General Reference Resources
Free Internet resources to find general information.
For more in-depth information on a particular subject, please visit our Research Guides by Subject.
Encyclopedias
Encyclopędia Britannica Online — Contains brief information on a given topic; provides links to articles and websites.
Oxford Reference Online Premium — Search more than 100 Oxford University Press reference books at the same time.
The Internet Public Library — Contains subject collections, which list favorable web resources; a ready reference section with encyclopedias, almanacs, and dictionaries; and more than 50 pathfinders. The University of Michigan maintains this site.
Dictionaries
Oxford English Dictionary — Complete OED in a searchable online format. Requires library subscription.
Oxford Language Dictionaries Online — Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (OLDO) offers over 4 million words, phrases and translations in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese. Also features native speaker audio, click-through verb tables and pronunciation charts, explanations of grammatical terms, notes on life and culture, guidance on grammar and idiomatic usage, and extensive links to other sites for further research.
The Free Dictionary — This site contains a thesaurus, acronyms dictionary, and encyclopedias, including The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th edition.
OneLook Dictionary Search — OneLook is a collection of 112 dictionaries, including older editions. The dictionaries are broken up by subject. Search one or all of the dictionaries.
AltaVista’s Babel Fish — Babel Fish has the ability to translate words or short paragraphs into 10 different languages. It also can translate websites.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919 — Project Bartleby provides this resource containing 11,000 quotations from ancient and modern literature.
Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations — Project Bartleby provides this resource containing 9,000 quotations from more than 4,000 different resources that range from 1950 to 1988.
Statistics
Offstats — This is a site from the University of Auckland Library. It is an index with links to from statistics for countries found around the world.
NationMaster— This site is a collection of world and country-by-country statistics. The statistics provided are cited by the provider of the information. Additionally, NationMaster offers maps and flags.
United States Census 2000: U.S. Census Bureau — This site contains 2000 and 1990 census information found in a PDF, full-text format. Also, census information can be found through "States and County Quick Facts" and "American FactFinder."
Historical Statistics of the United States from Colonial Times to 1970 — This site from the U.S. Census Bureau contains decennial census information. Areas covered are: census reports; questionnaires found on the census; statistical abstracts; and population and housing counts.
CIA World Factbook — The current edition of the Central Intelligence Agency's reports and statistics on countries of the world.
News
Google News — Google News is an excellent web news source because it collects articles from over 4,500 different news sources from around the world.