CONTENTS:

• Searchable Intellectual Property Databases - Updated
• xrefer

SEARCHABLE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DATABASES - UPDATED

Kathy Biehl, coauthor of Lawyer's Guide to Internet Research, recently updated her article for LLRX.com on free and fee-for-service sites for searching for U.S. and international copyrights, patents and trademarks. Her review is thorough and helpful - one of those "learn something new every day" experiences.

http://www.llrx.com/columns/roundup21.htm

XREFER

xrefer is a brainchild of a British technology company that works with reference material publishers to bring their client access and search technologies up-to-speed. xrefer is a free sample of their wares.

xreferplus is the expanded subscription option. Use the xrefer engine to find biographical references, as well as encyclopedia, thesaurus and dictionary entries and quotations. Take a quick gander at their "titles by topic" page to see what volumes you are searching. Remember that most of the content comes from British publications, but there are some meaty bios of U.S. and international public figures.

To limit your search by topic area, choose a topic in the drop down box that says "select a topic." According to the help, there should be a "biography" topic in that box, but it's missing. However, using "search all" works better - it picks up bio entries from non-biographical reference sources.

You can use search delimiters, but these have some quirks. Double quotation marks around a phrase is supposed to do an exact phrase search, but my search for "better man" yielded articles with both words but not in that exact order. A minus before a word or phrase excludes it, but be careful because xrefer excludes the word or phrase if it is found anywhere in the text, not just in entry headers. A tilde (~) in front of a word if you are not sure of the spelling will get you a "sounds like" lookup. You can combine the delimiters. For instance, I did a search on ~Albright - Madeleine to exclude all the Madeleines from my Albright soundex search.

What's really nice is that there are cross-references to other xrefer entries in the sidebar. A biographical entry about a prospect's ex-wife led me to several entries about the prospect's father that finished the family tree for me. The side bar also lists adjacent entries.If you find xrefer wonderfully useful, you can add an xrefer-it button to your browser's tool bar (sorry AOL users, you are out of luck on this option). Simply highlight the word or phrase anywhere on a Web page, click xrefer-it and violá, you search the xrefer site without having to manually type your query there. Works like a charm, but I wish the xrefer lookup would appear in another browser window so I wouldn't lose my starting Web page while I explore xrefer.

http://www.xrefer.com/

Chris Mildner

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