The U.S. Government Printing Office has added a new feature that allows you to browse for House and Senate documents, beginning with the 104th Congress in 1995-96.

I've added pages listing the most useful Web sites for reporters, software tools for computer-assisted reporting and sites for backgrounding to my Web site.

AdviceTOOL.com offers answers to frequently asked questions about the law - including auto accidents, bankruptcy, copyright, discrimination, divorce law, renting and leasing, and so on.

Here's a glossary of search terms.

On The Issues gives detailed information about where political candidates for federal and state office stand on the issues. Its "mission is to provide non-partisan information for voters in the Presidential election, so that votes can be based on issues rather than on personalities and popularity. We get our information daily from newspapers, speeches, press releases, and the Internet -- it is a labor-intensive process that requires countless volunteer hours."

IRE/NICAR has updated its Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database, which it obtained from the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and which contains information on fatal car and truck crashes. It has 10 years of data, including road conditions, weather conditions, speed limits, number of vehicles and people, name of the road and, for 2003, the latitude and longitude of most accidents.

Here's a tutorial on using PubMed, the best free source for researching medical literature.

WhoWhere has revamped its people search.

According to librarian Gary Price, some of the WhoWhere's information comes from Elyion.com, which describes itself as "the most comprehensive source of information on business professionals available." Elyion offers an interesting and (free for now) "business people search" that helps you find former workers at companies. A search on the CJ, for example, turns up profiles of many familiar names: Barry Bingham, Merv Aubespin, Michael Gartner, Billy Reed and more. It includes current and past employers and excerpts from articles and Web sites that have mentioned the esteemed or not-so-esteemed personage.

The University of Virginia offers The Plagiarism Resource Site.

Read the final independent panel report on Iraq prison abuse. (PDF)

FlatRateInfo.com says it has added 1,000 counties to its national property database. That database includes "property address, sale date, sale price, phone number, other owners associated with a specific address and owner mailing address." There's also more in-depth "financials, square footage and historical property listings and information" as part of an additional service you must pay extra for, but basic subscribers have free access to that too until Sept. 1.

OmniFormat is a free "document conversion utility which allows dynamic conversion and image manipulation of over 75 file formats including HTML, DOC, XLS, WPD, PDF, JPG, GIF, TIF, PNG, PCX, PPT, PS, TXT, Photo CD, FAX and MPEG."

You should bookmark FaganFinder because it combines links to many useful sites for reporters on a single page - search engines, encyclopedias, dictionaries, biographies, quotations, maps, law, health, science, news, government and more. The site's just added "URLinfo," which combines a blizzard of different ways of learning more about a particular Web site - info about the owner, who's linking to the site, caches of older versions, translators and much more.

The Wall Street Journal publishes detailed polling information on 16 battleground states online. These are the states where the margin of victory was closest either way in 2000 presidential race, and the states where both campaigns are concentrating most of their energy. You can see who won in 2000, who is leading in each state now, the margin and more. Thanks to Peter Smith for the pointer.

You can search the full text and get copies of recent Kentucky Court of Appeals and Supreme Court decisions on the Kentucky Court of Justice Web site.

Librarian Mary Ellen Bates' tip of the month offers her favorite sites "for finding answers to those there-must-be-an-answer-out-there questions." "I have found that librarians, speech writers and journalists have one thing in common - we all need to find information on all kinds of topics, and we usually need the answers right now," she says.

Her faves:

• RefDesk
• Information Please almanac
• Statistical Abstract of the US
• How Stuff Works
• Internet Movie Database
• Librarians' Index to the Internet
• Project Gutenberg
• QuotationsPage.com
• Bartleby

"WordCount™ is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words."

The Business of Baseball is about just that. " ... the goal of this site is to provide research tools for those wishing to learn more about the business end of professional baseball," it says. Among its offerings are databases and spreadsheets on baseball salaries, payrolls, franchise valuations, league attendance and TV ratings over time.

If you're like me and my children and are deep into the Harry Potter saga you'll want to regularly check out "The Harry Potter Automatic News Aggregator."

ResearchBuzz, the source of all of today's report, also offers a tipsheet on "Four Things Yahoo Can Do That Google Can't." (PDF)

The amateurish American War Library, which calls itself "The World's Largest On-line Military, Veteran, and Military Family Registry," with "Over 37 million Listings from Pre-Revolutionary War to the Present," has put together an online guide to getting military records.

TARSearch.com offers a database for finding accident reconstruction experts.

Crime-Scene-Investigator.net offers lots of information about how to do crime scene investigations.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse now has data on FBI enforcement actions through the first quarter of 2004. You have to pay to use TRAC, but it's the best source for databases shedding light on federal law enforcement - which includes U.S. Attorneys, the DEA, ATF, IRS and DHS (Department of Homeland Security).

"Vote- The Machinery of Democracy" by the National Museum of American History looks at "how ballots and voting systems have evolved over the years as a response to political, social, and technological change, transforming the ways in which Americans vote."

Opensecrets.org offers lots of information about presidential campaign contributions.

The CDC's "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" is where you go to find statistics on diseases, the sick and the dead. The information comes from weekly reports to the CDC from state health departments. You can sign up to have regular updates sent to you. Political reporters shouldn't overlook this site because some of those dead people may be voters.

Find out more about who registered a particular Web site at Whois Source. It includes the option to search for a partial web site address if you can't remember a site's full address. You can also find information on now defunct Web sites.

The ResourceShelf has a new site called Docuticker. It collects links to new reports from think tanks, government agencies and other organizations.

"Media giants don't always lead to less diverse content," a new study says. " ... the research suggests that media content is no less diverse than it was before the increase in consolidation of ownership."

IRE/NICAR has just updated its Federal Audit Clearinghouse database. "The Federal Clearinghouse operates on behalf of the Office of Management and Budget, which requires nonprofits and state and local government agencies to have audits once they obtain a certain amount of federal assistance," the site says. " ... The single audit database lists all the federal sources of the organization's expenditures and the amounts spent, starting in 1997. The data also includes notations about whether audits have revealed any problems, plus valuable contact information, including names, addresses, and phone numbers for the organizations being audited as well as the auditors."

The official Web site for the Athens Olympics is here. It includes searchable databases with biographical information about athletes, coaches and judges.

A Zip Code locator for military posts worldwide.

Search for abstracts of master's theses and Ph.D. dissertations in journalism and mass communication.

Technorati offers links to 2004 election weblogs. They are divided between conservative, liberal and "uncategorized" and the page is updated continuously.

The free Yahoo toolbar now includes a program for finding and removing spyware.

The American Press Institute offers a handbook on "crisis journalism."

About.com offers a tutorial on "SQL Fundamentals." "The Structured Query Language provides the foundation for all relational database systems," the site explains.

You can search for contributions made by non-profit 527 committees at the The Center for Public Integrity's Web site. 527 committees are named after a section of the tax code and are sometimes called "stealth PACs," according to the IRE book "Unstacking the Deck." They are this year's vehicle of choice for getting around federal campaign contribution limits. The center's site lets you search for donors or recipients as well as download complete data for more than 500 committees.

IRE/NICAR is selling a new database, "The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Information System (CERCLIS)," which comes from the EPA. It contains "information on potential and confirmed hazardous waste sites across the nation and U.S. territories including location, status, contaminants and actions taken." The organization notes that some of this data is available on the EPA's Web site but it has cleaned it up to make it easier to use.

biz/ed, a UK site for learning about business and economics, offers an online economics glossary. Particularly memorable for me are the charts showing functions for marginal cost, marginal revenue and what have you that I remember oh so well from my days as an economics student.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations has improved its "Quality Check," which allows you to compare health-care organizations nationwide. Improvements include better search functions and the ability to compare as many six organizations at a time.

Topix.net, which also just underwent an upgrade, is getting raves as the place to go for online news. It tracks more than 7,000 sources and lets you find local news by zip code. As an example of its reach, today's Louisville news includes a link to the United Arab Emirates' Khaleej Times, which is running an AP story about how the "Focus of Catholic sexual abuse suits now includes nuns."

You may recall that recently the Chicago Tribune didn't put out a newspaper because of a computer problem. You may not know that the problem arose while it was upgrading its CCI software, the same software used by the CJ...

Reuter's Global Managing Editor justifies the news agency's outsourcing of journalism jobs to India. " ... we owe it to our future to take the debate to the next level," he opines. "The question shouldn't be 'Why?' It should be 'What can I do now that I don't have to do the work that's gone abroad?' and it must be 'What can you, my company, do to help me make a fresh start?'" (In other words: Watch your back.) And note especially his distinction between "commoditized journalism" and "value-added journalism" and ask yourself whether the typical corporate manager knows the difference...

The US Patent Office says that for the first time ever anyone can "track the status of a public patent application as it moves from publication to final disposition, and review documents in the official application file, including all decisions made by patent examiners and their reasons for making them."

The Martin County slurry spill led Kentucky to begin posting maps of all Kentucky coal mines online. Kentucky Techlines explains more.

"New bosses in newsrooms are better at managing their product than leading their people," a study shows. This just in: The Earth is round...

FindLaw.com now lets you search for a lawyer's litigation history (a press release explaining it is here). That means you get not only basic information about a lawyer - law firm, phone, address, education - but also cases the lawyer handled . For example, a search on Jon Fleischaker, turned up 12 federal cases and 17 state cases involving The Courier-Journal's lawyer, such as University of Louisville Foundation, Inc. v. Cape Publications, Inc. (Cape Publications, if you didn't know, is now the corporate name for the CJ.) If you have a Westlaw account, you can click on a link and look at the actual case too, but it could be useful as it is. It doesn't begin to include every case a lawyer has handled (it seems to favor the big-time lawyers from big-time firms, while many lawyers are barely represented or not represented at all), and you have to register to use it.

MedicineNet.com has a free online medical dictionary with more than 10,000 medical terms.

Yahoo now has a local search site so you don't have to scour the world, just your neighborhood, for what you want.

NewsIsFree.com is offering news maps that graphically show you which stories are getting the most attention.

Forbes.com is experimenting with embedding ads in its online stories. " ... the business-news site has begun using technology that turns words in articles into ads when you move your mouse over them," according to this Poynteronline E-Media tidbits item. There's an unconfirmed rumor, meanwhile, that all Gannett reporters will soon be required to wear T-shirts advertising grocery stores and car dealerships ...

E-Media Tidbits also reports that although Google News spiders 7,000 news sources, only five of those sources account nearly half of the site's top news stories. It also reports that two of the most dominant sources are owned and operated by the U.S. and Chinese governments (Voice of America and the Xinhua news agency).

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press offers the 9th edition of its "How to Use the Federal FOI Act" free online.

LLRX.com offers a bibliography of Web sites for doing global research.

musicplasma is a music search engine that "helps you identify all the artists fitting your musical tastes."

Read summaries of European news at Euronews.

Librarian Gary Price lists some of his favorite news search and browsing sites:

• Topix.net
• Yahoo News
• Findory and Blogory
• NewsNow
• Rocket News

He mentions them in the context of MSNBC offering its own "newsbot."