Australian Research Online is a repository of Australian research – theses, journal articles, book chapters, music recordings and pictures – from universities and government departments.

You can search on specific terms, or browse via the tag cloud or via individual universities.

This looks to be yet another valuable resource for finding articles relating to your policy area. Give it a go and see what you find.

Twitter is the latest ‘hot’ social networking tool and it seems like the whole world is getting involved. So just what is it and how useful could it be for your work?

Twitter is micro-blogging. You get 140 characters to answer the question ‘What are you doing?’ That message, or tweet, is then sent to all the people who have chosen to follow you. So it’s a great way to keep in touch with friends and family.

As we have seen recently, it’s also a very efficient way of getting information out about events currently unfolding – eg the Iran democracy protests.

By following other people who are tweeting on topics of interest to you, you can keep up with new developments and this is where Twitter can be a useful tool in your work.

Politicians, government departments and other agencies can all use Twitter to disseminate information about policy releases, new reports and developments. Both Kevin Rudd and Anna Bligh have Twitter accounts to promote their governments’ initiatives, as well as including updates on their personal comings and goings.

You can respond directly to someone’s tweets, thus engaging in a conversation with them about the topic they are tweeting on. Again, very useful for communicating directly with policy makers.

So, why not get yourself a Twitter account? The sign-up process is free and very simple and before you know it, you’ll be creating a whole new network to communicate with.

You can find me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/elldeelosang

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.