General Information
Ready Reference - All Subjects
The newest content on the Internet comes from the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britanica. On-line searchers now have free access to the encyclopedia. Heavy Internet traffic problems may cause users some frustration at first. On-line real content is usually worth the trouble, however. Roget's Thesaurus on-line lets users find the same synonym and antonym information the over-sized book holds. Encyclopedia.com provides an electronic version of the Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. Microsoft's Encarta offers a free web-based encyclopedia. Information Please Almanac offers statistics, timelines, and brief descriptions on a large variety of items. The Virtual Reference Desk provides a one-stop gateway to the most often asked questions at any library. AskJeeves offers the most unique search engine on the web. Jeeves translates your questions into queries its database can parse. Jeeves returns alternate queries most like the one posed by the user. Searchers then choose the nearest match to their original question or can forward their question to a researcher at the AskJeeves site.
Current time for any place on Earth is available, thanks to the U.S. Naval Observatory. The U.S. Naval Observatory performs an essential scientific role for the Navy, for the Department of Defense and for the United States. Its mission is to determine the positions and motions of celestial objects, to provide astronomical data, to measure the Earth's rotation and to maintain the Master Clock for the United States. A World Clock is available to find the current time in 134 cities around the globe.
The CIA publishes a comprehensive country-by-country description of geography, political and population information, and current events in its Factbook. The CIA includes maps, consumer information, information on the foreign government, U.S. Embassy locations, national holidays and other information especially important to travellers. The factbook is updated yearly. Travel Warnings are issued by the U.S. State Department to alert travellers about changes in safety for Americans travelling abroad. MapQuest allows users to generate the map of a location using city, street or zip code input as the focus of the map. The University of Texas maintains the Perry-Castenada Library Map Collection of world maps. A large number of historical maps have been digitized at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Map Collection.
Earth.com presents this simple site. It features a monthly calendar based on the month/year you input. The calendar includes historical alterations, such as the Gregorian correction to our calendar in 1752. A World Holiday Calendar listing national holidays and festivals for 200 countries and the United States is available at this site.
Current forecasts can be found at a number of sites on the web. At Intellicast regional radar is updated two times per hour. The national satelite and radar loops are updated every hour. The Weather Channel provides both current weather forecasts and conditions as well as news-making weather stories. The National Weather Service sponsors the Interactive Weather Information Network. This web site provides in-depth climatic data in textual, satelite and radar images.
A variety of phone directories exist on-line. Switchboard includes both white and yellow page lookups, the GTE Superpages site includes the option to search 'nationwide' instead of just by state and a reverse directory (called 555-1212) is also available on-line. A comprehensive list of the available on-line telephone directories is located at Telephone Directories on the Web.
Information about current and pending U.S. legislation is available at Thomas the Congressional web server dedicated to legislative activities. Other federally-generated information can be searched through the Fedworld gateway. At the Fedworld site, users can also use the Govbot U.S. Business Advisor's gateway to search for information.
Nebraska legislation can be accessed through the Unicameral site. Other state information is located on-line at the Nebraska@Onlinesite.
The OneLook site provides a jump-off page for hundreds of general, business, medical, law, and subject dictionaries. Bucknell University gathered a "Web of On-Line Dictionaries" at their site, which includes multiple language look-up capabilities for over 150 languages. Roget's Thesaurus site gives users an easy option for finding synonyms and antonyms.
The Library of Congress site serves as the interface between the vast amount of information contained in the physical Library of Congress and the indexes and catalogs for the collection. The Library of Congress site has a growing amount of digitized information accessible through your web browser.