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Reference Help
Ask Now 24/7 Reference Service image 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Law Help California - Helping low-income Californians solve legal problems.
  • LibrarySpot - Award-winning reference and research site for libraries, reference, almanacs and more.
  • Public Law Library - Legal links and information, eight languages, from Council of California Law Libraries
  • Refdesk.com - Free source of facts, reference links, and more.
  • United Nations (Official Documents) - Free searchable database of UN documents.
  • United States Code (searchable) - From Cornell University's Law School's Legal Information Institute.
  • Vital Records - Where to write in states and territories for vital records.
Featured Links
Kids

General Web Search

Google Logo
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.
Yahoo! Logo
Yahoo! records all submitted Web sites submitted in a Web directory. Also see the local Yahoo! for San Diego, and People Search. Other major Yahoo! sites include Images and News. Offers Advanced Search.
MSN Search is a Microsoft search engine, and provides indexing for Web sites and content. MSN also offers searching for news, and more. Offers Search Builder for advanced searching.
metacrawler Logo
Metacrawler searches a number of different indexes, compares the results, and ranks them. Another good metasearch, with coverage of other languages, is Ixquick.

Other Languages

AltaVista Logo
AltaVista indexes sites by keyword and covers 25 languages at present. It also features a translation service.
Yahoo en Espanol Logo
Yahoo! en Español includes a directory of Web sites in Spanish as well as extensive original content. Two other Spanish language portals are Starmedia and MSN.com's http://www.yupimsn.com/. The latter gives four doorways to Hispanic and Spanish-language content, for Latin America, Mexico, Hispanic-speakers in the United States, and Spain.

Help and Advanced Searching

Try NoodleQuest for help in selecting an appropriate search tool. Develop the optimum Web-based search strategy, based on your research topic.

For country specific searching, and regional geographic searching, try out Country Search Engines and Regional Search Engines.

Information literacy: Try NoodleTools for getting help on the best search suggestions for your information needs.

Tutorials

Advanced Searching Help

Search syntax and best tools chart for major search engines and directories, from Infopeople. Also, see their Best Search Engines Quick Guide.

Indexes of specialized search sites and database content:


For more about search engines, see Search Engine Watch



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