Web Resources
AcademicInfo
An American online education resource centre with extensive subject
guides and distance learning information which seeks to provide free,
independent and accurate information and resources for prospective and
current students. Founded in 1998 by Mike Madin, a librarian coordinator,
and now maintained by multiple contributors. Currently features over
25,000+ hand-picked resources and updated on a daily basis.
www.academicinfo.net/
All Experts
Free Question & Answer service using thousands of volunteers, who
are committed to answering within a day, to provide organic storehouse of
knowledge. www.allexperts.com
Alternet
American site offering an alternative view of the news, supported by
the not-for-profit Independent Media Institute. The database contains more
than 7,000 articles on all aspects of current affairs and recent events.
Also runs the Alties alternative movie
awards. www.alternet.org/index.html
Art Cyclopedia
Highly impressive site which offers links to 1200 art sites (belonging
to museums and art galleries) and enables you to link directly to the
exact page housing the painting you're looking for. With 32,000
links to 100,000 works of art by 7,500 artists, this is an art-lover's
dream. www.artcyclopedia.com/
Arts and Letters Daily
Stunning site run by the chronicle of Higher Education and providing a
vast number of links to stories, reviews, news etc in other media six days
a week under the headings articles of note, new books and essays and
opinion. This site really does link you in to what's going on in the world
of letters and current affairs. www.aldaily.com/
Arts Journal
A daily digest of some of the best arts and cultural journalism in the
English-speaking world. Each day ArtsJournal combs through more than 200
English-language newspapers, magazines and publications featuring writing
about arts and culture and provides links to the best. Great coverage of
the arts, including music, art and books.
http://www.artsjournal.com
Ask a Librarian
Useful service from the UK public libraries. Type in a question
about information and get an answer in two working days. Operates 24
hours, 365 days a year.
www.ask-a-librarian.org.uk
Bartlelby
Self-styled 'pre-eminent Internet publisher of literature, reference
and verse' with a huge digital reference shelf including 86,000 quotations
and 10,000 poems. www.bartleby.com
Biography.com
Website of the Biography Channel - useful if you're researching celebrities, but not
good on more serious biographical subjects. www.biography.com
Biblegateway
Gospelcom's collection of fifteen online versions of the Bible in 28
languages, with a terrific facility for looking up chapter and verse, and
keywords, gives access to anything you want to find in the Good Book. www.biblegateway.com/
Bibliomania
A huge collection of classic texts, with an
academic and educational bent (includes their own study guides) http://www.bibliomania.com/
Bookmark
Online resource supporting families of children with reading
difficulties. Useful site which explains what can affect children's
ability to read and has a helpful page of advice on choosing books for
children. www.bookmark.org.uk
Compete around the world
Website which links to competitions across the globe, including lots of
literary ones and other competitions for writers.
www.competearoundtheworld.com/index.php
Contemporary Writers
The British Council's Contemporary Writers site
has now come into its own as a useful resource, as it’s built its excellent
author biographies to include over 400 writers, including
biographical details, bibliographies, critical reviews, prizes and author
photos. Constantly updated and searchable by author, genre,
nationality, gender, publisher, book title, date of publication and prize name
and date. A really first-rate resource, and a place for all writers to aspire to
be.www.contemporarywriters.com
The Electric Book Company
Offers many free classics downloadable on Adobe Acrobat, partly from
Project Gutenberg, and also e-books on CD for hardback prices from authors
including Austen, Darwin, Gibbon and Chomsky. Designed like book pages and
fully searchable, so useful for students. http://www.elecbook.com
Encyclopedia
Free online encyclopedia offered by eLibrary at www.encyclopedia.com
EServer
This extremely impressive academic site from the University of
Washington is maintained as a non-profit co-op by 281 writers, editors and
contributors. In 44 usefully-grouped 'collections' it currently displays
31,784 freely available works, mostly in the arts and humanities, and
provides an alternative niche for quality work. http://eserver.org/
Fact Check
Annenberg Political Fact Check is a non-partisan, nonprofit, "consumer
advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and
confusion in U.S. politics by monitoring the factual accuracy of what is
said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates,
speeches, interviews, and news releases. Useful to cut through the
bullshit of American politics.
www.factcheck.org/#
Family Search
Huge site providing over 200 million records since 1500 by county.
Provided by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, this is the world's
largest family history library and is invaluable for anyone wanting to
trace their ancestors.
www.familysearch.org
Freespeling
Richard Lawrence Wade's campaigning website which has as it mission:
'to encourage flexibility within English speling similar to the language’s
versatility of expression and innovation of vocabulary so that, year by
year, a new consensus on preferd spelings wil emerge to enable greater ease
of written communication and wider literacy.'
www.freespeling.com
Genealogy.com
Big American commercial site which offers all you need to know to trace
your family tree. Basic annual membership $69.99, but there is a lot
of information available and a powerful search engine to help you find it.
www.genealogy.com
Grammar and Style
Robust and often entertaining American online guide from Jack Lynch,
offering plenty to chew over. http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/index.html
Great Books Online
Impressive collection of ‘great books’, which can be read free
online.
http://www.bartleby.com
Independent Media Center
IndyMedia is a highly subversive news collective involving many
organisations and hundreds of journalists, with several languages and
branches in countries around the world. It's a great site to
bookmark for instant news updates.
www.indymedia.org
Intellectual Property World
Subscription site offered by publisher of copyright and patent
magazines which has updates on copyright issues affecting books and
software.
www.IPWorldonline.com
Kirkus Reviews
This offers more than 400 pre-publication reviews of books published in
America in 24 print issues a year. It also has an archive of more than
300,000 reviews dating back to 1933 - the most extensive single-source
reviews database anywhere. A subscription costs $37.50 a month.
www.kirkusreviews.com
Libraries Association
A superb index of literary links - Libraries
Association
Library of Congress
The national library of the United States, which offers a massive
amount of information easily available, including details about copyright
registration. http://lcweb.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html
The Literary Encyclopedia
Highly impressive academic site which offers profiles of the life and
works of literary authors, plus philosophers and musicians.
Contributors include more than 1,000 distinguished scholars from across
the English-speaking world. 'State of the art' entries amount to 5 million
words and attract 200,000 visitors a month.
www.litencyc.com
MagPortal
Portal offering very up-to-date listings of articles available on the
web in a carefully targeted content delivery service. Some of them
are free. www.magportal.com
Book section:
www.magportal.com/c/ent/book/
Merriam-Webster Online
America’s largest dictionary offered online, with access to 1,800
other dictionaries in 230 languages. www.m-w.com/home.htm
Mr William Shakespeare and the Internet
Complete annotated online guide to Shakespeare set up by Terry A Gray
of Palomar College. Now in its fourth edition, this is a model of clarity
and invaluable as a source on the Bard. shakespeare.palomar.edu/default.htm
National Library of New Zealand
A large collection, much of it digitised and therefore searchable,
including some important sets of papers and images relating to NZ history.
www.natlib.govt.nz/
National Extension College
Non profit-making UK educational charity which is dedicated to widening
access to education for adults through distance learning. Courses
cover Creative Writing, Writing Short Stories and Writing for Money.
www.nec.ac.uk
One Look Dictionary Site
Highly efficient American site which claims to offer the biggest
viewable dictionary on the Internet and cross-refers the browser to many
other reference books at www.onelook.com.
Online Literature Library
A substantial collection of literary classics in digital form,
in the public domain and freely available to all http://www.literature.org/authors/
Open Source Shakespeare
Built with four attributes in mind: Power, Flexibility, Friendliness,
and Openness, this
Open Source
site offers free access to the Bard's work with the benefit of a
powerful search engine. It's great for research and it's easy, for
instance, to find all a character's speeches, with cues, if you're trying
to learn your lines.
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/Oxford English Dictionary
Wonderful online resource giving 'a
truly astounding picture of the
English language as an extraordinary living phenomenon' (Robert McCrum).
Over 500,000 words, the complete 23 volumes for £350 subscription. www.oed.com
If this is a bit steep, there's www.AskOxford.com,
but this is really just a consolation prize and too
lightweight for serious browsing.Project Gutenberg
Contains thousands of classic texts, available for download. The
site, which looks a bit dull, is backed by university departments and
other institutions all over the world and gives links to sites which will
help you download a Project Gutenberg text to an e-book.. http://www.gutenberg.org
PubList
Invaluable for research, a free site providing access to 150,000
journals, magazines and newsletters, more than half of them outside the
US. Includes 300 subject categories for searching. Although
you need to register and login, you go to the publisher's site to download
and pay. http://www.publist.com/
Rating Zone
Site which enables you to start rating material online (although you do
need to create an account before you can start).
www.ratingzone.com
Reference Desk
Not for profit American website with access to huge amount of reference
material, providing an essential reference tool.
www.refdesk.com
Science Fiction Foundation
British national academic body for the study of science fiction, with
library housed at Liverpool University.
http://www.sf-foundation.com
Screenonline
Impressive resource offering material on British film and
tv from the bfi archive, with many video clips and much other reference
material.
http://www.screenonline.org.u
The Site
Useful wide-ranging site one-stop advice and information website where
16-24 year-olds can find support and guidance on a range of issues. It has
a useful page for aspiring writers
and comments from author Stella Duffy.
www.thesite.org/
Start at Literary Criticism
Useful site for those looking for literary criticism on the net, as it
has a large number of links to these sites.
http://start.at/literarycriticism/
Technology, Entertainment and
Design (TED)
Online community
of several million focusing on exchanging and spreading ideas from some of
the world's greatest thinkers and doers.
http://www.ted.com For instance there is
a video clip of Amy Tan talking about her writing
www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_tan_on_creativity.htmlTextArc
Intriguing approach to text which uses 2,000 books from Project
Gutenberg to discover patterns and concepts in text though the
relationship and frequency of words, creating a visual representation of a
text on a single page. www.textarc.org
Tips for students studying abroad
Useful American checklist which gives a starting-point for any student
who is considering or planning to study abroad.
http://mobal.com/articles/5.html
The Top 10 of Everything
Barnes and Noble's shopping site offers an extraordinarily over-the-top
set of over 300 bestseller lists in section entitled
What America's Reading. When checked, 3 out of the History
Top 10 were editions of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 5
out of 10 on Relativity were by Albert Einstein and 6 out of 10 on 'Cat
Sleuths' were by Lilian Jackson Brown. Quite fascinating. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bestsellers/top10everything.asp
Typing without Repetitive Strain Injury
Rob Simpson's practical guide which
teaches you how to protect yourself from computer injury and to allow RSI
to heal. You can buy the e-book from his site.
http://www.rsifree.com/
University of London Library
The powerful search engine of the library is very well-indexed and
extremely useful for tracking down a list of books relating to a
particular topic.
The Victorian Dictionary
Lee Jackson's obsessive and fascinating site, packed with his
collection of amazing first-hand information about Victorian London -a
gift for the researcher. www.victorianlondon.org/
The Vocabula Review
American website dedicated to preserving the English language, which
has monthly journal available for small fee. http://www.vocabula.com/index.asp
Which Book?
Rather entertaining site which helps you to choose the right book.
so if you're looking for 'no sex' or Larger than life', give it a go.
www.whichbook.net/index.jsp
Wordplay
Excellent online screenwriting resource which offers over 40
informative essays on aspects of screenwriting from working screenwriters.
www.wordplayer.com
Worldwide Words
Topical and highly informative site which investigates new words added
to British English at www.worldwidewords.org
Xrefer
Impressive online reference library containing 120 extensively
cross-referenced books from 23 publishers and around 10 million
words. Subscription service, primarily intended for libraries.
http://www.xrefer.com/search.jsp
