Appreciating our local universities? There's an app for that. The iPhone has become so popular and so widespread that applications are popping up for all kinds of things, including accessing collections for universities and getting a sightseeing guide for walking around campus.

Duke University Libraries has DukeMobile 1.1, which in addition to offering information about Duke courses, events, and sports, also puts a library in your pocket! The application offers about 32,000 images from 20 collections which cover a variety of topics, including women's history, Duke history, and even sheet music.

You can see a really nifty video demonstration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHK3E4N7w6o with a link to the application itself and more details at http://library.duke.edu/blogs/digital-collections/2009/06/16/library-digital-collections-theres-an-app-for-that/....

North Carolina genealogists! Do I have a treat for you. The State Library of North Carolina and the North Carolina State Archives have created a new digital collection: North Carolina Family Records Online. This new resource is available at http://statelibrary.ncdcr.gov/dimp/digital/ncfamilyrecords/ and contains almost 220 family Bible records as well as all six volumes of the Marriage and Death Notices from Raleigh Register and North Carolina State Gazetteer: 1799-1893.

You can browse the collection, if you like (it's divided up into families, so you could browse any of the record collections from the "A. E. S. Lindsey Family Bible Records" to the "Zeno Columbus Johnson Family Bible Records.") You can search by keyword, but I found browsing to be a bit less confusing. You can also search for information on a map. I thought that was a good idea, but it ended up being...

I'm not a car buff. I know where the motor is and that's about it. But I couldn't help being fascinated by this new collection The New York Public Library has on Flickr. The new collection, "G.M. and Chrysler Cars and Trucks, 1897-1938" contains hundreds of photos and is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nypl/collections/72157619203531284/.

Like I said, I don't know much about cars but I do like old pictures and old technology. The pictures are divided into several sets, including "Four Decades of Oldsmobiles" (starting in 1897!) and "G.M. Truck Company" (love those truck cabs from the 30s.) As most of these pictures are archival, they're a good size and it's easy to zoom in and grab details.

Most of these pictures are marked as "No known copyright restrictions" so you should be able to reproduce them. (That made me wonder: since...

There are search engines for everything else, so why not prescription drug costs? Web site Medtipster recently relaunched with a search engine that allows you to search prescription costs by zip code, finding generic alternatives to drugs. It's available at http://www.medtipster.com/.

And actually you can do quite a lot from this front page. You specify a drug, dosage, and zip code, and then search. I decided to search for do a search for blood pressure medication Capoten, in 50MG doses, near zip code 27604. (If you can't spell the name of the drug you're searching for, don't worry -- enter in the few letters and Medtipster will make suggestions. It'll give you a list of common doses too.)

In this case Medtipster searched for generic equivalent Captopril and found dozens of places to buy it near 27604, though mostly it was multiple iterations of pharmacy and grocery chains. Each listing has contact information...

You probably rely on Google to search the Web, but in late April it announced a new project to find and compare public data. I waited awhile to see if any more data
sets, but there aren't any yet, so let's look at the public data for which you can currently search.

Google currently lets you search for population or unemployment rate information for any state or county in the US. Just go to Google.com and enter the word population or unemployment rate followed by the name of a US county or state. Google will provide a chart, like the one in the screen shots that go with this blog entry.

In the example, I typed unemployment rate wake county. Google gave me a thumbnail chart as part of the regular search results, but when I clicked on that I got a larger chart. (See the screen shot.) With the larger chart came a navigation on the left part...