C&RL News July/August 2010 378 Joni R. Roberts is associate university librarian for public services and collection development at Willamette University, e-mail: jroberts@willamette.edu, and Carol A. Drost is associate university librarian for technical services at Willamette University, e-mail: cdrost@ willamette.edu I n t e r n e t R e v i e w sJoni R. Roberts and Carol A. Drost Choike.org. Access: http://www.choike.org/. Choike is a project of the Instituto del Terce Mundo, a nongovernmental organiza- tion (NGO) in Special Consultative Status with the Economics and Social Council of the United Nations based in Montevideo, Uruguay. Choike is the Mapuche (the indigenous inhabit- ants of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina) word for the Southern Cross (the constellation that serves as a beacon for trav- elers) and is a portal dedicated to increasing the visibility of NGOs and social movements from the Southern Hemisphere. The homepage has links to Southern NGOs and includes subdirectories for “Communica- tion,” “Environment,” Globalization,” “People,” and “Society.” Within these subdirectories researchers can access the “Caribbean Amer- indian Centrelink,” which contains informa- tion on the Amerindians of Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, etc., and “Canesta” (Centre for Sustainable Development), which promotes sustainable community and cultur- ally based development in southwest Asia. Choike provides “In-Depth Reports” on current events, for example, the UN confer- ence on climate change help in Copenhagen in December 2009. Follow-up reports on the Copenhagen conference include discussion of carbon offsets and cap and trade. There are also reports on the impact of the world’s financial crisis on developing countries, and abortion in Latin American and the Caribbean. NGOs frequently conduct campaigns to fur- ther the human and civil rights of the world’s disenfranchised. Many of these campaigns are featured on Choike’s homepage; for example, Food First (Institute for Food and Develop- ment Policy) accuses the World Bank of a succession of land grabs. Choike’s information is available in Eng- lish and Spanish. The site has an interactive search screen with keyword capability, which links to the Web site of the NGOs in the di- rectory. Choike provides a broad variety of useful material, however, much of it tends to be polemical, so the researcher should be advised about the editorial slant of the site. With this caveat in mind, students preparing argumentative or persuasive speeches and papers on controversial topics affecting the Southern hemisphere can find their talking points here.—Wendell G. Johnson, Northern Illinois University, wjohnso1@niu.edu Congressional Budget Office. Access: http://cbo.gov/. One would think that a government Web site containing reports and analysis of U.S. Congressional budgets would have the po- tential to easily slip into information overload and present this data in a very dry, unappeal- ing fashion. Surprisingly, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has put together a rather neat and clean portal to this content that does not overwhelm or confuse. The homepage is laid out simply with a top- aligned menu and featured content highlighted in the main portion of the screen. At the time of this review, the featured content included such things as charts and graphs represent- ing data of current interest (Projected Deficit, Unemployment Rate, and Climate Change Funding), recent and frequently requested publications, Budget Outlook 2010, and a link to the CBO director’s blog. The menu across the top has all the usual items, but the two links for accessing the core CBO-produced information are “Publica- tions” and “Cost Estimates.” Publications are organized by subject and document type and are easily browseable from a single page. A column for “Special Collections” of current interest issues can be found here too (Climate Change, Immigrations, Iraq and Afghanistan, Employment, etc.). Documents, including let- july10b.indd 378 6/23/2010 10:58:10 AM July/August 2010 379 C&RL News ters, studies and reports, briefs, presentations, and working and technical papers, are avail- able in various formats. If a document was mentioned in a “Director’s Blog” article, a link to the post is provided. An “Advanced Search” is available for limiting to a specific document type, subject, or date range (1975–present). Cost Estimates (required of CBO for every bill reported by a Congressional committee) are listed in reverse chronological order, and the link to “Browse All Cost Estimates” defaults to the current Congress. To view es- timates from previous Congressional sessions, you must go to the search screen and select from the drop-down box. This goes back as far as the 105th (1997–98). By leaving all other fields blank, you can hit search and browse estimates for a specific session. The site also has a customizable “New Document Notification” RSS feed sign-up, where users can select specific publication or document types and topics on which to receive updates. CBO publications are often referred to in the news and other political commentary arenas due to their role and influence in the federal legislative process. Similarly, this information could also be of great value to students of U.S. government, public policy, law, economics, or other fields of political sci- ence.—Todd J. Wiebe, Hope College Libraries, wiebe@hope.edu Lexicool.com. Access: http://www.lexicool. com. Lexicool.com is primarily a directory of more than 7,000 bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and glossaries that are freely available online. The directory alone makes the site a useful tool for linguists, translators, and language students, but additional features make the site invaluable for anyone working with languages. The directory can be searched by language, subject, or title. The range of topics covered by the dictionaries and glossaries is remark- able—from general, discipline-based resources to highly specialized topics (recent additions include terminology for woodwind instru- ments, coffee, and nanotechnology). Each title is evaluated and ranked by the Lexicool. com team; search results reflect this ranking and clearly identify the languages covered in each title. The directory is updated daily and links are checked every two months. For users focused on a specific language, Lexicool.com provides specialized translation and dictionary pages that gather useful re- sources on one concise page. Features include a quick dictionary word search using selected authoritative dictionaries; a monolingual dic- tionary for definitions; and automatic transla- tion of phrases using tools such as Google, Bing, Reverso, and Systran. There is also a short but quality list of language resources providing help with grammar, verb conjuga- tion, spell checking, and keyboard software. The online translation page pulls together resources for quick machine translation between two languages selected from pull- down menus. Lexicool.com also includes an impressive tool which identifies the language of a block of text based on at least five words keyed by the user. For those who occasionally need to write in other languages but do not have special- ized keyboards, the Lexibar toolbar provides quick access to special characters used in a particular language. Lexicool.com includes a directory of cours- es on translation and interpretation, organized by country, and a newsletter and blog which highlight new or especially timely resources (a recent post identified translation glossaries on volcano terminology). The site is run by an international team of linguists and IT specialists based in France. Well designed and maintained, it was named one of the Best Free Reference Web Sites by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section of ALA’s Reference and User Services Association in 2009. In addition to its intended audience, the site has much to offer to librarians—those whose work regularly with specific languages will find the specialized resources invaluable; those who encounter information in unfamiliar languages will find guidance here.—Lori Robare, University of Oregon, lrobare@uoregon.edu july10b.indd 379 6/23/2010 10:58:10 AM