LibGuides: Useful Websites for Students: Reference Resources

Subjects

Abbreviations.com Abbreviations.com holds hundreds of thousands of entries organized by a large variety of categories from computing and the Web to governmental, medicine and business and it is maintained and expanded by a large community of passionate editors.
Acronym Finder Acronym Finder is the world's largest and most comprehensive dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. Combined with the Acronym Attic, Acronym Finder contains more than 5 million acronyms and abbreviations.
GovSpeak This guide lists acronyms and abbreviations commonly used by the United States federal government. Each acronym is defined and links to the home page (or best alternative) of the identified department, agency, office, program or publication.

Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine collects and curates objective data; implements known models, methods, and algorithms; and makes it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything

Calendars Through the Ages Calendars Through the Ages is one of several exhibits in the WebExhibits online museum, all of which promote discovery through multidisciplinary approaches that support all learning styles. WebExhibits is a public service of the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement (IDEA).
Earth Calendar
U.S. Time Zone Clock This public service is cooperatively provided by the two time agencies of the United States: a Department of Commerce agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO). Readings from the clocks of these agencies contribute to world time, called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

CareerOneStop CareerOneStop is… Your source for employment information and inspiration The place to manage your career Your pathway to career success Tools to help job seekers, students, businesses and career professionals Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor
Career Outlook
Employ Florida The Employ Florida Marketplace is your one-stop online resource for job listings, education and training opportunities, career building assistance and much more.
Employment Projections (EP) The Employment Projections (EP) program develops information about the labor market for the Nation as a whole for 10 years in the future.
Florida Job Search Resources These resources will help you research job openings, create a great resume, apply for jobs, and research labor market trends.
Florida Shines MyCareerShines is a comprehensive education and career planning system that will help you succeed in the increasingly competitive global economy. You will learn about yourself, discover the many options and opportunities for your future, and gain access to the information and tools to achieve your goals.
indeed: One Search. All Jobs. Search job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages.
Monthly Labor Review Monthly Labor Review is the principal journal of fact, analysis, and research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor. Each month, economists, statisticians, and experts from the Bureau join with private sector professionals and state and local government specialists to provide a wealth of research in a wide variety of fields—the labor force, the economy, employment, inflation, productivity, occupational injuries and illnesses, wages, prices, and more.
National Compensation Survey The National Compensation Survey is a National Compensation Survey establishment survey of employee salaries, wages, and benefits. The survey produces the Employment Cost Index (ECI) as well as the Employment Cost for Employee Compensation (ECEC) along with employee benefit incidence and provision data.
Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) provides information on what workers do; the work environment; education, training, and other qualifications; pay; the job outlook; information on state and area data; similar occupations; and sources of additional information, for 329 occupational profiles covering about 83 percent of the jobs in the economy.
STEMcareer.com
ZipRecruiter Search, browse, apply for jobs.

College Affordability and Transparency Center Here you will find information about tuition and net prices at postsecondary institutions. The site highlights institutions with high and low tuition and fees as well as high and low net prices (the price of attendance minus grant and scholarship aid). It also shows institutions where tuition and fees and net prices are increasing at the highest rates.
College Navigator Here you can search for and compare colleges on all sorts of criteria including costs, majors offered, size of school, campus safety, and graduation rates.
College Scorecard College Scorecards make it easier for you to search for a college that is a good fit for you. You can use the College Scorecard to find out more about a college’s affordability and value so you can make more informed decisions about which college to attend.
Federal Student Aid Federal Student Aid is responsible for managing the student financial assistance programs authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965. These programs provide grants, loans, and work-study funds to students attending college or career school.
FloridaShines FloridaShines works with the state's 40 colleges and universities and other partners to help you succeed in school and beyond. Check your transcript. Register for an online course. Search libraries across the state. And a whole lot more. All designed to help you shine. FloridaShines - Florida's Student Hub of Innovative Educational Services - is a service of the Florida Virtual Campus.
Peterson's Planner The Peterson’s databases includes over 50,000 accredited Schools and Programs, and over 5,000 Scholarships. Use our search tools to find the school, program, or scholarship that’s right for you.

Better Business Bureau BBB helps people find and recommend businesses, brands and charities they can trust.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a 21st century agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, by consistently and fairly enforcing those rules, and by empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives.
Consumer Product Information Database (cpid) This database links over 15,000 consumer brands to health effects from Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) provided by manufacturers and allows scientists and consumers to research products based on chemical ingredients.
ConsumerSearch.com We analyze all the reviews so you can choose products you'll love.
Federal Trade Commission The FTC is the only federal agency with both consumer protection and competition jurisdiction in broad sectors of the economy.
Fueleconomy.gov The official U.S. government source for fuel economy information.
Kelley Blue Book Kelley Blue Book provides detailed information concerning automobile values.
U.S. Department of Agriculture

Green’s Dictionary of Slang Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang
Oxford Dictionaries
Vocabulary.com Dictionary By no means just a dictionary, this site offers vocabulary lists, a dictionary, and word challenges. They all work together to set a thorough, practical, and fun grounding in learning new words. Vocabulary lists have been created from items such as popular movies, historical documents, just for fun, political speeches, literature, or test prep. The challenge section quizzes you on word meanings, tracks words missed and adds them to a list of words being learned. All uses of a word are defined and usage examples given.

Florida Digital Newspaper Library The Florida Digital Newspaper Library exists to provide access to the news and history of Florida.
Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942 Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections is a multiformat ethnographic field collection documenting African-American, Arabic, Bahamian, British-American, Cuban, Greek, Italian, Minorcan, Seminole, and Slavic cultures throughout Florida.
Florida Memory Florida Memory is a digital outreach program providing free online access to select archival resources from collections housed in the State Library and Archives of Florida. Florida Memory digitizes materials that illuminate the state's history and culture.
Florida Online Journals Florida Online Journals is a scholarly journals publishing program hosted by the Florida Virtual Campus.
Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship.
Sanborn® Fire Insurance Company Maps of Florida The 'Sanborn® Fire Insurance Company Maps of Florida' comprise a collection of more than 300 bibliographic units in more than 3,000 map sheets.

Burke’s Peerage Freely accessible sections include: Families, which provides access to Burke's Peerage Family Index, Burke's Peerage General Armory, Burke's Peerage Colonial Gentry, and Burke's Peerage Distinguised Familes; Genealogies, which includes sovereign and distinguished families of Europe; Heraldry, which consists of a glossary of heraldic terms and selected British coats of arms; and Index, which includes access to the Roll of the Baronets.
Grand Comics Database (GCD) The Grand Comics Database (GCD) is a nonprofit, internet-based organization of international volunteers dedicated to building an open database covering all printed comics throughout the world.
Library of Congress Digital Collections Access to print, pictorial and audio-visual collections and other digital services
Library of Congress Research Guides Research guides to the Library's general collections of books and periodicals, as well as general subject guides prepared by Library of Congress reference librarians, are listed below.
National Academies Press The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy.
Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.
RAND Research RAND's research and analysis address issues that impact people around the world including security, health, education, sustainability, growth, and development.
Standard Reference Materials The National Institute of Standards and Technology supplies industry, academia, government, and other users with over 1200 reference materials of the highest quality and metrological value.
WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, and more.
WorldCat WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online.
World Digital Library In June 2005, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed establishing a World Digital Library to UNESCO. Four years later, the World Digital Library (WDL) was launched to the international public. The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary source materials from cultures around the world.Featuring high-quality digital items reflecting the cultural heritage of all UNESCO member countries, WDL includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural artifacts. The WDL interface is available in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The objectives of the WDL are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
World Factbook The World Factbook, produced for US policymakers and coordinated throughout the US Intelligence Community, marshals facts on every country, dependency, and geographic entity in the world.

BASE BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
CORE CORE is the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission. We serve the global network of repositories and journals by increasing the discoverability and reuse of open access content. We provide solutions for content management, discovery and scalable machine access to research. Our services support a wide range of stakeholders, specifically researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders and companies from a diverse range of sectors including but not limited to innovators, AI technology companies, digital library solutions and pharma.

Exploring Florida Maps The Exploring Florida Maps collection contains approximately 6,000 historic and contemporary Florida maps that support all subject areas in the K-12 classroom.
Google Earth
Google Maps
Google Mars
Google Moon
Google Sky
Library of Congress Online Maps Collection
Mapire Mapire presents detailed and accurate historical maps of several countries in an innovative way: Great military surveys Maps of countries and cities Thematic maps
Old Maps Online The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.
Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps Online Checklist provides a searchable database of the fire insurance maps published by the Sanborn Map Company housed in the collections of the Geography and Map Division. The online checklist is based upon the Library's 1981 publication Fire Insurance Maps in the Library of Congress and will be continually updated to reflect new acquisitions.
U.S. Geological Survey National Map The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation.
University of Texas Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

American Archive of Public Broadcasting The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is an unprecedented initiative to preserve and make accessible significant historical public television and radio programs, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media content before it is lost to posterity. To date, approximately 68,000 items comprising 40,000 hours of programming from the 1950s to the present have been digitized for long-term preservation.
BBC Archive
C-Span C-SPAN covers LIVE gavel-to-gavel floor proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives.C-SPAN2 covers LIVE gavel-to-gavel floor proceedings of the U.S. Senate. C-SPAN3 covers public affairs events, congressional hearings and history programming.When the House and Senate are out of session, we carry LIVE or taped events on our networks ranging from Press Briefings to Congressional Hearings to Speeches and News Conferences related to public affairs.
EUscreen EUscreen offers thousands of film and television clips, photos, audio recordings and documents. They come from audiovisual archives all over Europe.
The Forum Network (WGBH) The Forum Network is a public media service of WGBH that collects thousands of video and audio lectures from the world's foremost scholars, authors, artists, scientists, policymakers, and community leaders, made available to the public for free.
FRONTLINE
Latest Thinking LATEST THINKING is an independent Open Access Video Journal providing summaries of research findings covering all academic fields from anthropology to physics, from biology to philosophy.
Library of Congress Podcasts Discover the treasures of the Library through its experts and special guests
Library of Congress Webcasts
MITvideo The MIT Video website — developed and maintained by the MIT News Office — aggregates and curates video produced by the Institute's offices, laboratories, centers and administration.
NASA TV
PBS Video
Philosophy TV
PopTech PopTech brings together a global community of innovators from many fields to share insights and work together to create lasting change.
PRI Podcasts Public Radio International (PRI) is a global non-profit media company focused on the intersection of journalism and engagement to affect positive change in people’s lives.
TED TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). T
VideoLectures.NET VideoLectures.NET is an award-winning free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science. The portal is aimed at promoting science, exchanging ideas and fostering knowledge sharing by providing high quality didactic contents not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. All lectures, accompanying documents, information and links are systematically selected and classified through the editorial process taking into account also users' comments.
YouTube #Education YouTube EDU features some of our most popular educational videos across YouTube.

Nobel Prize
Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prizes site contains the complete list of Pulitzer Prize winners from 1917 (the first year the Prizes were awarded) to the present. The site also lists Nominated Finalists from 1980 (the first year finalists were announced) through the present.

360 Degrees Financial Literacy The 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy Web site offers general information for managing personal finances
Practical Money Skills To help consumers and students of all ages learn the essentials of personal finance, Visa has partnered with leading consumer advocates, educators, and financial institutions to develop the Practical Money Skills program. At practicalmoneyskills.com and whatsmyscore.org, consumers, educators, parents, students and policymakers can access free educational resources, including personal finance articles, games and lesson plans.

Census Explorer The Census Bureau is the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy.
FAOStat: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Statistics Division FAOSTAT provides free access to food and agriculture data for over 245 countries and territories and covers all FAO regional groupings from 1961 to the most recent year available.
Florida Data At Your Fingertips BEBR Conducts Florida's Monthly Consumer Sentiment Survey And Surveys for clients such as the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, the Florida Department of Transportation, the Florida Public Service Commission, the Kaiser Family Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the RAND Corporation, and academic researchers at UF and other universities. The monthly consumer attitude survey monitors changes in the Consumer Sentiment of Floridians, providing an important indicator of the state’s economic outlook.
HealthData.gov This site is dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.
Historical Statistics of the United States : Colonial Times to 1970 A compendium of statistics from over 1000 sources last updated in 1975 and has been expanded to include over 37,000 data series. Subjects covered are population, vital statistics, migration, labor, prices and price indexes, national income and wealth, consumer income and expenditures, social statistics, land, water, climate, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, minerals, construction and housing, manufacturing, transportation, communications, energy, trade, productivity, financial markets and institutions, government, colonial and pre-federal statistics.
MetroTrends The Urban Institute's report card and toolkit for researchers, students, journalists, elected officials and the public on the state of metropolitan economies.

Books and Journals

Center for Research Libraries Digital Collections CRL digitizes materials from our collections to support research and teaching. CRL also negotiates favorable terms with publishers for member institutions to acquire major electronic resources locally.
Digital Commons Network The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Digitalculturebooks Digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press dedicated to publishing work in new media studies and the emerging field of digital humanities. Their primary goal is to be an incubator for new publishing models in the humanities and social sciences. digitalculturebooks content is available to view for free online and for sale in print and e-book format.
Digital Public Library of America
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for Open Access monographs. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited volumes published under an Open Access business model, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
EOS (Electronic Open Stacks) EOS (Electronic Open Stacks) is a collection of the University of Chicago Library's image-based texts, i.e., digital facsimiles. These historical accounts and primary sources, which range from 1485 to the early 20th century, offer rare glimpses into the ancient world. Although the full texts are not searchable, users can navigate through these digital facsimiles using the digital tables of contents and the page turner or page navigator.
New York Public Library Digital Projects Featuring more than 100 digital collections (with additional ones being added on an ongoing basis), NYPL Digital Projects exposes the breadth and variety of New York Public Library's vast holdings. Drawing upon the expertise of the Library's curators and librarians, the digital collections include illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, historical menus, artwork, illustrated books, printed ephemera, and more.
The Online Books Page Listing over 2 million free books on the Web
Open Book Publishers We are a Social Enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. We publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All our books are available to read for free online.
OpenDOAR OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.
Open Library Over 1,000,000 free ebook titles available.
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.
Teaching Commons The Teaching Commons showcases high-quality open educational resources from leading colleges and universities and makes them available to educators and students around the world. Curated by librarians and their institutions and hosted by bepress, the Teaching Commons includes open-access textbooks, course materials, lesson plans, multimedia, lectures, k-12 materials, and more.
World Digital Library (WDL)

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Archive-It Since 2006, Internet Archive’s Archive-it has provided web archiving services to over 800 organizations in over 24 countries, including libraries, cultural memory and research institutions, social impact and community groups, and educational and open knowledge initiatives. Archive-it users have preserved over 40 billion born-digital, web-published records, totaling petabytes of data
The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) is a gateway to the international literature on the commons.
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.
JURN JURN is a unique search tool for finding free academic articles and books. JURN provides very comprehensive coverage of ejournals in the arts and humanities, the natural world and ecology.
OAISTER * Union catalog of digital resources * Contains digital resources from open archive collections. * Represents multidisciplinary resources from more than 1,100 contributors worldwide. * Records contain a digital object link allowing users access to the object in a single click.
Wolfram|Alpha Wolfram|Alpha introduces a fundamentally new way to get knowledge and answers— not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods.