Directory of Online Reference Sources

Online Reference Resources

This page contains links to online reference resources

Some of the reference sources on this page require a paid subscription. However, you can access many online reference sources from home for free by using your local library's subscription. As an example, see what Surrey Libraries provide. (You will need your library card number and PIN). If you are not sure if your public library is on the web, you can check out this list.

Other reference pages on this website:

Library Management Publications
Medical Publications

If you are looking for other resources, please search the rest of our site:

Blackwell Synergy

Blackwell Synergy, is the home of over 1 million articles from over 850 journals.

Britannica

Members have unlimited access to the full, updated content of the 32-volume Encyclopćdia Britannica, plus Britannica's Student and Concise encyclopedias, You pay a membership fee, but have an advertising-free environment

CIA factbook

The World Factbook is prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency for the use of US Government officials. The Factbook is in the ppublic domain and contains information on everything from population to climate, life expectancy to natural resources and territorial disputes.

Citizendium

The Citizendium, a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. They have over 4500 articles and hundreds of contributors. They will avoid calling the Citizendium an "encyclopedia" until the project's editors feel comfortable putting their reputations behind that description.

Digital Universe

The vision of the Digital Universe is to organize the sum total of human knowledge and make it available to everyone. It is an ever-growing array of commercial-free portals mapping the highest-quality Internet destinations, as recommended by experts recognized in their fields. These experts review public contributions, create context and attest to the reliability, integrity, and accuracy of the portals.

ibiblio

Drawing together a range of global public-domain academic resources (of varying quality). Home to one of the largest "collections of collections" on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies.

LoveToKnow Classic Encyclopedia

This free Online Encyclopedia is based on what many consider to be the best encyclopedia ever written: the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in 1911.

National Archives

The National Archives is the official archive for England, Wales and the central UK government, containing 900 years of history from Domesday Book to the present, with records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to recently created digital files and archived websites.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

56,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2004. You can access the whole Oxford DNB from home for free by using your local library's subscription. (Most UK public libraries subscribe.)

Refdesk

Refdesk is free and family friendly. The site is the single best source for facts on the Net; a one-stop site for all things Internet: news, weather, sports, reference, encyclopedia, facts on file, dictionaries and encyclopedias, tutorials, search engines. The site has 20,000+ quality links and links to all manner of free dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Allmusic

Scholar

Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

Science Direct

ScienceDirect is a digital library of scientific, technical and medical information. It offers more than a quarter of the world's scientific, medical and technical information online.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the world. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on some 9,000,000 articles in more than 250 languages.