Virtual Reference is a collection of online reference souces organized by subject. It includes dictionaries & thesauruses, encyclopedias and other resources that provide quick answers to your questions. These are Internet resources and are free to all users. For additional information TC3 students and staff are encouraged to use our e-mail reference service Ask a Librarian and our online Encyclopedias and Reference Books.
- Art and Architecture
- Biography
- Books & Publishing
- Business
- Citation Guides
- Colleges and Universities
- Countries
- Dictionaries
- Directories
- Education
- Electronic Texts
- Encyclopedias, Almanacs
- Events
- Government Resources
- Health
- Jobs
- Law
- Libraries
- Magazines and Journals
- Maps
- Movies
- Multimedia
- News & Newspapers
- Quotations
- Politics
- Recipes
- Regional Resources
- Search Engines and Subject Directories
- Statistics
- Time, Calendars, Holidays
- Weather
- Other Ready Reference Megasites
Art & Architecture
- Art & Architecture Thesaurus - Getty Research Institute
- Artcyclopedia: Fine Art Search Engine
- Finding Art Images Online
- Getty Union List of Artist Names
- Great Buildings Collection
- Structurae - International Database of Bridge and Structural Engineering
- Timeline of Art History - Metropolitan Museum of Art
Biography
- Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress - 1774 to present
- Biography.com
- Buscabiografias - "10.000 resúmenes biográficos en nuestra base de datos."
- Cambridge History of English and American Literature
- Catalog of American Portraits - National Portrait Gallery maintains images and data for more than 100,000 portraits in public and private collections. Use Portrait Search
- Congressional Pictorial Directory - "Color photograph of each member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. It also includes information about a Member of Congress' length of service, political party affiliations, and Congressional district."
- Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
- Internet Public Library: Biographies
- Library of Congress Authorities
- National Inventors Hall of Fame
Books & Publishing
- Google Book Search
- New York Times Books - Search book reviews since 1981
- Publisher's Weekly - Book reviews from 1987
Business
- County Business Patterns - U.S. Census Bureau
- Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) - Economic information and data for researchers interested in the U.S. economy. Has Economic Indicators back to 1948.
- North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
- Small Business Economy (pdf)
- ThomasNet - Companies & products
Colleges and Universities
- American Association of Community Colleges
- Braintrack University Index - Over 8,000 links to higher educational institutions in over 190 countries.
- Campus Newspapers
- Center for Measuring University Performance - With extensive data on top American Research Universities.
- College and University Rankings - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- College Board College Search
- College Opportunities Online Locator (COOL) - "See and compare profiles of nearly 7,000 colleges and universities across the nation." Part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)
- CollegeView College Search
- Fafsa - Has a Federal School Code Search
- General Education Online - International listing
- International Association of Universities - Has a Member Organisations List.
- Middle States Commission on Higher Education - With Institution Directory
- National Survey of Student Engagement - This survey of four-year college students has a list of participating institutions
- NCES School Search
- NewsDirectory: College Locator
- Princeton Review College Search
- SUNY Complete Campus List
- U.S. News & World Report College Rankings
- Web U.S. Higher Education
- Yahoo! Colleges and Universities
Countries
- Commonwealth - Has links to Members
- Country Studies/Area Handbooks
- Embassy.org - Foreign Embassies in the United States
- Foreign Consular Offices in the United States
- Human Development Index
- Market Research Library - Locate Country Commercial Guides created by the U.S. Commercial Service
- NationMaster.com
- Permanent Missions to the United Nations
- Portals to the World
- United Nations
- U.S. Department of States Background Notes
- U.S. Embassies, Consulates, and Diplomatic Missions - U.S. Department of State
- World Factbook
- World Health Organization
- World Leaders - Central Intelligence Agency
Dictionaries and Thesauri
- AltaVista Translations (Babel Fish)
- American Heritage Dictionary - With audio word pronunciations
- Cambridge Dictionaries Online
- Dictionary.com
- French-English Dictionary
- Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
- Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and Thesaurus
- Roget's II: The New Thesaurus
- Wordnet - Created by the Cognitive Science Laboratory, Princeton University, Wordnet is an "online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets."
- Wordsmith: A.Word.A.Day
- yourDictionary.com - Good source for foreign language dictionaries
Directories
- Anywho - With 800 Directory and Reverse LookUp
- GuideStar - National database of nonprofit organizations
- Langenberg - Person & Email Search
- Lycos Yellow Pages
- Idealist - 32,000 nonprofit and community organizations in 153 countries
- New York State Government Phone Directory
- Superpages - Yellow Pages
- Switchboard
- Yahoo People Search
- ZIP Code Look-Up - United States Postal Service
Education
Encyclopedias, Almanacs
Note: TC3 students and staff also have access to online Encyclopedias and Reference Books including the Gale Virtual Reference Library, a collection of over 250 academic encyclopedias, and almanacs.
- Acronym Finder
- Cambridge History of English and American Literature
- Canadian Encyclopedia
- Catholic Encyclopedia
- Columbia Encyclopedia
- Dictionary of the History of Ideas
- Encyclopedia Britannica - Access limited to TC3 students and employees.
- Encyclopedia Mythica
- Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
- Handbook of Texas Online
- Infoplease
- New Georgia Encyclopedia
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
- Utah History Encyclopedia
- Wikipedia - Users should be aware that Wikipedia is a collaborative project to which anyone may contribute and thus the information it contains may be incorrect, biased or intentionally misleading.
Events
Health
- AMA Doctor Finder
- American Hospital Association
- American Hospital Directory
- AVERT - HIV and AIDS statistics from around the world
- FDA Consumer Magazine - U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- HealthGrades - Research hospitals, nursing homes and physicians.
- Healthy People 2010
- Hospital Compare - U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides performance information on heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical infection prevention from participating hospitals through the end of 2005
- HospitalWeb
- MEDLINEplus
- Merck Manual
- Merck Manual of Medical Information
- National Center for Health Statistics
- National Mental Health Information Center - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) - Offers a number of online Mental Health Publications
- New York State Cancer Registry - Cancer statistics
- Nursing Homes in New York State - New York State Department of Health provides information on Selecting a Nursing Home in New York State: A Guide for Consumers and New York State Nursing Home Profile.
- Nutrition.gov
- OncoLink: A University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center Resource
- PubMed - Access to over 12 million MEDLINE citations back to the mid-1960's
- PubMed Central - U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
- RxList: The Internet Drug Index
Jobs
- America's Job Bank
- America's Career InfoNet
- Cornell University Office of Human Resources
- Cortland County Personnel/Civil Service
- Dictionary of Occupational Titles
- Employment in New York State Newsletter - New York State Department of Labor
- EssentialNYJobs.com - Job listings from Central New York employers
- Indeed.com - Job search engine
- Monster.com
- New York Job Source
- New York State Department of Civil Service
- New York State Department of Labor - They publish Employment in New York State
- New York's Job Bank
- Occupational Outlook Handbook - U.S. Department of Labor
- Project ION - Central Upstate New York region’s summer internship program
- SUNY Cortland Employment Opportunities
- SUNY Employment
- Tompkins Cortland Community College JobConnect
- Tompkins County Civil Service
- Tompkins Cortland Community College Job Opportunities
Law
Libraries
- Directory of New York State Library Systems and Members
- LibDex: the Library Index
- Library of Congress Classification Outline
- Library of Congress Online Catalog
- Libweb: Library Servers via WWW - "Over 7700 pages from libraries in 145 countries."
- Lib-web-cats - Directory of libraries worldwide
- Open Worldcat
- SUNY Library Web Sites
- Worldcat - Over 1 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide
Magazines and Journals
- Alternative Press Index Online Directory - With subject guide
- BioMed Central - Open access journals
- CUFTS Journal Title Search - Will locate title and ISSN only
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- FindArticles
- Free Medical Journals
- HighWire Press - "Largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1053 journals and 4,327,666 full text articles from over 130 scholarly publishers." (June 2007)
- Jake: Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment - Locates ISSN and database coverage for journal titles.
- NewsLink: Magazines
- PubMed - National Library of Medicine database includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's.
- PubMed Central - U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Maps & Geography
- Geographic Names Information System - U.S. Geological Survey. With Query Form
- Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names - Over 1.3 million place names
- Google Maps
- MapQuest
- National Geographic Map Machine
- National Map - Provides "public access to high-quality, geospatial data ." With Viewer.
- Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection
- Photo Finder - Digital aerial photos
- Princeton GIS Center
- Tiger Mapping Service - U.S. Census Bureau
- U.S. Census Bureau Maps and Cartographic Products
- U.S. Gazetteer
- Visible Earth - NASA provides satellite images of New York State including the upstate region.
- World Mapper
Movies
- Academy Awards Database
- Internet Movie Database
- Movie Review Query Engine
- New York Times: Movies - You can "browse or search 28,000 New York Times movie reviews. Included in the free review archive are all films reviewed since 1960."
- Rotten Tomatoes
News & Newspapers
Politics
- FactCheck - "Nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor 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."
- Open Secrets "Nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections and public policy."
Statistics
- American Statistical Association - The Related links section includes many useful resources, including statistical societies and Internet Resources.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics Handbook of Methods
- Bureau of Labor Statistics News Service
- Census 2000 Data for the State of New York
- Criminal Justice Statistics for New York State
- Digest of Education Statistics
- Economic Indicators - Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee by the Council of Economic Advisers. "Provides economic information on prices, wages, production, business activity, purchasing power, credit, money and Federal finance."
- Economic Statistics Briefing Room - The White House of President George W. Bush provides current values for the following economic indicators: employment, income, international, money, output, prices, production and trasnportation.
- FBI Uniform Crime Reports - Includes statistics for Crime in the United States, Hate Crime, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted and Age-Specific Arrest Rates and Race-Specific Arrest Rates for Selected Offenses, 1993-2001
- FedStats
- Fire in New York - Annual statistical report based on fire, accident, and burn injury reports from paid and volunteer departments provided by the New York State Department of State Office of Fire Prevention and Control.
- Health, United States - National Center for Health Statistics
- Issues in Labor Statistics - U.S. Department of Labor
- Mental Health, United States, 2004 - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
- Monthly Labor Review - U.S. Department of Labor
- National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
- New York State Department of Labor - Workforce Industry Data
- New York State Statistical Yearbook
- OFFSTATS: Official Statistics on the Web
- Social Science Data on the Internet
- Social Security Programs Throughout the World - Data for Europe, Asia and the Pacific, Africa and The Americas
- State and County Quick Facts
- State of the World's Children - UNICEF
- Statemaster - "Statistical database which allows you to research and compare a multitude of different data on US states."
- Statistical Abstract of the United States
- UNESCO Institute for Statistics
- United Nations Statistics Division
- United States Bureau of Justice Statistics
- United States Census Bureau - The site is searchable and provides an index.
- WHO Statistical Information System
- World Economic and Social Survey - United Nations
- Yearbook of Immigration Statistics
- Youth Indicators, 2005 Trends in the Well-Being of American Youth
Time, Calendars, Holidays
- Official U.S. Time - Provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and its military counterpart, the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO).
- Virtual Perpetual Calendars
- U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock Time
- U.S. Naval Observatory Data Services - Sunrise, sunset, moon phases, eclipses etc.
- World Clock
Weather
- National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) - "World's largest archive of climate data."
- National Weather Service Eastern Region Headquarters - With Binghamton office.
- USGS Real-Time Water Data - Provides a Water Watch: Locations above flood stage and Real-Time Data for New York: Streamflow and has data on river water levels including:
- Beaverkill at Cooks Falls NY
- Chemung River at Chemung NYChenango River near Chenango Forks NY
- Delaware River at Callicoon NY
- Delaware River, East Branch, at Fish's Eddy NY
- Delaware River, East Branch, at Harvard NY
- Delaware River, West Branch, at Hancock NY
- Delaware River, West Branch, at Hale Eddy NY
- Fall Creek near Ithaca NY
- Mohawk River at Cohoes NY
- Mohawk River near Little Falls NY
- Otselic River at Cincinnatus NY
- Susquehanna River near Waverly NY
- Susquehanna River at Vestal NY
- Tioughnioga River at Cortland NY
- Weather Channel
Other Ready Reference Megasites
- Academic Info
- BUBL Information Service
- Google Directory: Reference
- Infomine: Scholarly Internet Resource Collections
- Internet Public Library
- Intute - Database created by network of UK universities contains 116847 records.
- Librarians' Internet Index
- Martindale's 'The Reference Desk'
- Refdesk.com
- Scout Report
- Virtual Reference Desk
Last update: Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Tompkins Cortland Community College Library
P.O. Box 139 · 170 North Street · Dryden, New York 13053
1.888.567.8211, Ext. 4363 — 1.607.844.8222, Ext. 4363
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