Bidenmania

Unless you've been living under a media and/or digital rock, you should know that Senator Joe Biden, Democrat from Delaware, has been tapped to be the Vice-Presidential nominee of Barack Obama. Some of you may have even received a text message at 3:30 am Saturday morning informing you of Biden's nod.

Who is Biden? The USA Today for today described him as Pennsylvania's Third Senator (perhaps due to the proximity of Delaware to Pennsylvania and the fact he was born in the Keystone State). Many talking heads on the television have noted Biden's tendency to talk and talk and talk and talk . . . Well, you get the idea.

One place to find information about Biden is his official US Senate website, which you can access here. Understand that is this is an official Senate website maintained by Biden and his staff, it is not the best place to look for hard-hitting, critical analysis of Biden or his record. You can learn that by looking in the biography section that he won election to the US Senate at the age of 29. Under the terms of the Constitution, this would make him too young to serve as a US Senator. However, Biden did turn 30 by the time he took office in 1973. Also, you can sign up to receive the aptly named 'Biden Bulletin' which is an email newsletter.

One source of information about Biden is our old friend Galileo. From Browse by Subject, you can go to Social Sciences and select Political Science. Once there, you can do a search for 'Joe Biden' in the first search bar. The third result you get is actually a piece from USA Today that Biden wrote about Afghanistan.

Notice though, that when you change the search to 'Joe' in the first search bar and 'Biden' in the second search bar, the results are slightly different. This is also true when you change Joe to Joseph. A search for 'Joseph Biden' in the search bar gives us a set of results where the third result in Academic Search Complete is an an article relating to the future possible makeup of the Obama cabinet.

Another possibility is to go to Galileo and click on the 'Search' tab. At this point, you have the ability to search many databases by clicking on the show more databases link and selecting each database you want to search in. A search for 'Biden' and 'plagiarism' in Academic Search Complete and Research Library gives us a handful of results related to some incidents involving Senator Biden and accusations of plagiarism from his first presidential campaign in 1988.

Get ready for an information glut on Biden over the next week, just as you will get one when John McCain announces his VP pick on Friday (probably).

JWF