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When I first started writing for ONLINE in May 1985, the main topic of discussion among online professionals was end-user searching. The amount of digital content on the professional services [...]

One of the Web's great wonders is its enormous amount of free reference and research content. Whatever your information needs-academic, technical, professional, business, how-to, consumer, or personal-there are vast quantities [...]

The proliferation of virtual content is an important trend for libraries in recent years. It's instructive to recall your library of 15, 10, or even 5 years ago: a physical [...]

Among end-users, the name Dialog is less well known than those of rivals like Factiva and LexisNexis. This is ironic, because none of the proprietary online services have worked harder [...]

Dialog Corp. and Gale Group have had one of the most long-standing and successful partnerships in the online industry. Gale (or more precisely, the old Information Access Co. that is […]

This month I'll review a multidisciplinary database that contains the full text of dozens of short-entry reference books from British publishers. If this seems familiar, it's because in the June […]

No brand is more widely recognized and trusted, at least in the U.S., than Consumer Reports. Since 1936, the magazine, published by Consumers Union, has delivered thorough--and often blunt--consumer product [...]

The Web has done wonders for maps. What was for many people a disagreeable chore--using print maps to look up places and obtain travel directions--has become an effortless pleasure through […]

No company has been more important in the online business than Dialog. But from a parenting point of view, it's often been a neglected child. Lockheed, Dialog's first parent, encouraged […]

The most compelling reason that people go online is to communicate with each other. Information retrieval and shopping are also important, but the totality of online communications--e-mail, chat rooms, instant […]

A mid the many corporate earnings announcements for the fourth quarter 2001, an unassuming release from Hoover's Inc. could be easily overlooked. The company, which went public only in 1999, [...]

The conventional wisdom is that it takes older and well-established organizations longer to make the transition from one technology to another than their younger and more flexible counterparts. This has […]

It's tough being an aggregator. But then, it's always been tough to be an aggregator. It's tougher than being the other two sides of the information triangle: the buyers and […]

We're now in the post dot com age, as the great dot com contraction of the past year and a half continues. Once high-flying sites are being bought out, reducing [...]

The fastest-growing segment of education is distance learning. It takes numerous forms, but a simple definition might be 'education delivered to remote locations using technology.' The technology may be as […]

Many years ago, long before the arrival of the Web, I predicted that the biggest use of the online medium would be for communication, rather than for commerce (online shopping) […]

So you want to do some company research? There are lots of company databases around, but do you know just what you need? Company names, addresses, URLs, and telephone numbers […]

Thomson Corp. is the 800-pound gorilla of the online information business. You've heard the joke: 'Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit? Anywhere he wants.' With Thomson, it goes: 'What does […]

In spring 2014, an unlikely book reached number one on The New York Times' bestseller list. It was French economist Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a dense, 700-page [...]

One of the biggest news stories of 2016 was the release of the Panama Papers. They revealed a vast worldwide network of tax evasion and corruption, engineered by a mysterious [...]

Do you think that, in recent years, the world has gotten more or less peaceful? If you answered 'less,' you're right, according to the Global Peace Index 2016 (GPI; economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/GPI-2016-Report_2.pdf). [...]

The city of Palmyra in central Syria is one of the world's great archaeological treasures. For centuries, it was a principal node on the great Silk Road trade route between [...]

In early 2014, First Look Media (firstlook.media) was the new darling of digital media. It was launched in late 2013 by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire eBay founder, with millions of [...]

Penguin Watch (penguinwatch .org) is a 'citizen science' project. It works like this: 1. The University of Oxford has a research project to study penguins in the Southern Ocean and [...]

In 2000, the United Nations (UN) announced a far-reaching, 15-year objective for human betterment: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Aptly named for their inception date, the MDGs were to improve [...]

The new era of awareness of mass shootings began in 1999 with the massacre at Columbine High School, in which 13 people were killed and 21 injured. There, of course, [...]

Carlos Miller was arrested for filming police activities. Adam Mueller, entangled in the criminal justice system for drug offenses, was repeatedly harassed by police. Antonio Buehler came across a rough-handed [...]

If you are a follower of TED Talks, you probably have already encountered Hans Rosling and his magical moving bubble graphs. Rosling's spectacular presentation on global development, 'The Best Stats [...]

Two years ago I reviewed EBSCO-host, EBSCO Publishing's newly released Web online service. My comments were generally favorable, but with a slight tone of surprise at the service's large roster […]

Commercial publishers and database producers have a range of strategies when taking their products to the Web. Some mount abridged versions for the sake of protecting print and proprietary online [...]

One of the great trends of the day is generic data. Information that you paid dearly for not too long ago is now lying about for the picking. Even the […]

Last issue's column gave good marks to Healthfinder, a new Web service for consumer medical information, produced by the U.S. Office of Disease Prevention & Health Promotion, Health and Human [...]

DIALOG has a rich history of end-user products. Starting over a decade ago with the well-crafted, but premature Business Connection, it moved along through the elaborate DIALOG Menus, the KR [...]

Over the past year there have been several paradigmshaking developments in consumer online. In November the revised, Web-based Microsoft Network appeared, with a radically new look and feel and greatly [...]

It is impossible to describe Medscape by assigning it to a category, since it occupies a place at the front of several online trends. It is a publisher's Web site, […]

It hardly seems possible, but 1996 has been even more turbulent in consumer online than 1995. Nineteen ninety-five had its share of big stories: new services from Microsoft and AT&T, [...]

For many years CompuServe was the unquestioned leader in consumer online innovation. It pioneered significant applications like end-user database searching, special interest groups, and graphics transmission. It is even fair [...]

This simplified online service wins a heretofore unserved market niche The last few years have been hard on CompuServe. The once-unquestioned consumer online leader has been battered from all sides. […]

The 1994 launching of AT&T Business Network symbolizes AT&T Corp.'s magisterial entry into the online information service industry. Competing with established information providers such as America Online and CompuServe, AT&T Business Network targets small information customers such as consultants, small business managers, and independent professionals. Its advanced software as well as the impressive breadth of databases to which it has access ensure that it will become a major player in the industry., AT&T's entrance into online information has been watched with keen interest by the rest of the industry. With a proposed suite of products including business, consumer, transactional, and Internet services, [...]

EBSCO is one of the most familiar and well-established names in library circles. As a leading magazine subscription company, it has provided steady serials service to libraries for 50 years. […]