Reference World

In the Days of Elizabeth

Recently the Reference Department was deluged by questions about Shakespeare and Elizabethan England. Thought you might be interested in what is out there.

Life inElizabethan England
http://renaissance.dm.net/compendium/

Elizabethan Authors
http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/

Elizabeth I
http://www.elizabethi.org/

16th Century English Rennaissance Literature
http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/

Animals

Animals of all kinds are always a popular subject at libraries. These are some web pages that have caught my attention recently

Frogs: A Chorus of Colors
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/frogs/

National Wildlife Federation
http://www.nwf.org/

All About Birds
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/programs/allaboutbirds/

Pet Education.com
http://www.peteducation.com/

Boob tube

So who was that person who played who played Carlton, the doorman, on Rhoda. Lorenzo Music of course. You can find the answer to questions about shows old and new at TV Tome

http://www.tvtome.com/

For those Nick at Nite fans The Classic TV Database

http://www.classic-tv.com/

might be more your style. They have a broad definition of classic. As Keir Graff pointed out in his article on the database is Doogie Howser a classic or just old. :D

The 1997 edition of the Encyclopedia of Television by Horace Newcomb is now available with help from the Museum of Broadcast Communications.
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/index.html

Gasoline


With the high cost of driving a car these days, I thought I'd share some pages on gasoline

AAA's fuel cost calculator
http://www.fuelcostcalculator.com/

AAA's daily fuel gauge
http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/

GasBuddy helps you find cheap gas in your area
http://gasbuddy.com/

Find a better car for mileage from the Department of Energy
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/

Happy Birthday Yahoo!

Today marks the 10th birthday of the internet directory, Yahoo. The original idea was to be a subject guide to the internet. Altavista was the big search engine at the time, but it was a big unclassified index to the internet without any quality control. Yahoo wanted people to search by organized subjects like a library. They also hired staff to weed the wheat from the chaff. There were other directories at the time, but most fell by the wayside.

Yahoo is much more now. It offers e-mail, chat, special interest group pages and much much more. It is actually hard to find what you want sometime now, but it is a new day.

These are some of the features I use as a librarian -

The subject directory is on the left side here:
http://dir.yahoo.com/

Sometimes you need an expert or a group to ask a question. You can search the user groups to find people who have this as an interest. This is no assurance that they are experts, still it can be a start.
http://groups.yahoo.com/

State tax agencies for April 15th:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/U_S__Government/Taxes/State_Tax_Agencies