In a world where large volumes of information can be produced in the blink of an eye, citizen journalists need tools to access and cross-reference information. Several online database applications have sprouted up to fill that need. Here is a run-down of sites that are making it easier for citizen journalists to connect the dots:

Footnote: A repository of historical documents in a sleek Web 2.0 interface (think Flickr for documents). Footnote provides access to the original versions of millions of scanned historical documents, many of which are available on the Web for the first time. Here’s the Gettysburg Address (now tell me that’s not cool). Users are invited to share, discuss and annotate documents collaboratively to increase the ways they can be referenced. They have also partnered with the National Archives to bring millions of pages of historical documents never before available online.

Diplomacy Monitor: St. Thomas University School of Law produced Diplomacy Monitor to be a one-stop shop for diplomacy-related documents. It crawls hundreds of government and other diplomatic sources to index documents by nation, region and issue. This makes it easy for the user to see where countries stand on a given issue. They also boast near real-time indexing of documents, which makes it a good source for material which is usually filtered and edited by the mainstream media.

Watchdogging 101 : Created by the Sunlight Foundation, a NewAssignment.Net funder, Watchdogging 101 is a search tool for databases. Mainly it directs people to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets database, which tracks the relationship between money and politics. By itself, Open Secrets is bulky and hard to maneuver. But paired with Watchdogging 101 (a crash course in how to find what you are looking for in government accountability), citizen journalists have the power to investigate at the end of their fingertips.

(Also see NewAssignment.Net’s previous coverage of Watchdogging 101).

Enron Explorer: This one goes into the “I wish we had it when” pile, and is a good indicator of how investigations could be done in the future. Last October, SONAR technology, which was used to search ENRON’s email tracks released their case study to the public. There are more than 200,000 internal Enron emails from 1999-2003 that you can explore. Now just imagine what we would have found out if this database had been around in 2003?

Center for Cooperative Research: This site allows users to contribute to research and investigative projects. All projects take the form of timelines. Anyone is free to contribute to any project. Their most active project is the Complete 9/11 Timeline, which consists of events leading up to and following the attacks of September 11, 2001. It boasts 2,711 events at the time of writing this, ranging from the 1970’s to present day.

The U.S. Congress Votes Database: The Washington Post maintains this database, which gives you access to every vote that has been cast in the United States Congress since 1991. You can browse in numerous ways including by individual Congresses, by member of Congress, by bill. It also features RSS feeds that allow you to subscribe to the most recent votes being held in Congress, as well as the votes of individual members of Congress.

The Memory Hole: Edited by Russ Kick, the Memory Hole is “rescuing knowledge and freeing information” at all times. Kick didn’t hold back to publish pictures of soldiers’ coffins coming back from Iraq. And today the Memory Blog is a go-to place to find out what information is being declassified and how to get your hands on it.

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Derek van Vliet is a software developer in Canada. He is a Netscape Navigator and blogs at NeoThoughts