Common Chemistry is a resource from Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) which allows one to search for chemical information using a variety of search terms, whether the terms be common names (aspirin, table salt), basic chemical names (acetylsalicylic acid, sodium chloride), or even the official CAS registration number (50-78-2, 7647-14-5).

Although this does not search the entire CAS database, it is an excellent starting point for most of the chemical information questions posed students and the general public.

Note the link to the Wikipedia entry (just above the disclaimer) for many, but not all, results; not many “authoritative” resources are confident enough in their users to connect them with resources developed and maintained by the crowd.

found via ResourceShelf

Go to WorldCat and type in a search.  The results contain books, video, audio, you name it.  One of the more recent additions is the Digital Images Collections, which can be wonderful to view.  How to find them, though?

Type in your search terms, then add cntnt (“Content” without the vowels) as an additional term (which acts as a limit).  Viola!

Try chicago cubs cntnt

Try airplanes cntnt

Try carnegie libraries cntnt

You get the idea…

found via the WorldCat blog

BASE Lab is a search site/tool from the Bielenfeld University Library in Germany that has a couple of very interesting features.

One feature is that it can translate your search terms into different languages using the Eurovoc thesaurus, and retrieve articles from a variety of different foreign-language journals.  This can greatly enhance the scope and number of results.  Only speak English?  Run the search with Eurovoc enabled, then limit your results to English language only.  You still benefit greatly from the translated search terms.

The other feature is that you can browse across three hierarchies of the Dewey Decimal Classification.  This will only retrieve articles with the necessary metadata, so at the moment it is a fairly limited feature.  This could be very promising, an example of a web-based tool leveraging the metadata libraries have been developing for decades.

found via the Web4Lib listserv

Google Translate has a new feature:  it will allow you to search foreign language pages using your language’s search terms, and translates the results on the fly.

As with all machine translation, the results will vary; the interface is well worth trying out.

from Google Librarian Central

An intriguing idea:  As you write a paper/essay/whatever software would scan your text for search terms and run those searches, giving you additional sources and ideas as you write.

Write While You Search: Ambient Searching of a Digital Library in the Context of Writing.

(pdf)

from ResourceShelf