Best Free Reference

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, “your pathway to career success” assists in exploring careers, writing résumés, interviewing, and locating jobs. Though brought to the web by the State of Minnesota, the site provides links to other states and to nearly 2000 OneStopCareer Centers nationwide.

MapLight is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that "connects data on campaign contributions, politicians, votes, industries, companies, and more to show patterns of influence that could never be seen before." The result is visual, easy-to-understand data that shows how campaign contributions influence voting patterns in the US Congress. The intended audience is American taxpayers and consumers, as well as students, researchers, and journalists. Users can view the data in various ways: by bill, by legislator, by company, and by interest groups. Contributions data comes from the Center for Responsive Politics. The site is well-designed and easy-to-use, and is an excellent resource for researching the influence of campaign contributions and promoting government transparency and accountability. The video tour of how the website works is worth checking out: http://maplight.org/us-congress/guide/video-tour. There's also Maplight California, Maplight Wisconson, and Maplight Los Angeles.

“A world of information” is at your fingertips by browsing data series or searching by keyword more than 55 million records from the databases of the UN on employment, education, energy, environment, health, population, refugees, and much more.

The reading of Wallace's paper “On the Tendency of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type,” along with unpublished fragments from the writings of Charles Darwin on July 1, 1858, before the Linnean Society of London gained Wallace lasting fame as the “co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection.” Librarian Charles Smith demonstrates through this site rich with full-text transcriptions of Wallace's writings that he was so much more.

This site, directed by John van Wyhe at the University of Cambridge, began in 2002 to assemble all of Darwin's published and unpublished writings. The result is the largest Darwin resource ever created, with 75,914 pages of searchable text and 184,561 images. With the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species in 2009, the 70 million users who already visit the site should swell drastically.

This collection of primary resources about the culture, literature, and history of the American South was created by and is primarily from the holdings of the University Libraries of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Read first-person narratives of women, slaves, and soldiers; discover Southern literary works dating from the Colonial period; and listen to interviews on topics such as civil rights and politics.

An excellent example of a well-designed site on the history, culture, and geography of a U.S. state. Developed by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and Auburn University, it includes enhanced multimedia content. Use the site to search for the “Selma to Montgomery March” of 1965, or look for information on To Kill a Mockingbird, set in fictional Maycomb between 1932 and 1935.

With full-text access to over 3500 historical documents from Lincoln's Illinois years (1830–61), including writings and speeches, this collaborative project based at Northern Illinois University is one of the richest online resources about our 16th President. Here you can read or listen to his biography and view vignettes of his life through text, images, and videos.

The publisher of Poetry magazine has developed a web site that exists to share the discovery and celebration of poetry. The full text of Poetry from 1998 is available, as is a historical index that dates to its 1912 origin. Use the Poetry Tool to search for information about poets or for poems by title, author, first line, or occasion.

Ever wonder where the news outlets get the monthly housing starts, or how they learn whether retail trade sales are up or down? These data are released like clockwork by the U.S. Census Bureau. The former site has info on current indicators and historic time series. The latter keeps employment and earnings data and price indexes.

MRQE is the ultimate place “where people talk about movies.” Relaunched with expanded content, it's the largest online database of movie reviews, partnering with leading movie blogs to collect and make searchable their content. From Slumdog Millionaire to Sundance, it's all here.