If you use the Web regularly for research you very likely use a variety of sites and tools. How you choose to organise and access these sites can govern how efficiently you do your research. Some people develop their own databases or files of sites, other people use tools specially developed for organising sites, URLs, favourites, bookmarks, whatever you call them.
Personally, I favour my own HTML page of sites that I access frequently. But some people do a very good job of organising their sites and making them available on the Web. Bill Dedman's site is one of these, developed with journalists and reporters in mind. And he seems to be aware of the need offer a choice of accessing the same material in several different ways.
There's a list of major categories on the left had margin. These divide into sub-categories which you'll find in the detailed menu to the right of this. There's also a site map, which contains all the same stuff. There's a long list of "What's New" items on the home page. A search box allows you to search by keyword. And you can have an email alert when new things are added to the site.
You may find a lot of the sites Bill lists very familiar and his categories do sound like typical portal type categories, things like People finders, Reference shelf, Alerts, etc. But the main focus is on sites that would be useful to journalists and to that end, Power Reporting does a very good job.
Finally, you may think the site is very American. Well, that's true, but you can't have everything. And you can suggest sites to be added. So if you find that you like this format for accessing sites, you should consider making Power Reporting your home page.
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