By Rita Kaiser, Reference Services Librarian

This month’s focus is On The Road, so I thought I would look at some of the resources available on the Internet for planning your road travel and looking at the weather in an area that you need to visit.

Many of us simply use the two best-known map services, Mapsonus at http://www.mapsonus.com/ and Map-quest at http://www.mapquest.com/ and leave it at that. These web sites will give us our directions and maps, but there are more sites that can help and are easier to use.

Some of the other web sites give you more than directions; they give you satellite views and even a bird’s-eye view. The weather-related web sites can be very useful for determining past conditions, including how much rain or snow was received on a particular day in an area, information on storms and other historical weather data.

Let’s start this journey with FreeTrip, which allows you to plan a trip from one location to another, specifying whether you want a scenic or a direct route and even letting you pick out hotels in a particular price range. It sends you a copy of the itinerary by email. While this site is not pretty, it is direct and easy to use. Check it out at http://www.freetrip.com/.

Google has an interesting map service at http://maps.google.com/, which allows you to search an address in a city, map it, get directions to or from the location and then view a satellite image of the location. You can email a copy of the map to yourself or to a friend. One of the nice things about this service is that you do not have to be very precise. For example, you can type in “500 3rd ave seattle” and find the King County Courthouse with ease.

You can click between a map view, a satellite view or a hybrid view, which includes the street names with a satellite image. Google also has another service called Google Earth, which includes more features, but requires a download to use.

Another intriguing mapping service is Windows Live Local, which is a revised and improved MSN Maps web site. It is located at http://local.live. com/ and has some features not found anywhere else. You can look at a bird’s-eye view of a number of cities, including Seattle and Washington, D.C. This includes the ability to zoom in on a location, look at buildings from angles and switch between the bird’s-eye view, a regular aerial view and a road map.

You can add pushpins to the maps and then email them, save them with comments to a scratchpad and more. You can also search for businesses near an address, get a list and then save them to the same scratchpad if you like. This works nicely for keeping a list of restaurants or copying services near a court location.

Now that we have our route that will get us to our court date and have looked at what kinds of businesses are located in the area we will be, let’s see what the weather is going to be for the area. Start with the National Weather Service at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ where you will find weather forecasts for our nation. You can look at local forecasts and get storm, snow, hurricane and other information.

For past climatic data you can use the National Climatic Data Center at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html, which includes a monthly summary of temperature, precipitation, wind speed and more. These summaries are available from 1996 to date. This is not a free service but rather a subscription service. However, if you need detailed information, this cannot be beat.

Another cost-based service for past weather is the CompuWeather site at http://www.pastweather. com/. They do forensic weather reports for litigation, weather reports for filming and issue a weekly email newsletter.

If you would rather not pay for the historical information, try Weather Underground at http://www. wunderground.com/, which will give you current information for U.S. locations, maps with historical weather information to help you plan and, if you search by city or zip code, you can also get historical weather information from 1970 forward.

If you need information on storms check out The Storm Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. This data is both current and historical from 2000 and you can search by state and date. Find it at: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/.

There are other good map research sites, such as Embassy World at http://www.embassyworld.com/, which will let you search by country and city and leads to numerous map sites; Yahoo Maps at http://maps.yahoo.com, which includes a beta movable map to find your location; and the Verizon Yellow pages at http://www.superpages.com/, which allows you to search within your phone and address results for maps of the surrounding area.