Web Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Large collection of poems listed by author nationality.  Also offers poets the ability to submit their poems and get them published online.

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/

A huge collection of classic texts, with an academic and educational bent (includes their own study guides) http://www.bibliomania.com/

Website of the Biography Channel - useful if you're researching celebrities, but not good on more serious biographical subjects. www.biography.com

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

Website which links to competitions across the globe, including lots of literary ones and other competitions for writers. www.competearoundtheworld.com/index.php

Produced by the British CouncilThis government-supported body is best-known for its activities overseas, but in fact provides a great deal of information which is of interest to writers. http://www.britishcouncil.org/
Their UK Literature Festivals provides a full listing, but this is only as up to date as the information supplied by the individual festival organizers. in association with BookTrust, this is an elegant but browsable site with pages on contemporary British writers of a literary bent. Short articles (some excellent) and lists of books.

The 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.  Update: this seems to have been downgraded, which is a shame, but it still contains much useful information, although it may not have so many newer writers.

CourtSystem.org is home to tens of thousands of US courts, jails, prisons, police departments, sheriffs, and district attorneys with easy to access contact information including addresses, hours, phone numbers, and services provided by each office. A very useful site for research purposes.

Covering mainly the US but with some international and UK news, this is a vast resource of education news from K-12 and higher education policy and politics all the way to education technology. Comprehensive, stimulating and up-to-date. www.educationnews.org/

Free online encyclopedia offered by eLibrary at www.encyclopedia.com

An educational resource put together by a group of recent college graduates with a passion for English. Drawing from they university and employment experiences, they offer useful materials for those engaged in the study of English from high school students to college students to post-graduates. Also features the Ultimate Grammar guide and the Guide to Technical Writing. www.onlineenglishdegree.com/

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/

Annenberg Political 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

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

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

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

Robust and often entertaining American online guide from Jack Lynch, offering plenty to chew over. http://www.andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/index.html

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

Subscription site offered by publisher of copyright and patent magazines which has updates on copyright issues affecting books and software. www.IPWorldonline.com

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

A superb index of literary links - Libraries Association

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

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/

America’s largest dictionary offered online, with access to 1,800 other dictionaries in 230 languages. www.m-w.com/home.htm

America’s largest dictionary offered online, with access to 1,800 other dictionaries in 230 languages. www.m-w.com/homComplete 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

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

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/

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

A substantial collection of literary classics in digital form, in the public domain and freely available to all http://www.literature.org/authors/

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/

A masive free database of last names of people in the US. It contains erecords of over 162,000 names and the database has used AI and Our Public Records programming to help users find information such as origins and genealogy. It's completely free to use.

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.

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

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

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/

Site which enables you to start rating material online (although you do need to create an account before you can start). www.ratingzone.com

Not for profit American website with access to huge amount of reference material, providing an essential reference tool. www.refdesk.com

British national academic body for the study of science fiction, with library housed at Liverpool University. http://www.sf-foundation.com

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.uk

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/

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.html

Intriguing approach to text which uses 2,000 books from 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

Offers many free classics downloadable on Adobe Acrobat, partly from 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

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

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/

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

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/

American website dedicated to preserving the English language, which has monthly journal available for small fee. http://www.vocabula.com/index.asp

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

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/

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. http://www.london.ac.uk/2894.html?&no_cache=1&sword_list[]=library

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

Excellent online screenwriting resource which offers over 40 informative essays on aspects of screenwriting from working screenwriters. www.wordplayer.com

Topical and highly informative site which investigates new words added to British English at www.worldwidewords.org