• BC Public Libraries' Virtual Reference Desk
This is a virtual library of sites on the Internet that are arranged by the Dewey Decimal System. All sites are evaluated by librarians.
• Best Online Reference Sites
This site, located at Rampo Catskill Library System in New York, has really done a fine job of putting together a page that has links to many useful resources on the Internet.  There are links to directories,, postal/phone systems, government manuals, government statistics, writer's resources, medical resources and information, weights & measures, quotations, maps & atlases, consumer guides, news, time, weather, dictionaries and thesauri, travel, sports, and more.
• Martindale's The Reference Desk
This extensive site contains a host of links to information. There are language dictionaries, science tables, calculators, histories of all the flags of the world, TV schedules all over the world, ballet theatre schedules the world over, weather information, a planet simulator, full text of international treaties, and more. There are also dictionaries of many different subject areas, and courses and tutorials of subjects such as: biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, business, and more.
• Refdesk.com
This is a truly amazing site! It has a link to 260 search engines covering many topics, links to ask-the-experts sites, and other help and advice sites, such as: consumer, financial advisor, free legal advice, how stuff works sites, homework helper, and tax preparation guides. There are also facts-at -a-glance sites, such as:  Acronym Finder ,  Airline Flight Tracker,  Airline Toll-Free Numbers,   America's Job Bank,  American Fact Finder,  Area Code Finder,  AT&T Toll-Free directory,  Interactive Worldwide Atlas, Perpetual Calendars,  Chemical Elements,  Chiefs of State,   Consumer Information,   Convert Anything to Anything,  Dictionaries on many different topics,  Distance Calculator,  Doctor Board Verification, encyclopedias covering many different topics,  Exchange Rates,   Find Ancestors,  Find a Birthday,  Find a College,  Find Countries Information ,  Find a Doctor,  Find a House,  Find a Job,  Find a Lawyer ,  Find Government Stats,  Find Health Info,  Find Legal Info,  Find Medical Info,   Find People,  Find People in Government,  Find Vital Records,   Flags of the World,  Global Statistics,  Holidays Worldwide,  How Far Is It?,   International Calling Codes,  International Emergency. Telephone. Numbers,    Kelley Blue Book of  Car Prices,  Language Translator,    List of Lists,  Maps of the USA & World,  Maps & Driving Directions,   Postage Rates,  Population. Clocks  of the US & World,  Prescription List,   Robert's Rules of Order,  Social Security Death Index,  Strunk's Elements of Style,  State & Local Gov't Sites,  UPS,  U.S. Census Bureau,  U.S. Postal Service,  White Pages,  World Gazetteer,  World Time Server,  Yellow Pages,  ZIP 4 Code Look-up, and  International ZIP Codes. and much, much more!
• Directory of corporate archives in the United States and Canada
• Fact Monster
• Farmer's Almanac
• StartSpot Network
• Edmund's Car Guide
• Bartlett's Quotations
• Chambers Reference Online
• Great Buildings Online
"More than 800 great buildings from around the world and across history are listed below and illustrated at this web site and The Great Buildings Collection CD-ROM, with photographic images, architectural drawings, discussion, bibliography, architect info, and live 3D walkthrough computer models."

• Ask an Expert Sources
Here you will find links to ask an expert sources for school subjects such as: english, fine arts, fitness, health and medicine, mathematics, science and social studies.
• The Straight  Dope
This is the site of Cecil Adams, the World's Smartest Human Being, and his famous syndicated column The Straight Dope. Here you will find all manner of things relating to the column and the vast Straight Dope media empire. He has published many Straight Dope books.He answers a question every day and you can search the archive of about 2000 questions.
• The Mad Scientist Network
This is a network of scientists providing answers to your questions. You can search the archives of 25,000 questions that have been already answered. In the Mad Scientist Library, you can locate resources, demos and ideas for science projects.
• llrx.com
Go to this site an do a search for "finding Experts"
• Scholar Universe
"Find Scholarly Experts on Any Topic"

• Biography.com
This database contains over 20,000 biographies, past and present, from all over the world.
• Biographical Dictionary
• Time 100: The Most Influential People of the Twentieth Century
• Annenberg Media-A Biography of America
• The National Inventors Hall of Fame
• The Nobel Prize Internet Archive
• National Women's Hall of Fame
• Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
• Catholic Online Saints and Angels
This is the "largest collection of facts and information concerning Saints and Angels on the Internet. The Saints Index is an exhaustive list of Saints that contains all known information pertaining to each Saint. There is also information about this months Saints, general FAQ about Saints, Patron Saints and a Feastday List. This site also provides a Saints Search feature that will help you locate a specific Saint quickly and effectively by name or other search criteria."
• Notable American Unitarians 1936-1961
• Freeality: Online Biographies
• Distinguished Women of Past and Present
• History Makers
• a. k. a. (Also Know As)
author pseudonyms, aliases, nicknames, working names, legalized names, pen names, noms de plume, maiden names... etc.
• Australian Dictionary of Biography

• the-artists.org
• Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)
• Who's Who of Victorian Cinema

• Women's Legal History Biography Project

• Book Lovers-Great Writers
• Biographies: The Poets

• Dr. Estrella's Incredibly Abridged Dictionary of Classical Composers
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
• PBS Jazz Biography

• Major World Philosophers

• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• The Political Graveyard
• The American Presidents
• POTUS: President of the United States

• 4000 Years of Women in Science
• Biographies of Women Mathematicians
• Mathematicians: index of Biographies
• Anthropology Biography Web

General Dictionaries

• The Glossarist
"a searchable directory of glossaries and topical dictionaries."
• YourDictionary.com
This amazing site has over 200 language dictionaries, over 50 specialty or subject dictionaries, nine thesauruses, a rhyming dictionary, a phrase dictionary, a pronunciation dictionary, and acronym and synonym dictionary plus a regular dictionary, the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
• OneLook Dictionaries
This is a collection of 444 dictionaries that contain over 2 million words. There are general dictionaries and subject dictionaries in the arts and humanities, business, computers/Internet, religion, science, sports, technological, spelling slang and spelling dictionaries.
• Merriam-Webster Online
Webster's Dictionary is now on the Internet.
• The Oxford English Dictionary
Electronic version of the 2nd edition of this standard reference work. It is a "consolidation of more than a century's work by four generations of lexicographers." "The Oxford English Dictionary is the only English language dictionary that presents a comprehensive history of the English language and illustrates its development by quotations from both scholarly and popular works" "In addition to explaining what a word means, it also, by documenting its history, explains why it has come to have a particular meaning." It contains 290,500 entries, and 616,500 word forms. It contains words that are "currently employed in the English language, or known to have been is use at any time since the middle of the twelfth century."
Quotations come from: Donna Lee Berg. A Users Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 pp3-4
• Oxymorons Info
• Glossarist

• Encyberpedia
A collection of dictionaries on the Internet on many different topics
• DOD Dictionary of Military Terms
From this page you can either browse the dictionary or search for the definition and usage of individual terms. The DOD Dictionary and the Joint Acronyms and Abbreviations master data base are managed by the Joint Doctrine Division, J-7, Joint Staff.
• Directory of Holidays

• Trinpsite: Vocabulary of Alliteration
 "This Vocabulary of Alliteration is a new aid in writing poems and songs (and in the study of phonetic or phonemic syllable divisions in English). Alliteration is one of several aural devices in literature making use of the repetition of single sounds or groups of sounds."

• Internet Acronym Server
At this site you can search for an acronym and see what it means, search for a word and see what acronyms it is in.
• Abbreviations.com
• Acronyma
• Acronym Finder

• Pimbley's Dictionary of Heraldry

• How Stuff Works
This excellent site contains information on how different things work, such as: the microwave, a toilet, smoke detectors, refrigerators, airplanes, engines and motors, and more.
• Netlingo
"The online dictionary containing hundreds of words that are emerging as a new vocabulary surrounding the technology and community of the Internet and the World Wide Web"
• WordNet
"WordNet®is an on-line lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets."
• World Wide Words
"World Wide Words is devoted to the English language - its history, quirks, curiosities and evolution. The Words site is organized into sections, each with its own index to help you find your way about."
• Symbols.com
"Welcome to SYMBOLS.com -- the world's largest online encyclopedia of graphic symbols! SYMBOLS.com contains more than 2,500 Western signs, arranged into 54 groups according to their graphic characteristics. In 1,600 articles their histories, uses, and meanings are thoroughly discussed. The signs range from ideograms carved in mammoth teeth by Cro-Magnon men, to hobo signs and subway graffiti".
• The Very Best of British

• English-French/French-English

• NetLingo

• American School Directory
A directory of elementary and secondary schools in the United States
• American Universities
A list of links to U.S. colleges and universities home pages.
• Oklahoma Schools
A list of all elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities in Oklahoma

• LibDex
A list of library catalogues on the Internet.

• Switchboard
• International Calling Codes
• Bigbook
• AT&T AnyWho
This service has over 10 million business listings and over 90 million residential listings in the United States. It claims to offer some of the fastest search response times.  It also offers a map service that shows locations of addresses that is provided by MapQuest.
• Other Business Directories on the Internet

• AMA DocFinder
AMA Physician Select provides basic professional information on virtually every  licensed physician in the United States and its possessions, including more than 690,000 doctors of medicine (MD) and doctors of osteopathy or osteopathic medicine (DO)."

• Encyclopedia Smithsonian
The Smithsonian Institution has put together a list of topics that they often get questions about

• Facts and Statistics
• Factbites

• IRS Forms
You can get IRS income tax forms here for the latest year, and back to 1992. The forms themselves and the instruction books are in pdf format, so you will need the Adobe Acrobat software.

• HowStuffWorks
• What's That Stuff?

• Maps on Us
Made by Switchboard, with this service you can have a map drawn of any address, or you can have directions given to any address.
• MapQuest
You can use Mapquest to obtain a map of any city in the world, plus driving directions to any city in North America.
• AVIS Maps
• Other Maps

• MegaConverter
Megaconverter.com is an ever-growing set of weights, measures and units conversion/calculation modules....For just about anything you can think of, megaConverter can show you its equivalent"
• Convert It!
You can convert inches to feet, acres to square miles and much more. There are acceleration equivalents, area equivalents, energy/work equivalents, power equivalents, length equivalents, mass equivalents, metrology equivalents, pressure equivalents, temperature equivalents, and more.
• How Far is It?
You can use this aid to calculate the distance between two places, such as Paris, France and New York City. These distances are "as the crow flies". You will also be given the latitude and longitude of each place.

• News365
This site contains news from over 10,000 news sources and covers over 300 topics. It covers news from magazines, newspapers, and TV stations.
• CNET.com
Contains technology news, reviews of hardware and software, reviews of games, download software, provides help and how-to's on hardware and software.
• ESPN.com
Provides sports news, scores and stats.
• WorldNews.com
Has world news stories from business, cities, editorials, environment, fashion, health, Internet, media, music, politics, science, sports, students, scams, theatre, travel, technology, weather, and more.
• WorldWideWeb Tax
• Other News Sources

• The Quotations Page

• 10,000 Year Calendar
This is a perpetual calendar
• Calendar Zone

NOTE: While every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of these pages, errors may occur on occasion. Please verify any information obtained on these pages with the relevant department before relying on the information for anything critical.