Information and Revolution

Information management professionals will gather in Anaheim this week for the AIIM 98 Show & Conference to see what’s new in the technology age.

This year’s Assn. for Information and Image Management event will feature a keynote speech by Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web. His talk, titled “Managing the Web, From Chaos to Quality,” will address a new technology, metadata, that Berners-Lee says will provide a second Internet revolution.

For more information about AIIM or the event, which runs today through Thursday at the Anaheim Convention Center and Anaheim Hilton & Towers, call (888) 397-6209 or go to https://www.aiim.org.

Registered Site: It was five years ago today that the Senate passed the “motor voter” bill aimed at making voter registration easier. Register America offers online voter registration for all 50 states at https://register2vote.org/ and can even provide an absentee ballot. If privacy issues still make you uneasy, you can download the registration form and send it in. It’s also worth a visit to the Federal Election Commission’s site (https://www.fec.gov/), which has registration and voter turnout figures, voting statistics and all sorts of info about the electoral college--including its history and how it works.

Speaking of “motor,” the DMV is online at https://www.dmv.ca.gov/ with sample driver’s tests, special-interest license plate info, California codes, DMV locations, new laws and other DMV services.

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Health Net: On May 14, 1980, President Carter inaugurated the Department of Health and Human Services. And now you can visit it online (https://www.dhhs.gov/).

In addition to agency links and HHS news and info, the site has Healthfinder--the lowdown on health-care issues. Healthfinder has news and prevention and care information on a variety of health-related topics, including AIDS, cancer, diabetes, food safety, Medicare and tobacco. There are also links to online medical journals, libraries and dictionaries.

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Cyber Space: It was this week in 1973 that NASA launched Skylab One, its first manned space station. Blast on over to the “orbital classroom” for everything you want to know about Skylab: information about the mission, vital statistics, program start and end dates and pictures. The site is part of Explore’s ThinkQuest Library and was created by kids--although you wouldn’t know it from looking at it. General space buffs can explore the National Aeronautics and Science Administration’s Web site (https://www.nasa.gov/) and see what NASA is up to these days.

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Stock Options: Picture this: Twenty-four stockbrokers sitting around this week in 1792, trying to fix rates on stock and bond commissions. From their agreement, the New York Stock Exchange was born. Wall Street may be too far to visit, but you can check it out virtually at https://www.nyse.com.

And you might want to know that Nasdaq is online too at https://www.nasdaq.com.

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