How
many times have you wanted to look something up when the library was
closed? Even when the
library's open, it can be inconvenient getting there.
A lot of people just don't bother; and they end up accepting
someone else's word for something, even when in doubt, rather than
getting the facts themselves.
That
elusive encyclopedia or almanac or atlas gathers dust in the Library
Reference Room while people guess at realities rather than looking up
the facts.
One
of the most useful features of the Internet comes with the multitude
of references now online. The
World Wide Web currently plays host to a virtual reference library.
The most incredible reference site on the Web is The
Reference Desk. There's
nothing quite like it anywhere, other than perhaps the Library of
Congress, as a veritable source of reference materials.
There's
an A to Z list of “Facts at a Glance,” a remarkable virtual
reference library. Just a
few of the links include The Cambridge History of Literature, The CIA
Fact Book, 10 or 11 dictionaries, an equal number of encyclopedias,
including Britannica, Gray's Anatomy, Information Please, a free
language translator, and much much more.
If
you're looking for information from British sources, xrefer
provides free access to over 450,000 entries--facts, words, concepts,
people & quotations covering art, music, history, business, law,
literature, health, science and more.
Most of the sources are from Oxford University Press,
Bloomsbury Press or Penguin.
A
reference source for educators that has a number of essential
databases for teachers is the EDinformatics
directory. Their
databases include curriculum frameworks, lesson plans, search engines,
research sources, and a parent’s page.
Several
search engines have “References” as a category with links to
various
different types of references. The
best of these sources include Yahoo,
Looksmart under
'Library', Hotbot and the
Open
Directory.
Yahoo,
for example, has 38 sub- categories of reference as well as a sizeable
list of libraries, various specialized dictionaries and collections of
quotations. Joseph Roux
wrote one that I particularly like, about quotations: “A
fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a
pebble in the hand of a fool.”
Both
Hotbot and the
Open
Directory have substantial
listings under the category of “Knowledge
Management,” a relatively new category on
reference shelves, where businesses
develop strategies, using technology and the combined knowledge of
their people in this novel field.
Atlases
serve more than professional and amateur geographers.
They're a valuable source of information about cities,
mountains, roads, time zones, climate, topography, distances and
temperatures for the entire planet.
Online
atlases make it possible to burrow down from larger areas to smaller. Infoplease
presents a world map. Click
on any area for a more detailed map or use the map index to locate a
place of interest. In
addition to the maps and geography that you’d expect to find in an
atlas, Infoplease also has a “Fact Monster” for kids and a
Homework Center.
Infoplease
is something of an all-round reference source with an atlas, almanacs,
a dictionary and an encyclopedia.
An
opening line from a once-popular song read,
“I know a little bit about a lot of things, but I don't know
enough about you.” Almanacs
are the places to find a little bit about a lot of things.
The
almanacs at
Infoplease have a huge collection of facts from a wide variety of
information sources. The
site has the sources categorized, and one group includes Geography,
Countries, Current Events, World Statistics, International Relations,
Disasters, Travel, Architecture and Flags; and that's only one
category.
The
others include the US, History and Government, Biography, Sports,
Entertainment, Business and Finance, Society and Culture, Health and
Science, and Weather.
Almanacs
have a treasure-store of information. Hooting
Owl, for instance, has 59 different kinds of almanacs featuring
those rare bits of information that all of us look for at one time or
another.
Dictionaries
are common in most people's homes, though the home varieties are not
necessarily the best. The World Wide Web has literally thousands of
general and specialized dictionaries.
Google lists 1187 of them.
There are the standard ones, like Merriam-Webster
Online, and the Cambridge
International Dictionaries.
The
American Heritage Dictionary
is online with over 90,000 entries including 10,000 new words, 70,000
audio word pronunciations, 900 full-page color illustrations, language
notes and word-root appendixes.
In
addition to the standard dictionaries, you'll find many specialized
lexicons, like medical, foreign languages, rhyming, literature,
business, legal, science, high-tech, phrases and thesauruses.
You
can even get online translations.
One source says there are over 500 translation services on the
Internet. Some of the
best are free, like the one at Alta
Vista. You can write
what you want and translate it to or from 8 different languages.
You can even give the address of a Web site that you want
translated from Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese,
Japanese, Chinese or Korean to English and vice versa.
There
are also dictionaries of quotations, including the most famous Bartlett's
Quotations. This 10th
edition of 1919 has over 11,000 entries and has been revised and
enlarged by Nathan Haskell Dole.
Encyclopedias,
as most people who have bought a set know, are both desirable and
expensive to own. If almanacs are the places to find "a little
bit about a lot of things," encyclopedias, (as well as who's who
and bibliographies) are the places to go to get to “know enough
about you.”
The
most exciting and welcome inclusion in the reference sources available
on the Net was the addition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and making online access to it free.
Of
course, you can use other excellent encyclopedias online, including Encarta,
Columbia 2000 and
Comptons.
These are the places to begin researching a topic.
Not only do they provide well-written summaries of their
entries, they also provide useful bibliographies so that the searcher
can follow up with other, more complete, sources of information on a
topic listed in the encyclopedia entries.
The
next time you need a fact, a place to start your research or
satisfaction of a nagging curiosity, go online and check out the vast
collection of reference sources.
Samuel
Johnson, great 18th century thinker and compiler of the
first English dictionary, once concluded, “Knowledge is of
two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find
information on it.”
