| REVIEWS
Cruising
Cyberspace
Web
Site Pick Of The Month
By Pam Wegmann
If you are looking
for articles on a particular topic, or, if you are looking for a
new media avenue where you can post your public relations copyright free
articles, you may want to check out
http://www.aracopy.com
This is the site
of the Article Resource Association which promotes it services to 18,000
reporters in the U.S. and Canada. This association accepts submissions
and then posts them to its Web Site categorized under different headings.
Perhaps you do an
external or internal company newsletter and need an article for inclusion
or a statistic to quote. Perhaps you need to research a business topic,
or want to find out about health issues for your own personal edification.
This site may provide you with what you need.
You do not have to
register to search the site, but you cannot view or download the full text
of the articles you retrieve until you do so. Like many sites, however,
membership is free.
There are two avenues
you can take to search the database. First, you can search by category.
Available categories include automotive, business and investing, food and
cooking, technology, and seasonal articles.
The second method
ignores the categories and searches across the entire database (all categories).
After entering your
search, you will be provided with a list of titles and a brief introductory
description of each. If you want to view the full article, you simply click
on the title. The retrieved articles load to your screen without images,
which is good because they load quickly.
You can choose to
print what you see (without images) or download to a disk with images.
All articles are in formats that can be imported directly into most word
processing and page layout programs for convenient publishing.
If you have articles
that you have written, that you would like to place using this new media,
there is contact information on the home page that tells you who to contact
at ARA.
This site is not
very comprehensive in depth or breadth, but it does contain some relevant
articles on current topics. Sometimes you will get zero results if you
are looking for a very specific topic (such as the nil results I got when
looking for articles on hospital branding issues), and sometimes you will
get some good hits. This site is still a viable resource, and one worth
bookmarking. Don't expect too much and you won't be disappointed.
But that's the nature of research on the Web.
August, 1998
Knowledge is Power!
Happy cruising! :-)
Questions/Comments
can be sent to pam@info-matters.com
or faxed to 504.738.0016. You can also reach Ms. Wegmann at 504.738.0070.
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