Data organization and accessibility

C-SPAN is a pain (the video can be found) but American Presidents: Life Portraits (by the C-SPAN folks) is awful.

I don't want to watch, view or review; no tour either. Unfortunately, I want to read (but right now I don't care to remember "Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?" and he probably doesn't care either). What I need is a simple list of presidents and basic bios. That's it. The data is there somewhere, but that basic view doesn't exist.

So I ended up over at Groliers.

When I'm having trouble finding the right way to search for something, I occasionally go out to the old encyclopedia in the family room and thumb around in the reference volume. The encyclopedia folks have been working this multiple indexing game for a long time — they may not have figured out an optimal new media organization, but they get accessibility for old media very well.