Searcher Facelift

The federated search engine, Searcher, has a new look. From the one interface, you can use Searcher to send searches to and fetch results from a number of different web-based resources. The major chemistry abstracting and indexing databases (SciFinder Scholar, Beilstein and Gmelin) aren't available to search this way but have a look at http://www.searcher.lib.ed.ac.uk [EASE login required] and tell us what you think.

Freely available chinese language material

From a Chinese language interface resource is available a large amount of open access resources from the National Library of China.

My Chinese colleague has summarised its content as including:

1. PhD dissertations from China (free view of the first 24 pages of over 100,000 PhD dissertations);

2. Biographies of Sinologists outside China (over 150);

3. Chinese e-books (free view of the first 24 pages of tens of thousands of books published since 1949);

4. Local gazetteers/local histories (full text all free, I think);

5. Books published in the Min guo (Republican period, 1911-1949) (full text all free; 8172 titles or 8884 volumes);

6. Min guo periodicals (full text all free; 4329 titles);

7. Min guo (Republican period) laws/legal documents (full text all free; 8112 items or 29087 pages);

8. Photos of oracle bones, characters, New Year pictures, etc, (all free.);

9. Audio and video resources (158,000 audio items and 108,000 video items since 1987; only partially available)