Reference Help Online Assistance: Chat reference help from the San Diego Public Library, Tuesdays (10-11am) & Wednesdays (11am-Noon). For live assistance outside of these hours, try the Library's AskNow 24/7 Reference Service or Ask the Library service.
Ready Reference Tools
Articles & Databases - The Library's collection of specialized resources for periodicals, business,
literature, the Library Catalog, and more. A valid San Diego Public Library card is required for remote (home) access.
Bartleby - Great books online, encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus and hundreds more.
Calisphere - Includes primary documents about California and history including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, and more. Calisphere is a service of the University of California.
Chronicling America (Newspapers) - Search historic American newspapers, from 1880-1922, and also search for general publication information about all U.S. newspapers from 1690 to the present. From the U.S. Library of Congress.
College Navigator - U.S. Department of Education College Navigator site provides for "comparison shopping" for people seeking information about the cost of higher education, linked to over 7,000 colleges and universities. Search, compare, export, etc. Spanish language version of this resource is also available.
Concise Britannica - A one-volume encyclopedia that includes 25,000 short entries.
ERIC - Education Resources Information Center, provides bibliographic records of education literature, plus a growing collection of fulltext. 1966-present.
European Online Library - Emphasis on multimedia, with more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films. Many European and other languages available.
Google Scholar (Beta) - Search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
GPO Access - U.S. Government Printing Office portal, all three branches of government.
Information Please - Online dictionary, Internet encyclopedia, atlas and almanac reference.
Internet Library for Librarians - A portal designed for librarians to locate Internet resources related to their profession.
Internet Public Library - A subject-based directory of quality Internet sites and resources.
Google searches a multi-billion record index, and provides results ranked by the frequency with which sites are linked to by other sites on the Web. Other major Google sites include Images, Groups, and News. Offers Advanced Search.
Windows Live Search is a Microsoft search engine, and provides indexing for Web sites and content.
Metacrawler searches a number of different indexes, compares the results, and ranks them. Another good metasearch, with coverage of other languages, is Ixquick.
Online Assistance: Chat reference help from the San Diego Public Library, Tuesdays (10-11am) & Wednesdays (11am-Noon). For live assistance outside of these hours, try the Library's AskNow 24/7 Reference Service or Ask the Library service. 
