The University Daily Kansan
Thursday, August 24, 2000
Online
Section B • Page 7
Assorted Web sites give students easy access to details
Wandering the Web
For a lot of college work, the grade depends on the details. Not just the ones pertinent to the topic, but also the ones that are completely tangential that show professors what a smart little student you are and make your writing enjoyable
Chris Hopkins
vabeditor@akansan.com
to read. For instance, you could quote Ernest Hemingway in a history paper about World War I or find the most up-to-date demographics for Mexico for an essay about contemporary Latin American literature.
The easiest way to check these
facts is through the Internet — it would be silly to hit the library for a single fact — but wading through the Web can be time consuming. Here are some sites I've found especially helpful.
Search engines
I usually use Yahoo for my basic searches, but that's mostly out of habit. Most basic search engines like Altavista and Infoseek are pretty much the same as far as I've found. I use askjeeves.com when I don't know what to search for or when the topic is too broad. A couple of other options to consider are www.northernlight.com and an all-in-one search engine. Northern Lights is research-focused, and the rankings are solid, but some documents cost money. An all-in-one
engine checks through several basic search engines. I use www.dogpile.com; others are allonesearch.com, search.com, and mamma.com.
The world at large
For maps, www.mapquest.com is hard to beat. For statistics, the CIA world fact book (www.odci.gov/cia/publications/f actbook/) has almost any number you could need, and all of it is fairly up-to-date. It's the same basic resource the CIA gives to its agents.
There are a lot of good reference sites on the Web, but there are three where you'll find a lot of information on one site: www.bartleby.com/reference,
The reference section
www.funkandwagnalls.com and www.ipl.org/ref. The last, the Internet Public Library, also contains a list of online documents from 250 different versions of Shakespeare plays to two full copies of War and Peace — all 361 chapters of it. It's a good place to check if you're desperate to save money on textbooks.
Elsewhere, the Britannica site, www.britannica.com, is as solid as the print version of the encyclopedia, and during my copy-editing internship I must have hit www.m-w.com, the Merriam-Webster site, at least twice a day for definitions or just for fun.
For foreign languages, dictionaries.travlang.com covers 16, and www.travlang.com/languages has audio pronunciations of 70 languages. Print versions are still superior, though.
Entertainment
Possibly the most obsessive site on the Internet, www.imdb.com is a ridiculously thorough database of movie info. It can direct you to audio files from The Usual Suspects or give you a list of movies that were filmed here in Douglas County. There isn't really a similar site for music that I know of. I use www.cdnnow.com. There isn't a clearing house for quotations, either, but you can find the most popular collections at bartleby's and www.quote land.com.
If you think I missed anything, email me a link to your favorite site at webeditor@kansan.com, and I may include reader recommendations in a later column.