for information and data on Queensland’s economic performance? There are a number of regular reports published on the internet. The Queensland Treasury Corporation puts out the Queensland Economic Updates. These weekly and monthly reports provide economic analysis and forecasts of worldwide financial market trends.

The Office of Economic and Statistical Review puts out the Queensland Economic Review. This is a monthly publication and gives a summary of a range of economic and financial indicators.

The Federal Parliamentary Library produces the Monthly Statistical Bulletin, which contains a selection of economic and social statistics.

You can also try looking at the Australian Bureau of Statistic’s (ABS) National Accounts for information on national income, expenditure and product.

Site of the month

Griffith University’s Urban Research Program  aim is to produce research that informs policy and regulatory frameworks that impact on sustainable urban development. Its research covers a wide range of topics, such as urban governance, transportation, housing, ecology and infrastructure. All of its research publications are freely available on the site. Some examples of the papers you can find are “Climate change: what are Local Governments liable for?” “Suburban scars: Australian cities and socio-economic deprivation” and “Where have all the gardens gone? An investigation into the disappearance of backyards in newer Australian suburbs”.

An excellent website for research materials highly relevant to South East Queensland in particular, and Australia generally.