for Penn State faculty, staff and students

Source: Merriam-Webster Inc.
Super on-line encyclopedia, available by subscription and site license. The on-line version is updated more often than the print version.

for the public WWWebster Dictionary and Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster Inc.
Search the on-line Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus. These are free and, unlike some on-line reference works, they are current. (Not indexed by OneLook.)

Simultaneously search 751 (and growing) on-line dictionaries, glossaries and acronym lists. Includes a page of "More Dictionaries" not indexed. This free site was launched April 16, 1996.

This is a fast, free electronic dictionary tied in with a thesaurus.

Search -- Complete descriptions of complex terms.
Source: O'Reilly & Associates, publisher of books and software.

Hosted by the School of Information at the University of Michigan This is a truly great site. IPL has more than 37,000 items in its collections. The books are in the Reference Center and the Reading Room. The Reading Room offers more than 15,000 text titles (searchable), more than 3,000 serial titles and more than 2,900 newspaper titles. Buried in the stacks of the Reading Room are Other Online Text Collections, which yield such nuggets as The On-Line Books Page and the Historical Text Archive. Both are listed below.

Maintained by volunteers Virtual Library is another super Internet resource. This library is hosted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization that exists "to realize the full potential of the Web."

The home page offers main entry points: American Memory (history), Thomas (legislative information), Exhibitions, Collections and Services, Exhibits, and a link to the U.S. Copyright Office. A May 1998 article in Editor & Publisher reported: "Databases are updated several times a day with text of new bills and reports."

A superb and growing collection of on-line books, including verse, classic literature, fiction, non-fiction and reference works, all searchable. The books include material out of copyright (at least 75 years old) or licensed to Columbia University. One popular reference is listed below:
Familiar Quotations, Bartlett
Passages, phrases and proverbs traced to their sources. Based on the ninth edition published in 1901. Searchable.

A growing directory of more than 16,000 books freely available on line. The site is edited by founder John Mark Ockerbloom.

Project Gutenberg finds public domain copies of books, turns them into e-texts and publishes them on the Internet. PG doesn't have a Head Office, or a staff; all the work is done by Michael Hart, the Executive Director, and hundreds of unpaid volunteers.

This is described as a large site covering much of human history. HTA provides original material, links to other sites and electronic reprints of books. HTA is organized by geography/nations and topics.

Provides a wealth of information about time and calendars. Click on Solar System Live for a really neat view of the solar system right now.

Compare the value of dollars today and in the past. This free tool is based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Areas (CPI-U) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The calculator is maintained by NewsEngin Inc., a company that provides software development and consulting services for news organizations. Hint: When you arrive at this site, click on the triangular "twisties" to expand a topic.

You can view any exchange rates among the 164 currencies for any day from Jan. 1, 1990, through today. The currency converter is updated daily at 8 p.m.

This site by ConvertIt.com has grown from one very effective measurement converter to a range of Web-based tools.

Yahoo's reference main page, with links to hundreds of other reference sources in dozens of topical categories.

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