• Ask a Librarian is our e-mail reference service.
• EBSCO, Literary Reference Center, etc. are available to use from home. (You'll need the 13 numbers on back of your library card to log in.)
• Need help with the citations? CitationMachine is amazing. Duke University offers sample citations by type.
• Surfing tips
• Sources: material we consider among the best, most authoritative on the 'Net
• Tip: running Firefox? Take a look at Zotero.

WRITING PAPERS: from Asst. Professor Jack Lynch, Rutgers University
Guide to Grammar and Style and
Getting an A on an English paper

LITERATURE:
Digital Book Index--search 80,000 books online fulltext (35K are free, 55K are for $$$). Also links out to foreign language sites for fulltext books in German, French, Spanish and Portugese.
ALEX--online texts--Need a Poe short story at midnight?!
or
Online books--Carnegie Mellon
Shakespeare Bookshelf--the plays and the poems
Shakespeare Resource Center--from bardweb.net
Literary Criticism--from the Internet Public Library
Use THIS PAGE for stuff on books and authors
Unbelievable dictionary collection!--even has Klingon and Vulcan.

HISTORY/LAW:
Internet Ancient History Sourcebook (3100 BC to 3rd century AD), from Fordham University
Cuneiform, Sumerian--different topics
Tufts Perseus Project--Papyri, Greek and Latin texts....and Christopher Marlowe!
Medieval/Renaissance Language and Literature--Labyrinth Project at Georgetown
American Archives--documents of American Revolution, 1774-1776.
Law, current and historic--from Cornell (great page on the law behind the Amistad case)
18th-20th century US documents and treaties--from Yale
Laws & customs of England, 13th century--in Latin and English! Useful for history, Chaucer or Shakespeare studies

Speech/debate: American Rhetoric--Online speech bank, Top 100 speeches, etc.

CURRENT EVENTS/JOURNALISM:
Congressional Research Reports--the public domain reports from Congress' "think tank", provided by Open CRS
Issues guides from PublicAgenda.org--good for debates
Television News Archive, 1968+ --from Vanderbilt
US Dept of State--country reports, human rights practices and background notes. What more could you ask for?
Presidents of the United States--all 43 of them
History of US Diplomacy, by Presidential administrations--from US Dept of State, Office of the Historian
US Congress--what's current in DC?
Bureau of the Census--its not just population! latest figures.

MAPS, IMAGES, etc
Images and sounds from US history--Library of Congress
Digital Gallery from the New York Public Library
Maps from National Geographic--be sure to click on printable map!
Univ of Texas, Perry Casteña Map Collection

ECONOMICS/PHILOSOPHY
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy--who were the Stoics, anyhow?
Ethics Updates--theory and application, from U San Diego
Inflation calculator--from US Bureau of Labor Statistics. What did it cost then...and now?
Federal Reserve Board, NY--money, interest rates and currency conversion
Resources for Economists--U Washington at St. Louis
Liber8, from the St. Louis US Federal Reserve
Purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, 1665-present--also exchange rates U.S. Dollar/British Pound 1771-1999
WebMath includes Trig, Calculus, Graphing..all kinds of stuff. The fellow who wrote this page is in graduate physics at UVa.
Online calculators

RELIGION: Virtual Religion Index, from Mahlon H. Smith, Religion Dept., Rutgers University

INTERNATIONAL
European Commission
UN ...UNICEF .... Intl Labor Organization ....Food & Agriculture Organization
World Bank
International Monetary Fund
OECD
World Health Organization
Intl Telecommunications Union
British Government
Canadian Government

Surfing tips

• We use Google most of the time, though Euroseek is good if you need European information. For video or audio files (need to add the sound of a wolf call to your report?), try Altavista.
• Put phrases (words you want to stick together) "in quotes like this".
• Use geographic search words. If you need information on Georgia, not Oregon, lumber industry add GA to your search.
• Watch the end codes of web sites returned.
  • .com is commercial--do they have a slant? selling something?
  • .edu is educational, colleges and universities, sometimes the whole name, sometimes initials: rutgers.edu or tcnj.edu
  • .org is a non-profit, may be an official organization (redcross.org)
  • .gov is government (fws.gov is US Fish & Wildlife Service, for example)
  • .mil is the US military, as defenselink.mil
  • .int is international, groups like un.int, worldbank.int
  • Country endcodes are two letters, usually the country name in it's native language: .de is Deutschland, .fr is France, .uk United Kingdom and so on.
  • You can reach all 50 of the United States with www.state.postal-initials.us: www.state.tx.us, www.state.or.us, www.state.il.us and so on
• Think about who creates, is responsible for the information you need. Who tracks US gasoline consumption? US Dept of Energy, energy.gov. Who tracks world oil production? opec.org
  See also Internet Detective: wise up to the web--the good, the bad and the ugly online.
• Remember the slight variations between US and British English (theatre, theater/color, colour). If you searched gas, but not petrol (European term) you'd miss a lot of good material.
• Check for a date at the bottom of a web page. Is the information current--or out of date?
• If you don't get the material you want in the first two pages of a Google return? Redo your search with new words, or add the NOT. Use a minus sign and the word you want to block out of your search: cats -dog is cats but not dogs.
• Don't waste your valuable time! If you're not finding what you need, talk to a librarian. We do this stuff for a living and are pretty good at it!

  
  Questions?

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  http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/haven/
  © Morris County Library 1998
  29 April 2003