At the Federal Procurement Data Center you can find out if a company is a government contractor, and if so, how much money it's received, what it's sold, and what agency did the purchasing. For example, Louisville's Brown-Forman Corp., liquor pushers and purveyors of high-end tableware, sold $13,000 worth of silverware to the U.S. Army. The database is for years 2002 and previously, and doesn't include every federal government entity. Apparently 2003 data isn't currently available online, according to FOIA hound Michael Ravnitzky.

Other government contracting Web sites:

FPDS Contractor Search

U.S. Government Contract Awards

Central Contractor Registration

Search the CBD via GPO Access

Federal Procurement Data System

FBO Synopsis/Awards Search

NICAR Data Federal Contracts Data

The Global Investigative Journalism Network is "a group of independent journalism organizations that support the training and sharing of information among journalists in investigative and computer-assisted reporting."

Global-L "is for participants in global investigative journalism conferences and others interested in global investigative journalism."

The Genetics Home Reference is "about genetic conditions and the genes responsible for those conditions."

The State University of New York at Albany has a good page on "How to Choose a Search Engine or Directory."

American University College of Law has a reference page devoted to international environmental law and policy.

Google, in partnership with several publishers, is experimenting with book searches.

The Daily Misleader is a shameful attempt to impugn the integrity of our commander in chief. You can get daily updates too.

Google has added a new number searching feature that allows you to enter UPS or FedEx tracking numbers, patent numbers, FAA airplane registration numbers or FCC equipment registration numbers to get results from their respective databases without visiting the sites themselves. This was reported by Researchbuzz.com.

The Society of Environmental Journalists now offers a "First Amendment Watchblog."

The United Network for Organ Sharing has an online database that "contains data regarding every organ donation and transplant event occurring in the U.S. since 1986."

USA Today used LexisNexis searches and an Access database to help compile information for its story on 168 sexual assault allegations involving athletes in the last dozen years.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good explainer on Web bugs, which use invisible images on Web pages and email to track who is viewing them.

Military.com offers a directory of U.S. military installations.

Project Vote Smart offers background, issue positions, voting records, campaign finances and performance evaluations of thousands of political candidates and government officials.

Quotez offers "more than 13500 quotations."

radio-locator claims to be "the most comprehensive radio station search engine on the internet."

Radiolovers.com offers "Free Old Time Radio Shows."

Drugs.com advertises itself as "the most popular, comprehensive and up-to-date drug information resource online. Fast, easy searching of over 24,000 approved medications." The Physician's Desk Reference is included in its database.

Recreation.gov helps you find information about outdoor recreation for all 50 states.

Stock Exchanges Worldwide "is a list of world's major stock exchanges and other exchange resources."

The Library of America's Reporting Civil Rights "presents the reporters and journalism of the American Civil Rights Movement."

New from IRE/NICAR:

• Resources for covering military and and other government contractors
• An updated DOT Truck Census database, which contains records on "each company that has commercial interstate vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds."
• The SEC Administrative Proceedings database, containing "cases before the Securities and Exchange Commission administrative judges, as opposed to criminal cases or civil cases filed in federal courts."
• Resources for covering earthquakes.

The Kentucky Attorney General has an online database of charities and professional solicitors registered with the state.

The Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse lets you search by company for court cases involving stock fraud and similar corporate swindles.

The Virtual Gumshoe is a one-stop shop for finding investigative resources on the Web.

Handy advice from WordTips on speeding up deleting text in Microsoft Word: "All you need to do is hold down the Ctrl key to speed up your deletions. Using Ctrl+Delete deletes text from the insertion point to the end of the next word. For instance, if you wanted to delete four words to the right, simply press Ctrl+Delete four times. Likewise, Ctrl+Backspace deletes words to the left of the insertion point."

The Auto Exchange offers a list of all U.S. state departments of motor vehicles.

Allwhois is for finding out who registered a particular Web site. It claims to be the most complete service of its kind on the Web.

PoliticalMoneyLine is one of the best campaign finance sites on the Web, allowing political donor searches by name, zip code, PAC, employer, occupation and more.

IRE's Campaign Finance Information Center has a clickable map to help you find out what campaign finance data is available in any state.

The Chronic Disease Prevention (CDP) databases "were developed to provide access to information on chronic disease prevention and health promotion to health professionals responsible for supporting, planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating chronic disease prevention and risk reduction efforts." It provides article abstracts and bibliographic citations and full text from "selected publications."

The Educator's Reference Desk offers education information that will no longer by offered by the U.S. Department of Education through its discontinued AskERIC service.

Here is a large collection of information on homelessness and poverty.

The University of California at Berkeley offers computer assisted reporting guides, including guides on finding public record databases on the Internet, doing public records research, finding experts, and using Lexis-Nexis to find news stories.

Portico can tell you where to find online real estate records for all 50 states. So can the Tax Assessor Database.

Garish, ugly Equine Info is "your gateway to horses and everything horse related."

EquiSearch is "Where Horse Owners Click." It offers horse-related information, including news and a horse business directory, from the publishers of EQUUS, Dressage Today, Practical Horseman, Horse & Rider, Arabian Horse World and Discover Horses at the Kentucky Horse Park magazines.

CLEAR offers a directory of professional and occupational license boards for the U.S. and Canada. It can help you find who to contact to find if someone is truly a licensed chiropractor, dentist, interior designer or whatever.

Yahoo maintains a detailed directory of professional organizations.

The Better Business Bureau lets you search for a "BBB Reliability Report" by company name.

Thomas Register "is the most comprehensive online resource for finding companies and products manufactured in North America." Registration is required but it's free. And it offers the inevitable toolbar.

CorporateInformation.com offers free corporate information, including recent stock information, officers, earnings and dividends paid, accounting ratios, phone numbers and addresses and more. Registration is required.

CrapToons should speak for itself.

Governing magazine, whose readers are mostly local and state government officials, has its own Web site where you can search for the full content of the magazine back to October 1987.

NICAR has updated its U.S. Department of Transportation truck database. NICAR cleans up and sells the database to journalists.

Weather.com has a national flu map, like the one in The Courier Journal today, where you can lookup flu activity state by state. The information is drawn from the Centers for Disease Control, which also has a flu page.

Vivisimo offers yet another Internet search engine toolbar.

Your next story about a higher education controversy could benefit from the University Policy Handbook Index, which allows you to search policy handbooks from nearly 700 colleges and universities.

The New York Times has digitized its newspaper back to its founding in 1851. You can search online but you have to pay for copies of articles.

Two days ago I told you about where to search for federal trademarks. I didn't know then that you can search for Kentucky and Indiana trademarks too.

Whatis.com is a computer dictionary and encyclopedia.

Grants.gov "allows organizations to electronically find and apply for competitive grant opportunities from all Federal grant-making agencies."

CLOExpress - "Web Resources for Logistics Executives" - offers a painfully broad selection of links on transportation and related topics for those whose job it is to move goods from here to there.

Recent stories elsewhere that involved CAR, in one way or another:

• The Palm Beach Post used data on migrant farm violations and working conditions for its series on "Modern-day Slavery."
• The Charlotte Observer used electronic airplane maintenance records for its series on "Are the Planes We Fly More at Risk?"
• The LA Times mined company Web sites among other techniques to figure out how some top NIH scientists are collecting paychecks and stock options from biomedical firms who also receive NIH grants

The Geographic Names Information System "contains information about almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features in the United States and its territories."

The NCAA puts many of its research reports online, including on graduation rates, gender equity, participation rates, racial demographics of athletes, revenues and expenses, substance use, academic performance and more.

NICAR's Uplink newsletter on computer-assisted reporting has an online page devoted to tech tips.

The Internet Archive has received an exemption from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to archive "vintage software" - old programs that are no longer in wide use. The could be significant should some day you come across an obscure electronic data file and can't find a program to read it. The Internet Archive already has a movie archive.

Public Citizen has a page devoted to finding doctor disciplinary information on state Web sites.

The University of Michigan offers a fine collection of statistics resources on the Web.

FXConverter - the Foreign Exchange Currency Converter - promises up-to-date foreign exchange rates for 164 currencies.

The Public History Resource Center "seeks to curate the field of public history, particularly as it is exercised on the Web, by providing a structure of information which contextualizes and supports public history's recent invigoration." Gawd. Drivel like that is enough to make you want to privatize history.

"Crafty hipsters share clever ideas at Craftster.org." A site devoted to making crafts and sharing craft ideas, but only for those who "are not excited by cross stitched bunnies and crocheted toilet paper cozies

Wired News has an article on a case of "Spam Rage," about a California man "arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis."

Search for copyright records since 1978 at the U.S. Copyright Office. Patents and trademarks are at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Following the collapse of a bridge under construction in California, IRE has put together information useful for reporting a bridge collapse. Databases for sale include the National Bridge Inventory, OSHA Workplace Safety Data, Federal Procurement Data System, Consolidated Federal Funds Report, and the Federal Assistance Award Data System.

Assassins have their own archive and research center.

Cornell University's educational portfolio includes home gardening.

And of course Christmas tree growers have to have their own association. Enter a zip code to "Find My Tree Now."

Go here to learn the history of negro spirituals.

The University of Washington can help you learn those research skills you didn't learn in your college.

LLRX.com has revised and updated its collection of links on state and federal legislation.

RSS in Government explains how this new means of delivering content is being adopted by federal, state and local governments. My greatest dread? A Richie Farmer blog.

 

The Cook's Thesaurus "is a cooking encyclopedia that covers thousands of ingredients and kitchen tools. Entries include pictures, descriptions, synonyms, pronunciations, and suggested substitutions."

ConsumerSearch, "Reviewing the Reviewers," gathers what others say about consumer products, summarizes it, and lists what scored highest. Here's a review of the site.

Recalls.gov is "your online resource for government recalls."

Looksmart FindArticles lets you "search and read 3.5 million articles from over 700 publications."

Here are lots of electronic texts on folklore and mythology.

The University of Iowa Center for Human Rights has a child labor legislative database.

The Journalist's Toolbox has a page devoted to information on holiday trends and traditions.

Roll Call compiles lots of links on Washington.

A Penn State professor says advocates of using boolean "ifs," "ands" and "nots" when Internet searching are wrong - simple queries work best.

Tracerlock, a fee-based Web site monitoring service, offers free toolbars that will scan Web sites for keywords so you can "Instantly find out if a web page has anything of interest to you."

Zimmerman's Research Guide is an online encyclopedia for legal researchers hosted by lexisOne.

StumbleUpon "shows you websites which your friends and peers suggest – great pages you can't find with a search engine."

In the Directory of Open Access Journals you can find nearly 600 "free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals."

The U.S. Census Bureau's State & County QuickFacts gives you "Quick, easy access to facts about people, business, and geography."

Sam's Club has begun selling software that allows anyone to do a background check, courtesy of the company that brings you Autotrack and KnowX, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

One of my alma mater's is sponsoring a seminar on "Weblogs in Journalism." It's only a matter of time before dead-tree peddlers such as yourself go the way of the dodo. Prepare.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel used electronic Medicaid billing records to expose how some doctors have exploited Medicaid, "prescribing huge amounts and dosages of narcotics that have contributed to a flood of overdose deaths in the state," in the words of that paper's project's editor, Rosemary Armao.

A Dutch site asserts that European journalists are behind Americans in the use of computer-assisted reporting and need to catch up.

The Multilaterals Project at Tufts University lets you search for the actual text of many international treaties on the environment, space, human rights, warfare and more.

OSCAR is devoted to promoting the use of open source software, aka free software, to do computer-assisted reporting. A geeky site - not for the timid.

Poynteronline offers a bibliography on computer-assisted reporting.

Municode.com offers online access to municipal codes for 45 states, including Kentucky and Indiana. Only some cities from each state are offered here. Louisville's, for example, is on another site, American Legal Publishing, that does the same thing.

Kompass "provides product, contact and other information for 1.8 million companies worldwide." The free search returns telephone and fax numbers. You pay for "a comprehensive overview" of a company, including executives, key business stats, branches, products and services and so on.

SkyMinder calls itself "The best online source for credit and business information on 46 million public and private companies worldwide." For a fee, naturally, although the searches themselves are free after you enlist.

The editor of a magazine on Geographic Information Systems argues that journalists' ignorance of GIS is symptomatic of a society where "our mainstream media has become so accustomed to spoon fed news and sound bites that some reporters no longer question what they're told or think critically about the issue at hand."

The latest from About.com on "Building An Access Database from the Ground Up."

Poynteronline's Web tips offers resources on covering Medicare.

The Database Journal is writing about Microsoft Access query techniques.

iTools offers "Quick access to the best Internet tools," including Web search engines, people finders, dictionaries, text translators, encyclopedias, newspapers and magazines, biographies, area codes and more.

The non-profit Transactional Record Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, which specializes in obtaining federal databases to monitor the government's performance, is offering embargoed access to its latest report on terrorism enforcement.

Cool site of the day will email you its choice if you want.

GIGA offers a "Broad collection of 50,000+ ancient and modern quotations, aphorisms, maxims, proverbs, sayings, truisms, mottoes, book excerpts, poems and the like browsable by 4,000+ authors or 1,300+ cross-referenced topics" and a "Directory of 8,000+ biographical names of historical figures, world leaders, noted authors, famous celebrities and the like including nationality, occupation, and years of birth and death."

Bartleby.com now offers "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy."

Free Lunch "provides you with FREE access to over 900,000 economic and financial data series."

Collegenews.org offers an "Easy to use searchable lists of the top experts in dozens of fields. Each entry includes contact information and a brief biography."

Federal Computer Week reports that Kentucky's Chief Information Officer, who it says is "one of the nation's most well-respected, recognizable and sought-after technology advocates," is leaving when Patton's term is up.

Cartoon Research is "dedicated to classic cartoons: past, present and future."

Research Papers in Economics "is a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 41 countries."

KartOO is a different kind of meta search engine that searches a bunch of different search engines and creates a visual map of its results. It gives more prominence to results that more closely match your request and links to sites with similar information.

The HomeTownLocator Gazetteer offers an easier way to get Census data than the overloaded Census site. Search by city, county or zip code. You can also find the distance between two cities or zip codes, or look up satellite images and topographical maps of anywhere in the U.S. via TerraServer.

The Census Bureau offers detailed statistics on business size - nationally and by state and by industry, for 2001. That's the latest year available.

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication offers "Research You Can Use." This is stuff "from AEJMC refereed journals that may interest journalists." Emphasis on the may.

Future Fisherpeople of America and underemployed tobacco farmers will be interested in the Aquaculture Network Information Center.

The Washington Post wrote last week about how one man with a Web site is effectively fighting irrational government secrecy.

The ACCRA Cost of Living Index offers up-to-date comparisons between cities for a price.

Finance for Geeks is a layman's overview of accounting and company funding that could be useful to you too. If you weren't a number-hating journalist, that is.

Graphic-design.com offers Photoshop tips & tricks.

invisible-web.net helps you find valuable databases on the Web not easily found with your typical search engine.

You can use an asterisk as a wildcard when searching for federal court records through PACER. That means pac* will match packer, pace, packet and pachyderm. *a* will find everything with a letter a, which isn't a wise search but illustrates the point.

FreePint is "the must-read newsletter for information researchers," says SearchEngineWatch.com.

About.com explains how to export data from Microsoft Access to Excel.

Get information on grief and bereavment from growthhouse.org, the "gateway to resources for life-threatening illness and end of life care."

Here are lots of links for learning about math -- not that you're likely to make much use of them. Innumeracy is a great book for explaining why that's a mistake, not to mention the same author's A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.

And you just thought it was a useful tool. Here's someone who thinks Google's new deskbar is a threat to Microsoft and "the kind of quantum leap forward that marks all great technological evolution."

Chi-Chi lovers will appreciate FoodSafety.gov.