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
Encyclopædia Britannica Online — Contains brief information on a given topic; provides links to articles and websites.
Oxford Reference Online —Search more than 320 Oxford University Press reference books at the same time.
ipl2: Information You Can Trust —Contains subject collections, which list favorable web resources; a ready reference section with encyclopedias, almanacs, and dictionaries.
Dictionaries
Oxford English Dictionary — Complete OED in a searchable online format. Requires library subscription.
Oxford Language Dictionaries Online —Oxford Language Dictionaries Online (OLDO) offers almost 4.5 million words, phrases, and translations in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. This database also features native speaker audio, click-through verb tables and pronunciation charts, writing and word games, notes on life and culture, and usage tools and resources.
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 1062 dictionaries, including older editions. The dictionaries are broken up by subject. Search one or all of the dictionaries.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed., 1919 — Project Bartleby provides this resource containing 11,000 quotations from ancient and modern literature.
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 2010: U.S. Census Bureau —This site contains information relating to the 2010 census, including population reports and statistics.
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.