As you may have noticed, Intellectual Takeout has a fresh, new look on its homepage. The changes are more than skin-deep, too.

Roughly one year ago, Intellectual Takeout spun off from Center of the American Experiment, a conservative, free market think tank in Minnesota. After doing a lot of the intitial work to get the site built, we began recruiting student researchers from around the country to help us build content for the site. By September 2009 thirty researchers worked for Intellectual Takeout in ten different states. Because of their hard work, Intellectual Takeout ended up with nearly 4,000 pages of internally generated content, much of which is visible on the site now. 

With all of that content came the realization that before we had even officially launched the site we had outgrown it. So starting in early October, we set about building a more robust website capable of handling a lot more content while providing our site visitors with a dynamic, user-friendly experience.

What you see now is the fruit of our passion and labor: an online one-stop-shop of conservative, libertarian, and classically liberal resources. We hope you like it.

As you poke around the new site, the first thing you should notice is the emphasis on the search feature at the top of the page. We want you to be able to use Intellectual Takeout in class and on the go. With the amount of information we plan on housing on the site, the search is the best way to find what you're looking for. Search results can be filtered by library topics, forum topics, blog entries, regular site pages, and within library topics by quotes, charts and graphs, commentary, analysis, videos and podcasts, primary documents, recommended reading, and links. You can see an example below:

Once at a topic page, such as "Deflation," you no longer have to click through a title to read the content; everything pops up in a preview window as you scroll over titles:

Additionally, we added a "Take Action" section to give you direction on applying the ideas of liberty on and off campus:

There's a lot more to the site and we have a lot of topics still to add. Once we do our official hard launch of the site, we'll also add to the blog on a regular basis.

Last, but most certainly not least is the newest staff member of Intellectual Takeout: Anja Hartleb-Parson. Anja is our new Vice President of Research and Education. In this role she will be updating the library, managing researchers, blogging, and helping us continue to provide students and others with academically rigorous material critical to the progress of liberty.

Please take time to review the site. Comments are appreciated, and if you have more detailed feedback, please e-mail us.