From June 25 through 29, I had the honor of representing KnowItNow24x7 at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington, DC. The conference is always an opportunity to re-connect with and learn from colleagues from around the country. In speaking with vendors, government agencies, and representatives of nonprofits, I was able to discover a number of new and exciting free online resources, and the links and descriptions below summarize them. You may be familiar with some of these, but it never hurts to revisit them as they are updated and enhanced. Some of these will also be integrated into the Pathfinder project as new pathfinders become available. I hope you find the links below useful and are able to share them with patrons, teachers, and your colleagues:

Federal Government Agencies

Census Bureau:

Main URL: www.census.gov (This is the place to go for population data and other similar statistics)

Many may be familiar with www.census.gov but don't forget its links to Statistical Abstract, FedStats, and more.

Citizenship and Immigration Services:

FREE Citizenship Toolkit: www.citizenshiptoolkit.gov (Great for new immigrants or even quizzing patrons during a library event with the large pack of civics flashcards)

Welcome to the USA WelcometoUSA.gov (another good site for new immigrants)

Department of Education:

ERIC www.eric.ed.gov (Good source of research including library-related topics)

National Center for Education Statistics nces.ed.gov (extremely useful when looking for data on any education-related topic)

Teachers Web Site www.ed.gov/teachers (Don't forget to share with teachers and homeschoolers)

Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information:

Science.gov science.gov - Content of 14 federal agencies, 200 million pages, and thousands of science websites.

WorldWide Science: The Global Science Gateway worldwidescience.org - Includes both current and historical documents.

Federal Communications Commisssion

Consumer Alerts and Fact Sheets: www.fcc.gov/registry

Do-Not-Call Registry: www.fcc.gov/cgb/donotcall

Federal Reserve System

Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland: Learning Center clevelandfed.org/learning_center (Ohio's own connection to the Federal Reserve System)

Consumer Resources federalreserve.gov/consumerinfo

Library of Congress, American Folklife Center

Online Collections www.loc.gov/folklife/onlinecollections.html (Great collection of recordings, documents, etc.)

NASA

Main Site www.nasa.gov (A wealth of information on space exploration and astronomy)

Climate Change for Kids climate.nasa.gov/kids "Serious fun with a serious subject"

NASA's Space Place spaceplace.nasa.gov

Non-profit Organizations

One nonprofit organization of which I was aware before attending ALA was WebJunction. However, in speaking with their representative at the Training Showcase sponsored by the ALA Learning Roundtable, one thing I was not aware of was the benefits that Ohio librarians can get by registering (for free!) at Ohio's WebJunction portal including tuition-free online classes. The LDS Church also has a wonderful library of digitized genealogical books just waiting for researchers. Additionally, for those already aware of Thinkfinity, they have added a number of new features and resources to their site...all still absolutely free. Finally, for those who have access to Mango Languages at their local library, they are adding more new languages plus coming out with a mobile app in the near future. If your library does not subscribe to Mango, they are definitely worth looking into (Not free, but Mango provides value and is very committed to working with libraries).

FamilySearch (LDS Church)

Library of Digitized Genealogical Books familyhistoryarchive.byu.edu

FamilySearch online classes www.familysearch.org/eng/library/education

Verizon Foundation

Thinkfinity thinkfinity.org (especially the Illuminations resources for mathematics)

ReadWriteThink readwritethink.org (excellent resources to share with teachers)

WebJunction: The Ohio Portal

http://oh.webjunction.org/ FREE online classes can be taken by simply registering (for free!) with WebJunction Ohio (thanks to the generosity of the State Library of Ohio).