The Library has added three Bureau of National Affairs online resources to it’s collection:

Environment Reporter : “This multi-part [U.S. focused] environmental resource keeps you fully up to date on rapidly changing developments in courts, Congress, federal agencies, state legislatures, industry, and environmental organizations.”

International Environment Reporter : “Know and understand environmental news, laws, regulations, and policies—in all major industrialized and developing nations, as well as international governmental and nongovernmental organizations.”

Environment & Safety Library : “The Library combines powerful, easy-to-use, continuously updated compliance tools with a research collection of [mostly U.S.] federal and state laws, regulations, and documents.” NOTE -we do not have access to grayed-out text.

The US Census Bureau conducts an official census every 10 years, with the next one coming up in March 2010.  In between years the Bureau conducts a variety of smaller-scale nationwide surveys, including the American Community Survey (ACS).  The ACS is sent to approximately 3 million households.  The most recent 3 year estimates based on surveys conducted from 2005 – 2008 have just been released for public use.

“The ACS collects information such as age, race, income, commute time to work, home value, veteran status, and other important data…. These 3-year estimates are available annually for geographic areas with a population of 20,000 or more, including the nation, all states and the District of Columbia, all congressional districts, approximately 1,800 counties, and 900 metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, among others.”

The Washington Post has a very useful site up for anyone interested in reading/watching President Obama’s key speeches.  It provides a free database of speeches – the transcribed text as well as video clips of the speech being delivered whenever possible.  You can search for speeches by keyword, click on an issue-based tag or browse all issues from most recent to oldest.   Note, tags are a bit arbitrary – the President’s speech reacting to the attempted terrorist attack on December 25th, 2009 was not tagged under “national security and intelligence;”  “homeland security;” or even under “crime and judiciary.”  As of today, it’s tagged under “issue: other”?!!!  Apart from this anomaly, the speeches are easy to find and read.  You can sign up for an RSS feed of President Obama’s speeches, and you can use the Post’s Potus database to “track how Obama is spending his time, what issues are getting the most attention and who is influencing the debate.”

The US Census Bureau has just released new data:

“on a wide range of socioeconomic, housing and demographic characteristics for communities across the nation, part of an ongoing statistical portrait of America.

Among dozens of topics covered in the survey are educational attainment, commute times, housing characteristics, occupation, language ability and various other social, economic and housing topics.”

The data are available from the American FactFinder website at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPageServlet?_program=ACS&_submenuId=&_lang=en&_ts=