The Research Wizard
| Categorized Research Links | Simplified Research Links | |
|---|---|---|
| News Sites | Online Comics | |
| Come Visit "Steve's Reads" | ||
| Categorized Research Links | Simplified Research Links | |
|---|---|---|
| News Sites | Online Comics | |
| Come Visit "Steve's Reads" | ||
NOTICE: BIG CHANGES COMING!
Everything on this page -- on this site, really -- is outdated. I've been working on my other site, Steve's Reads and I'm almost done and pretty soon I'm coming back to fix this one. Just as an example of how far behind this page is, I haven't worked at the Post-Dispatch as a News Librarian since 2007. Check back in a few months and it will be all spiffy and new!
My name is J. Stephen Bolhafner, but my friends call me Steve. I'm a News Librarian - a job most people don't even know exists. My actual job title is "News Researcher." Sometimes I think of myself as a librarian, other times I think of myself as a journalist. I'm really both.
Am I really a Wizard at Research? I like to think so. At least the specialized research needed by reporters and editors on tight deadlines. While news librarians once were primarily the archivists in charge of the files of past stories from the newspaper, we have become vital to the research and reporting of news stories, using a variety of tools, including the Internet, to help reporters get facts. Maintaining the database of current news stories is but one part of the modern newspaper Librarian's job, sometimes a small part. I talk a little more about my job on my "Introduction to News Research" page.
The research links above go to pages created from my bookmarks at work. The Categorized Research Links have easy-to-use tables to jump you through to the different categories, while the Simplified Research Links page is just a big long list of all the categories and links in my odd and esoteric order of priorities. The "News Sites" link will take you to a table listing some of my favorite news sites, the "Online Comics" to some online comics and some syndicated comics I follow online - plus all the comics available in the Post-Dispatch. I follow those in the paper and don't need to check them online, but I put them up there anyway. That's what they will do, anyway. These two pages are sadly out of date, not having been truly updated for years, and I'm working on completely new versions of them (just as this is a completely new version of my original main page).
Steve's Reads is my other website, which is even more outdated. In what I laughingly call my spare time, I'm a freelance writer. I've reviewed some books for the Post, for instance, and interviewed some writers. I've also been published in The Comics Journal and Starlog magazine. My main interests are science fiction and what most people call comic books (I call them comics magazines - I mean, they aren't really books, now are they?). I used to do a weekly column called "This Week's Good Reads," but it was a long time ago. Still, I occasionally stumble across someone who's linked to one of them, which is always gratifying.
So "Steve's Reads" contains those columns, plus just about all the reviews, interviews, etc. I'd had published up to the time of its last update, a couple of miscellaneous rants and separate pages devoted to Sandman, Cerebus, and Love and Rockets.
And finally, I have a link to my wife's website. She's a St. Louis Realtor with Coldwell Banker Gundaker.
