TOOLS

CONTENTS:

• National Opportunities NOCs
• Lib-Web-Cats
• Searchability

NATIONAL OPPORTUNITY NOCs

Looking for another job? This site lists classified ads specifically tailored to the nonprofit sector. Your nonprofit also can post a job there for what seems to me to be a reasonable price. They offer some free resources too, one of which is a list of those pesky nonprofit listservs for which we can never remember the URLs. The list is in the nonprofit library in the resource section under mailing lists.

The advanced search page offers easy ways to limit your search. Using the basic search function with no keyword, I ran a search for jobs in Oregon and only got two, both with the state. Southern California yielded 23 opportunities, ranging from housekeeper to executive director with a wide variety of organizations. The Oregon-to-California job ratio seems about right. It looks like a lot of employers have not discovered this site, but it is worth a look if you are hunting.

http://www.opportunitynocs.org/

LIB-WEB-CATS

Use this library search engine, maintained by Marshall Breeding at Vanderbilt University, to find a library near you or one near where your prospect lives. Search by the name of the institution associated with the library or by library type in combination with city, state or country. If you use the geographic browser, you can find libraries in Canada, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and New Zealand. If the library has a Web site, you can link to it from the search results list.

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding/libwebcats.html

SEARCHABILITY

This site describes itself as "The complete list of guides (with descriptions) to thousands of search engines covering hundreds of subjects. Listed by approximate order of size, specificity of subject categories and some aspects of search engine collection quality." Basically, it's a guide to guides. In the side bar, guides are offered by search engine size, alphabetically, for specialized metasearches and for popular topics. Specialty groupings include academic and regional search engines, as well as search engines especially for children.

Searchability gives an overall description of each guide, what subjects are covered, whether or not the search engines to which the site links are described and who might find it especially useful. I think the reviewers are coming from a limited perspective of what's useful to whom. Gary Price's Direct Search page, http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/ ~gprice/direct.htm, is described as "ESPECIALLY USEFUL FOR - Academics and subject specialists." I think Gary's work is useful to everyone! But overall, this is a very nice guide.

In addition to the guide descriptions and links, Searchability offers a nicely detailed explanation of how boolean operators work. In addition, an explanation is given of what speciality search engines are and when they are appropriate to use.

http://www.searchability.com