Jacket Homepage
The Internet Public Library at the University of Michigan School of Information in Ann Arbor, MI, offers an Online Literary Criticism Collection which contains 1,454
critical and biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by literary period, as well as thousands of other book, newspaper and magazine references
on other topics. Free, at http://www.ipl.org/
The site called “My Virtual Reference Desk” is free, and it's chockablock full of encyclopædias, dictionaries, atlases, almanacs, thesauruses and reference books of all
kinds, at http://www.refdesk.com/index.html
But the king gorilla is Martindale's The Reference Desk, at http://www.martindalecenter.com/ — a gigantic free
home-made collection of Internet links for researching everything from the time in Uzbekistan to how to tie the non-slip climber's knot to poetry magazines to cellular biology to the shipping
news.
Digital Librarian at http://www.digital-librarian.com/
Useful links for research, especially for academic research.
Itools at http://www.itools.com/
Dozens of translating programs and tools for over a dozen languages, thesaurus, dictionaries.
Teldir.com at http://www.infobel.com/teldir
Links to lists of telephone and email and fax addresses for more than a hundred countries around the world.
A full dimension larger than reference sites are the SEARCH ENGINES, sites which allow you to find any site on earth, including reference sites! Jacket's current favourite is Google Search at http://www.google.com/ which is fast and very clever, and seems to know exactly what you want. (Anyone remember the
unimaginably large number known as a googleplex? That's how many sites they trawl.)
CompletePlanet at http://www.completeplanet.com/
Tens of thousands of search engines, facts and databases
Search Engine Colossus at http://www.searchenginecolossus.com/
A search engines that finds local search engines in nearly two hundred different countries.
Another useful old favorite is ProFusion, free at http://profusion.ittc.ukans.edu/ at the University in Kansas, which takes your
search details and submits them to half a dozen different search engines, presenting you with a brief summary of each of the thousands of answers they give you. This sure ain't Kansas, Toto!
Looking up POET and MONEY on ProFusion gave Jacket fifty search results, by the way, including an intense and mournful fragment of free verse on
the theme of poverty by the immensely rich L. Ron Hubbard (the inventor of Scientology), and a list of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, including the immensely rich Seamus Heaney. Seamus
Heaney and L.Ron Hubbard... hmmm... the Internet certainly throws up some fascinating connections!
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/00/reference-sites.shtml