Trust a Librarian

The Internet is today’s library, but who do you ask for advice on which sources are trustworthy or not for you liberal arts research paper? YOU ASK THE LIBRARIAN!

You Cannot Trust Wikipedia

As a librarian, I can tell you to trust only those comprehensive online reference sites which simply offer information which has been previously published in hard copy format (i.e. books, diaries, journals, newspapers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.). These published works have been reviewed by independent and knowledgeable scholars before publication and have stood up to close scrutiny. Reliance on anything less is dangerous.

Wikipedia appears to be the first reference site to which high school students turn for a quick, last minute paper. The trouble is that anyone can enter information onto that site. Nobody officially acts as the gatekeeper to prevent nonsense and false information from showing up. For example, the United States’ presidential candidates have had to have their campaign personnel monitor for abusively false entries. As soon as they delete false information, however, more shows up!

There exist far too many sites which claim to be trustworthy providers of academic sources. Most of them have merely jumped onto the internet bandwagon to collect advertising revenue from their commercial sponsors. They are shoddy and of limited scope. Some advertising is, of course, necessary in order to make the website pay for itself, but stick to the comprehensive internet sites which are reliable.

Online reference sites devoted to the general theme of liberal arts dominate the industry. With only one exception, the best sites are comprehensive and offer their services free of charge. I’ve listed, below, the only sites which you should trust.

The Trusty Online Sources

QUESTIA

Questia is the lone exception I mentioned. At Questia, all content is previously published from reputable commercial and academic publishers. Their library offers reliable, trustworthy online content that is difficult to find on the internet because it licenses the digital copyrights from over 259 authoritative publishers, like John Wiley & Sons and Oxford University Press. It contains over 67,000 full-text books and 1,500,000 journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. You can read books from cover-to-cover, and your search results are identified down to specific pages

BARTLEBY

Bartleby is uncluttered and is full of the best reference sources. It is also super easy to use. While testing out this website I quickly and easily accessed a book on the Harvard Classics link and could have read the entire thing from the comfort of my laptop!

You can access the convenient author, title and subject indexes. Some of the handy links are: the Columbia Encyclopedia, American Heritage Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, American Heritage Book of English Usage, Columbia World of Quotations, Oxford Shakespeare, Strunk’s Elements of Style, World Factbook, Columbia Gazetteer, King James Bible, The Harvard Classics and The Shelf of Fiction. This reference site is the preeminent internet publisher of literature, reference and verse.

THE FREE LIBRARY

The Free Library is a ‘no-nonsense’ reference site, with its topical references listed like an index. It is an invaluable research tool and the fastest, easiest way to locate useful information on virtually any topic. All that’s missing is the librarian! Explore the site through a keyword search, or simply browse the enormous collection of literary classics and up-to-date periodicals to find exactly what you need.