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Footnote: A repository of historical documents in a sleek Web 2.0 interface (think Flickr for documents). Footnote provides access to the original versions of millions of scanned historical documents, many of which are available on the Web for the first time.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 They have also partnered with the National Archives to bring millions of pages of historical documents never before available online.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.

We’re entering a new age of government transparency because the Net makes so much more information available to so many more people. Some of them are going to want to do something with it.

A good and recent example is My Left Nutmeg, “where Connecticut Dems scratch that progressive itch.” It created an investigative network around some strange figures in the campaign spending habits of Senator Joe Lieberman. Originating in politics not journalism, the project demonstrates the potential that open source methods have to reveal portions of the campaign that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Nutmeg writer Matt Browner-Hamlin noticed that Lieberman spent over $380,000 in petty cash during his campaign — an obvious red flag. But rather than make outrageous accusations, Hamlin wanted someone to investigate Lieberman’s spending habits.