Jim Karpen Tips

March 2001

This is another amazing-resources-on-the-Internet column. We'll cover quick access to facts, reference works online--and a site devoted to hoaxes.

Librarians are often called upon to produce facts quickly and have long had at their fingertips a range of useful tools. Now a librarian, Gary Price from George Washington University, has put together a collection of Internet-based tools that give you "fast facts" on a wide range of topics.

The categories are listed alphabetically by topic, from agriculture, banking, and the CIA to weather, world population, and zoology. I checked the Iowa category and found just one reference work: the Iowa Redbook, the Iowa Official Register put out by the Iowa Secretary of State.

Sounds boring, but it's absolutely filled with information. Many of the links are what you would expect: listing of senators and representatives by district, justices, judges, listing of state agencies, local government links, county officials, stats on Iowa counties, maps of senate districts--and scores more.

And some of the information you might not expect, such as a link to information about the origin and naming of Iowa counties and about the Underground Railroad. Also included are links to travel and tourism, art and culture, educational institutions, election results, and much more.

All in all, this is a good example of the sort of resource you'll find on Gary Price's fast facts collection.

For a nice collection of reference works, check our Bartelby. We've no doubt mentioned this site before, but it just keeps adding more reference works, as well as classic fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. One of the richest resources is the Columbia Encyclopedia, which has just been updated to the 2001 edition. The new version has faster full-text searching and includes an index of over 17,000 biographical entries. As with other online encyclopedias, there is also multimedia cross-referencing.

Some of the other major reference works available are the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, the King James Bible, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Gray's Anatomy, and the World Factbook. You'll find an array of English handbooks and usage manuals, which can be real handy for writers. The search function on the site is flexible and useful. You can search the whole site, specific categories such as reference, or specific works such as the Columbia Encyclopedia.

And now the fun site: the Museum of Hoaxes. These are all actual hoaxes that have occurred over the years and that have been reported in the media. The author organizes them by date and by category. Each hoax is on a separate page and is a retelling based on media reports.

© 2001 by Jim Karpen, Ph.D. (#258)