The Bureau of Transportation statistics offers up lots of data, in Excel format, on U.S. Holiday travel. For example, there is data on "long-distance Thanksgiving trips." For those inevitable holiday travel stories.

Recall lets you search more than 11,094,924,000 archived Web pages from 1996 to the present. "You can search and find things the way they used to be," it says.

The Radio, Television News Directors Association & Foundation has a guide on HIPAA - the federal privacy law that restricts access to personal medical information. The goal is to help you challenge overzealous use of the law.

You can look up how well any county is doing donating blood in the Red Cross' Save a Life Tour 2003

A Pennsylvania hospital company offers a virtual medical library.

Much cancer information on the Internet is inaccurate or outdated, a Journal of Urology study says.

BusinessWeek Online wants to help you "sharpen your Internet searches."

roadsideamerica.com "is your online guide to offbeat tourist attractions."

singingfish is an audio/video search engine recently bought by AOL.

"The U.S. News/American Hospital Association National Directory has facts and figures on more than 6,000 hospitals."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offers statistics on national and state Medicare enrollment trends.

Starting December 1st you will no longer be able to get Social Security numbers from federal bankruptcy dockets online, as you have been able to, according to LexisNexis. Only the last four digits of the SSN will be shown.

Beliefnet.com is "hands-down the best religion site on the Web," Jonathan Dube proclaims in his Poynter Web tips column.

The Cyber Times Navigator is the New York Times newsroom's guide to the Web.

QuickStudy is a library and Internet research guide by the University of Minnesota.

You may be sitting next to a candidate for the Workplace Bullying and Trauma Institute.

A shameless attempt to drive up the CAR Report's readership: The Smoking Gun promises to make available the actual court documents on the Michael Jackson case. Make sure you read the declaration from the 13-year-old boy who settled out of court with Jackson 10 years ago.

The National Law Journal claims it has "the nation's largest expert witness and consultant database."

Security on Campus has crime statistics for more than 6,000 colleges and universities.

The Public Opinion Poll Question Database lets you download data for polls dating back to the 1960s.

The non-profit MediaResource helps journalists find scientific, engineering, medical and other experts.

OneLook's reverse dictionary "lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept."

State-by-state bankruptcy stats (PDF)

Rocketnews is a "breaking news and Weblog search engine." The same company is also responsible for Rocketinfo Desktop, which is $29.95 "search software for finding and sharing current news, blogs, rss feeds, books, market research, white papers and company information." Information junkie Gary Price is a big fan and says they are making significant improvments.

Second shameless attempt to drive up the CAR Report's readership: You gotta love this editor's note from The New York Times:

An obituary last Wednesday about Marvin Smith, a leading photographer of Harlem who worked with his identical twin, Morgan, described the closeness of the two men —it was said that they never used the pronoun "I" —and recounted an anecdote about Marvin Smith's response to the illness that caused his brother's death, in 1993.

The article said that Morgan Smith died of testicular cancer and that his brother, in response, had his own testicles removed. That account was given to The Times by a friend of both men. It should not have been published unless it could be verified and attributed.

After the obituary appeared, Monica Smith, the daughter of Morgan Smith, told The Times that her father had had prostate cancer and that her uncle did not have his testicles removed.

Ok, that has nothing to do with computer-assisted reporting. So sue me.

Sportsjournalists.com bills itself as "The Internet's most popular gathering place for journalists!"

Religionsource.org is "The Journalist's Shortcut to 5,000 Scholars" and is sponsored by the American Academy of Religion.

If you're trying to trace someone's past old city directories are invaluable. The Library of Congress has a large collection of old city directories from around the U.S. on microfilm, as well as a a page devoted to explaining all the old phone directories from around the world they have. Reference librarians there will do research for you if you ask online.

News Library News is the quarterly bulletin of the Special Libraries Association News Division and you can get a copy and search the archives online.

Sciseek.com is a science-only search engine -- but they give the most prominent results to advertisers who pay for the privilege.

The Memory Hole is a document repository that "exists to preserve and spread material that is in danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. ... The emphasis is on material that exposes things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)."

FOIA case logs record FOIA requests to federal agencies. Some agencies, such as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, put them online. The Memory Hole also posts them on its Web site. It can be interesting and informative to see what others request -- but disturbing, I'm sure, to have your own requests broadcast for all to see.

If you have a car or truck's vehicle identification number, called a VIN, you can get its vehicle history via Carfax or Autocheck. Vinpower is software that decodes a VIN's meaning - the vehicle's year, make, model, engine, country of origin and so on.

The Digital Book Index indexes more than 80,000 digital books, including 30,000 that are free.

The granddaddy of all free digital book sites is Project Gutenberg, where you can get free electronic copies of many classic texts for which the copyright has lapsed.

A law firm has compiled the Personal Injury Web Law Library.

The Newark Star Ledger used detailed Census data called PUMS (Public Use Micro Sample) to look at the characteristics of same sex couples. The full stories and graphics can't be seen online but you can download them. (This is a compressed file that must be decompressed with software such as Winzip.)

The University of California at Berkeley's journalism school has a site "for reporters to learn how to do multimedia stories." A fine example is from The Rocky Mountain News, which used audio and video in this story on a battle over an irrigation ditch.

Louisville's BusinessFirst will email you regular updates on local business news and other topics.

Investopedia.com offers an online dictionary of more than 4,000 investment terms. It doesn't inspire confidence that when I tried to subscribe to its "term of the day" newsletter it generated a database error (it worked the second time). And then there's the site's list of the ten most popular dictionary searches. Number 4 is "Bo Derek." Turns out that's "a slang term used to describe a perfect stock or investment."

The Glossarist has a searchable directory of online glossaries and topical dictionaries.

And naturally Google is experimenting with glossaries too.

To learn more about how to search with Google, try the Google Guide, which offers an interactive tutorial on searching.

Blogger Abu Aardvark says we shouldn't read the English translations from the Middle East Media Research Institute mentioned here November 4 because it's operated by Israelis and highlights the "worst and ugliest" in Arab journalism.

SecurityFocus , a Web site devoted to computer security, has a detailed example of how an online banking scam works.

You can search for people and organizations banned from federal Health and Human Services programs because of fraud and abuse. You can also download the entire database, which was recently updated.

Al Tompkins, of the Poynter Institute's "Al's Morning Meeting" newsletter, has compiled a large collection of links for covering the 2004 elections.

Here's an interesting use of mapping to show where the U.S. presidential candidates are getting their money.

If you haven't heard of RSS yet, you soon will. Here's an article explaining what it is and why you should care. RSS (which stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, depending on who you ask) is one of the ways I gather all these links I report on the CAR Report.

Wordtips will email you tips on using Microsoft Word every week. Exceltips does the same for Excel.

The National Criminal Justice Reference Service will email a bi-weekly summary of new information it produces on crime, police, corrections, substance abuse and the law.

ConvertIt.com offers all kinds of free calculators to convert weights, distance, time, currencies and much more. For example, this page will tell you how many days or weeks it is between two dates.

Librarian Gary Price laments the over reliance on Google at the expense of trained librarians and libraries. "Why do more and more people believe that universal truth is just a click away via a single source?" he asks.

You can get free subscriptions to many business trade magazines through Tradepub.com, if you qualify. These are fascinating magazines like Microwave Journal and Pig International (really). If you're writing about anything to do with one of those subjects, reading these magazines can be a great window onto how those industries really operate. People talk differently when addressing their own kind as opposed to outsiders. The late Jessica Mitford, for example, relied heavily on funeral industry literature to write her muckraking masterpiece The American Way of Death.

A Detroit Free Press reporter says reporters "are in the dark ages when it comes to computer-assisted reporting" and offers suggestions on how to do it yourself.

Yahoo has a toolbar, just like Google's, and, just like Google's, it now blocks pop-up ads.

Brainboost is a search engine that tries to answer questions phrased in plain English.

The Northwest History Database offers more than 19,000 news articles on - you guessed it.

You can get regular updates on contracts over $5 million awarded to private vendors by the Department of Defense.

The Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research offers lots of information on demographic changes in the United States.

The Census of Marine Life wants to "assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life in the oceans- past, present, and future."

The 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' famous flight is Dec. 17 and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers is celebrating it online.

This British site is devoted to - ugh - media theory.

Who says soup shouldn't have its own Web site?

Every month you can get sky maps of the Southern and Northern hemispheres.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center is "the official source of space weather alerts, warnings and forecasts." Something to keep in mind for your next intergalactic journey.

Internet resources on aging.

All about plagiarism and how to avoid it, for students, but it could help you too.

Wired scholar is the "planning for college destination."

SafeStat is the "Safety Status Measurement System" and it is run by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. It offers detailed safety ratings for motor carriers, from small coal, logging and towing operations to giants like United Parcel Service. There's a lot of information about each company on this site, and you can download raw data too.

The Census offers data on state and local government payrolls back to 1992. It can be had as Excel tables, text files or online tables. The latest figures, for 2002, were released this week.

KeyNote is a free program that keeps all your notes in a single file. You organize your notes using tabs and a tree-like outline, which can be a more efficient way of doing research than creating many individual files. It can also automatically makes new notes when you clip information with the clipboard.

India is not only a rising economic power but has also embraced computer-assisted reporting. You might also want to read this site's commentary on Pitfalls of textbook journalism (American style). The site was founded by a reporter for The Hindu newspaper.

The Girlfriends' Locker Room is a Weblog created by 9 women at the Philadelphia Daily News who get together online to talk about keeping fit.

Tax-exempt political organizations must file with the IRS and you can search for their filings here.

NICAR has enhanced its offering of Federal Election Commission data in time for next year's presidential race: The offer "regular updates of the FEC data, covering presidential, Senate and House races, then making those updates available through an online delivery service." Each online service subscriber gets his or her own Web page that links to the latest data. They say it's for "those who aren't interested in processing the raw government data" and provides "a cleaner, more user-friendly format for instant use."

If you need to print only a part of a Web page, you can select the text you need with your mouse, then, in Internet Explorer, choose File > Print > Selection. That will print only the selected text.

The NCAA has an archive of graduation rate data for all its Division I, II, and III schools that goes back to 1999, as well as offering 2003 data. But as best I can tell, it only makes available data for individual schools -- you can't get data online for all schools, which makes it hard to do comparisons. Is that deliberate or accidental? You decide.

GetLocalNews.com enlists citizen journalists to report the news, instead of professional journalists. There is a particularly successful South Korean example of this called OhMyNews.

GovBenefits.gov "is the official government benefits Web site." It lets you search for what benefits you may be entitled to, and has lists of benefits offered by the federal government and 20 states (including Kentucky and Indiana).

Internal memos is where disgruntled employees can drop a dime on their bosses. But you gotta pay to see most of the memos.

Jane's searchable FastTrack to Defence Industry calls itself the "world's most comprehensive guide to defence industry manufacturers, suppliers and services."

Coldwell Banker's Home Price Comparison Index "allows you to quickly approximate how much your home might cost in any of over 300 markets across North America."

SkateboardDirectory.com is a vast repository of information about little boards with wheels.

ClassActionAmerica.com offers a "database of class actions for any company." YOU COULD BE DUE MONEY! the site screams. But it could also be a way of finding if a company or product you're researching is subject to such a lawsuit.

Here's a tutorial on the invisible web for educators, but useful for anyone. The invisible web are those database-driven sites that aren't indexed by search engines.

You may not be aware (or care) that many Internet search engines share information, as this search engine decoder shows.

Access to Archival Databases lets you search for nearly 50 million historic electronic records created by more than 20 federal agencies held by The National Archives and Records Administration.

The Centers for Disease Control's Public Health Image Library lets you search for photographs, illustrations, audio/visuals and animations of your favorite diseases. And we all have one, don't we?

The Political Graveyard claims to be "The Internet's Most Comprehensive Source of U.S. Political Biography, or, The Web Site That Tells Where the Dead Politicians are Buried." It has information on 120,948 politicians, judges and diplomats. Whether it's accurate, I don't know.

Dictation Buddy is $32.95 software that lets you record directly from your telephone to your computer's hard drive, and then play back the recording for transcribing like you would with a dictation machine. I've used it to record telephone interviews. You just plug a line from your telephone into your computer's sound card. A recently added Dictation Buddy feature allows you to use a foot pedal to do the playback, like real dictation machines, although I haven't tried that feature myself. The advantage of a dictation machine is that it makes it much easier to transcribe interviews because of the way it jumps back a few seconds in the recording each time you stop it, keeping you from having to constantly fiddle with the annoying playback button of your recorder.

A coalition of civil liberties organizations wants to restrict access to information contained in the Whois database, which is how you can find out who owns a particular Internet address. (One example is at Network Solutions). That could be bad news for reporters who need to find out who operates a particular Web site. The organizations raise today's all-purpose bogeyman, identity fraud and theft, as one of their prime justifications. I'd like to see some hard evidence that's a significant problem, given that all the database provides is the owner's name, address, IP number, fax and telephone. Perhaps the phone book is next.

You can read the script for the semi-censored Reagan mini-series online at Salon.com.

The revamped Kentucky.gov gives you the option of getting questions about state government answered online by a living person, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. This was reported in Techlines, an e-mailed newsletter reporting on the latest Kentucky government technology news.

The United States Digital Map Library, aimed at genealogists, offers old U.S., state and county maps.

Links to many special education resources.

Free Press "is a national organization working to increase informed public participation in crucial media policy debates. The ultimate aim of Free Press is to generate a range of policies that will produce a more competitive and public interest-oriented media system with a strong nonprofit and noncommercial sector."

DM Review is a magazine devoted to "business intelligence and data warehousing."

The Chinese People's Daily in English. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. And lots more Chinese media links.

Google has introduced the "Google Deskbar," which "enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard." It installs on the Windows taskbar and allows you to access Google from any application by typing Ctrl+Alt+G -- without opening Internet Explorer.

If you want a non-Google version of the deskbar, which uses other search engines in addition to Google, try Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar. This guy says it has a lot more features than Google's.

You may not know you can use Google as a dictionary. Just type define:word and Google will look up the word's definition. Leave off the colon(:) and Google will give you the definition and search the Internet for pages containing that word. Google has many more advanced operators to help you search.

The New York Times last week exposed how Houston was underreporting school violence. One way The Times demonstrated this was by comparing the 761 school assaults reported by the district with the 3,091 school assaults in a database maintained by the Houston police. The article notes similar underreporting of school violence uncovered in Virginia and Atlanta. Given the strong incentives schools have to underreport violence, it makes you wonder how accurate the data is at the Kentucky Center for School Safety.

The New York Times also analyzed thousands of U.S. Department of Education records to show how rich schools get more financial aid than poor schools.

ABC News' The Note is a daily summary of political news from other media, commentary and schedules of upcoming political events. Subscribe to get a daily email announcing the availability of the day's note. It's updated throughout the day.

CRISP is "a searchable database of federally funded biomedical research projects conducted at universities, hospitals, and other research institutions." The Traditional Values Coalition has upset some academics by questioning studies listed in the database having to do with sexual behavior and other controversial topics.

Wilbur is a free program that indexes your computer's hard drive, allowing you to do very fast searches for files.

A small controversy has been brewing recently over whether the White House is preventing Internet search engines from indexing many of its pages related to Iraq.

Here's another tutorial on how to search the Internet more effectively.

Here's a list of top Internet sites for business research.

Online magazine has an article on unusual power web searching commands.