Research Areas: General Reference

A Spanish-language encyclopedia for both Spanish speakers and students of Spanish.

Online access to a variety of reference works from Salem Press. These are essentially the website versions of the same Salem Press volumes we have in the library. Topics include history, science, health, and careers. A good starting point for elementary and high school research projects.

This site offers resources in Spanish for all ages in two unique interfaces, each with its own comprehensive encyclopedia: Enciclopedia Moderna for high school and college students and Britannica Escolar for elementary and middle school students.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from Dictionaries of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You’ll still find present-day meanings in the OED, but you’ll also find the history of individual words, and of the language.

You can access many Boston Public Library online resources with a free eCard. eCards are available to anyone who lives, resides part-time to attend school, owns property, or works in Massachusetts.

AtoZdatabases is a reference and marketing database that includes 30 million business profiles, 220 million residents, 1.1 Million Healthcare Professionals, and much more. It is ideal for sales leads, mailing lists, market research, employment opportunities, and tracking down hard to find phone numbers and addresses.

(formerly Kids InfoBits)

Targeting the research needs of grades K-5 students. This resources incudes Blackbirch Press curriculum support references, 100 full-text age appropriate magazines and 2 newswires. Graphs, charts, maps and over 2,500 searchable images.

Designed for middle school students. Includes mainly full-text magazines, newspapers and reference books covering current events, the arts, science, popular culture, health, people, government, history, sports and more. This resource has a highly visual design and navigation  combined with the authoritative content and user-focused tool set needed to support middle school assignments and coursework.

This treasure trove for researchers contains back issues of over 800 scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences. The website also contains tutorials and help pages to orient new users.

Global Issues in Context offers international viewpoints on a broad spectrum of global issues, topics, and current events. Featured are hundreds of continuously updated issue and country portals that bring together a variety of sources for analysis of social, political, military, economic, environmental, health, and cultural issues. Each of these includes an overview, unique “perspectives” articles, reference, periodical, primary source and statistical information.

Use this general interest database for full-text and images from magazines, reference books, and newspapers for information on current events, popular culture, the arts and sciences, sports, etc.

A tool that lets you search many of our databases at once.