IRE/NICAR has upgraded its national bridge database, which includes the most recent inspection of most U.S. bridges and which many newspapers have used to report on dangerous bridges. "For example, in 2001 The Kansas City Star reported that 'More than a quarter of the nation's bridges are too weak, dilapidated or overburdened for their current traffic'" IRE/NICAR says.

The Library of Congress has put online Spalding's baseball guides from 1889-1939. "Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide was perhaps the premier publication of its day for the game of baseball," the LOC says. Lots of statistics, analysis and photographs from way back when baseball was a significant sport.

"The HotList is a master registry of K-12 schools" on the Internet. "The registry is organized by state and by grade level. The registry also includes sites for charter Schools, virtual schools, school districts, state and regional education organizations, state departments of education, state standards and state administrators," the site says.

The goal of City & Town Official Websites is "to collect all reliable & stable sources of city & town information."

HUD's "State of the Cities Datasystem" (SOCDS) offers demographic and economic information from the 1970 to 2000 census, current employment statistics for city residents, data on county business patterns, FBI crime data, local building permit data, information on city and suburban public finances and more.

IRE/NICAR has updated its federal contracts database to include 2003 data. "For about 70 federal agencies -- including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense -- the database includes a record of every contract transaction of more than $25,000. The database includes the specific agency, the company, a basic description of the product or service, the location of where the work is performed, and the amount," IRE/NICAR says.

"A Journalist's Guide to Covering Bioterrorism," a free book funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is now out in its second edition.

MathWorld claims to be "the web's most extensive mathematics resource."

Here's a good guide on how to read and understand IRS Form 990s, which are filed by non-profits and which contain lots of useful financial information. You can request these from the IRS or ask the non-profit itself (by law, the non-profit must provide it). You can also get them on the Web at Guidestar.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram used computer-assisted reporting to report how "High-scoring games and big-money players are more important than wins in drawing fans to major-league baseball games."

The U.S. Senate offers a "Virtual Reference Desk." "If you are seeking general information on the Senate, the legislative branch and process, or on the federal government, this is a good place to begin," the site says.

PC Magazine shows how "You can keep frequently used documents readily available on Word's menu bar so you don't have to use the File menu and search through files and folders to find them."

Contributors to FreePint compiled this handy list of sites that offer free email news alerts:

• Allzenews
• Feedster - News Alerts
• Google news alerts
• GoogleAlert
• HighBeam alerts
• InboxRobot Newsletter
• Individual.com - daily e-mail
• Moreover alerts
• NetNews Tracker
• News4Sites
• Newsguard
• NewsMax
• Phonotics Alerter
• ProFusion
• ShortWire
• Tracerlock
• WiseEye
• Yahoo! keyword alerts
• Google WebAlerts

IRE/NICAR have added the Toxic Release Inventory to their database collection. "Although you can download this data for free off the EPA's Web site, NICAR data analysts have done a significant amount of cleaning to make this data easy to use immediately. Fields containing standard date formats and mappable latitude and longitude have been added," IRE/NICAR says.

The blog Micro Persuasion is about "how blogs and participatory journalism are impacting the practice of public relations."

Small Step is a U.S. Department of Health & Human Services site devoted to help the underexercised and overindulged adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Bob Hill/Diane Heilenman Dept. of Plant Worship: The Elisabeth C. Miller Library is "the foremost horticultural library in the northwestern United States." Its focus is on the Pacific Northwest but lots of general plant information too.

The rest of us should spend our time at Blackthumb.

BusinessJournalism.org offers "commentary, training and resources for those who write about business." The site is operated by the American Press Institute.

Find out what the weather was like, for any day back to 1973, at more than 1500 places in the U.S. at Almanac.com.

Ric Manning says this is a better tutorial on RSS feeds, which we mentioned here a few days ago (except that it's oriented toward those who want to make an RSS feed, rather than consume one). CJ Online is going to use RSS to offer our horse racing stories to other Gannett sites during Derby week.

Skipease is "The People Search & Public Records Network."

You can get a demographic summary of your zip code at ESRI, the company that makes the mapping program Arcview. My zip code, 40205, is dominated by "metropolitans" in their jargon. "Metropolitans favor city living, in older neighborhoods populated by singles or childless couples," the site says. Naturally, with two children, I don't fit in.

RocketNews, which offers current news and business information, now lets you get an RSS feed of any new content on the site that matches keywords you select. RocketNews also offers a free RSS reader. More and more Web sites, including news and government sites, are making RSS (for "rich site summary" or "really simple syndication") feeds available. Instead of visiting the Web site, you use a news "reader" or "aggregator" to retrieve new information. It's a faster way of keeping up with what's out there because you don't have to visit each site to discover what's changed. The information comes to you. Yahoo, for example, offers many RSS news feeds.

Here's a librarian's 15-minute tutorial on getting started with RSS.

Amazon now offers its own Internet search page (powered by Google) called A9. It remembers your previous searches and tells you the last time you visited a particular Web page, among other features. Naturally, one of its goals is to sell you Amazon's books, which it does by including books matching your query in a separate panel. This isn't entirely obnoxious because remember Amazon now lets you search the entire contents of many of its books...

The New York Times offers free access to its theater review archives back to 1996.

Kentucky has a Web page outlining all the online government services it offers.

The Jefferson Muzzles, by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, are awards to bring "national attention to abridgments of free speech and press."

A private investigator group keeps a list summarizing tape recording laws for all states. Kentucky and Indiana are one-party consent states, meaning you can record your telephone conversation with someone else without telling the other party. The ethics -- as opposed to the legality -- of that is something you must work out yourself.

Namechop is free software that makes it easy to split names in databases into separate fields. You want to do that often when matching one database with another, or to make it easier to search the database.

Open the Government has a list of the " Ten Most Wanted Documents for 2004."

Martindale's Reference Center offers links to a huge number of reference sites on education, science, computers, entertainment, business and more.

Researchbuzz reports that the Veterans Administration has a new online database where you can search by name for veterans buried in VA cemeteries. The search results include the rank and military branch, date of birth, date of death, date of burial and service dates of the deceased. Researchbuzz also says this site will tell you where to find online searchable death indexes and records by state.

Now you have no excuse for not communicating with your children because there is Ka-Boom, a dictionary of comic book sounds. Under S, for example, you'll find SHAKITYSHAKESHAKE, the "sound made by something being shaken, as of a salt shaker" (The Ren and Stimpy Show), SCHPLOOK, "a sound made by a rapidly extending mechanical arm" (Dead Pool: The Circle Chase) and SHOOSH, "the sound of flesh being torn off" (Mantra).

You can look up online if someone has a real estate license in Kentucky.

SurfWax offers a "news accumulator," with "100,000 Topic-Specific News Pages covering 4,000 News Sources."--

Harvard Business School has created "The Great American Business Leaders database." It includes the name, birthplace, industry, era, gender, ethnicity, education and a bio of the august ones. Only part of it is available online, but you can get the entire thing by in an Excel spreadsheet for free by filling out a form. It "was compiled over a two-year period in an effort to identify and chronicle the lives of individuals whose business leadership in the twentieth century shaped the way people live, work, and interact," the school says.

Google will now send you alerts when it finds new Web pages matching your interests. Google Alert, an independent service reported here earlier, also does this. Both are free.

The New York Times has reported that "Medicare will soon publish detailed information comparing the prices of most prescription drugs, shining a bright light on some of the biggest secrets in the health care industry." There could be rich computer-assisted reporting potential in that.

NICAR has updated its version of the federal database on medical devices known as MAUDE, the "Manufacturer and User Facility Device Experience Database." "Journalists can use the database to help identify which commonly-used medical devices might put patients at risk," NICAR says. "The data details problems that have ocured with medical devices such as blood glucose monitoring systems, surgical staplers, breast implants, pacemakers, whelchairs, defibrillators, catheters, joint replacements, and much more. The details include manufacturer information as well as the brand and generic names of the device. Patient outcome information is also included." NICAR sells the database to journalists.

BoardBuzz is a blog on schools and education by the National School Boards Association.

Kinja "is a weblog portal, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web. Visitors can browse items on topics, everything from food to sex. Or they can create a convenient personal digest, to track their favorite writers."

Princeton University's WordNet is "a lexical database for the English language. ... WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets." Got that?

You can search for a range of numbers in Google by using two periods. For example, to search for a range of zip codes, type 40201..40205.

AskJeeves now has a famous people search. Enter the famous person's name and you'll get a photo, a bio, birthdate, birthplace, news and links for the celebrated personage.

zFacts makes it easier to get hard-to-find Congressional Research Service reports. As the site explains: "The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the public policy research arm of the US Congress. With its $80 million budget and 800 employees, it issues about 3,000 briefs, reports, short issue papers and longer position papers per year. An arm of the Library of Congress, CRS is renowned for its non-partisanship and in-depth analysis, but it does not make its reports available to the public. However, it cannot prevent members of Congress from giving them out individually and some government agencies from posting reports they find relevant. Perhaps 1000 have become available on the web."

The American Journalism Review has a piece asking journalists "What reporting gadgets do you use?" Answers include digital recorders, PDAs and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices (Matt Waite of the St. Petersburg Times used a GPS to judge what the average speed will be on a new tollway.)

All Things Photo is a site devoted to just that.

An article on The Register, "The perils of Googling," points out how easy it is to use Google to find user names, passwords and other sensitive information inadvertently left exposed on the Internet.

OneWorldRadio is "global community of producers and broadcasters sharing audio for, and ideas on, radio for development."

PubMed Central is an "archive of life sciences journals." A project of the National Library of Medicine, PubMed Central says it wants to ensure unrestricted access to electronic literature on biomedicine just as it has always done with printed information.

CARET is the "Center for Applied Research in Educational Technology."

Reason magazine will show where easily available mapping technology and customized publishing is headed: It is going to publish its magazine with a photo of each subscriber's house and neighborhood on the cover.

Jim Baumgarten is a big fan of BoingBoing, "a directory of wonderful things." It's a blog about the many interesting oddities infesting the Internet.

I think this is an oxymoron but there is a site called the "Joy of Hockey." It offers "player records, awards, scoring & more" and recently made PC Magazine's list of "100 Best Undiscovered Web Sites."

A New York Post article about a man arrested for a stock scam involving Google points out the dangers of relying on Google alone. The gist of it is that the writer found telling information about the con artist in other search engines he didn't find with Google.

Baseball-reference.com is stuffed with information about that past-its-prime, steroid-corrupted sport.

USA Today has put online its database of best-selling books.

Findlaw, one of the best legal information sites for lawyers, has a new section aimed at "the public."

The Online Climate Atlas gives you fine national maps on weather phenomena such as rain, snow and wind, but you have to download it and install free java software to use it. (The site detects whether you have java installed already, as many do.)

About.com offers an article for beginners on "Microsoft Access Database Fundamentals."

The Baseball Archive offers a free, downloadable database of baseball statistics. "It's the most complete set of baseball data available anywhere, with full statistics from 1871-2003," the site says.

The goal of the Live Music Archive is "to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy." The site, part of the Internet Archive, has more than 10,000 recordings so far.

The 9-11 Commission has its own Web site.

"Allexperts.com is the oldest & largest free Q&A service on the Internet. ... We have thousands of volunteers, including top lawyers, doctors, engineers, and scientists, waiting to answer your questions. All answers are free and most come within a day!"

eWeek offers an interesting article on how spreadsheets "distort our thinking and lead to bad decisions." So maybe we should cancel that next introduction to Excel class...

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences offers links to databases on biomedicine, chemicals, hazardous substances and other topics of interest to environmental health researchers.

Wired for Books lets you listen to recordings of many famous authors talking about their work.

GeoHive offers a wealth of statistics on countries and regions of the world.

The Animal Legal & Historical Web Center's goal is "to contain a full set of legal material relating to animals including all levels in the US, foreign national law and international materials."