The Online World resources handbook

Finding a needle ... (Part II) http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/10b.html
Online books
You needed strong muscles to read the earliest books. In ancient Babylonia and Assyria,
books consisted of numbered collections of rectangular clay tablets. They were inscribed
with cuneifom and packaged in a labeled container. Taking a book from the shelf and
carrying it to a reading table required the help of several assistants.
Today, you'll find full electronic versions of books on the World Wide Web and in
other types of Internet archives.
The first issue (version 1.0) of this virtual book is one example. You can find it in
the archives of Project Gutenberg. You can retrieve it to your disk for later reading, or
read it with your Web browser.
Project Gutenberg's offerings include The Complete Sherlock Holmes Mysteries,
Aesop's Fables, The Unabridged Works of Shakespeare, The Love Teachings of Kama
Sutra, Tarzan, The Oedipus Trilogy (Sophocles), Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee,
Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Holy Bible, Peter Pan, The Holy
Koran, Roget's Thesaurus (1911), Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, and The World
Factbook (CIA).
The Electronic Text Center offers a collection of thousands of English, French,
German, Japanese, and Latin texts.
The Alex Catalog of full text Electronic Texts gives pointers to more offerings.
The catalogue is divided into Search the catalog, Browse the catalog (by author, date,
host, language, subject, or title), and Information about cataloging Internet resources.
Books in other languages
On the Internet, there are a rapidly growing number of library online public access
catalogs (OPACs) from all over the world. Some provide users with access to additional
resources, such as periodical indexes of specialized databases. More than 270 library
catalogs are online (1992).
For Chinese books in Chinese (and in English language), check the China
International Book Trading Corporation.
Non Chinese speaking people will probably classify Chinese poems as 'rare'. Many
of them are impossible to read, unless your computer can handle the special characters,
and you know their meaning. Interested? Subscribe to the CHPOEM L mailing list. Be
prepared to use your Big5 and GuoBiao utilities.
Dictionaries and encyclopedias
OneLook Dictionaries, The Faster Finder, lets you search words in several
dictionaries and glossaries in one operation. By March 1999, it had 2,299,280 words in
461 online dictionaries indexed. A search for "backbone" returned definitions in six
specialized dictionaries.
Your search may be limited to specific dictionaries/glossaries sorted in groups like
Computer/Internet, Science, Medical, Technological, Business, Sports, Religion,
Acronym, and General Dictionaries.
A Web of On line Dictionaries has links to online grammar resources for
languages ranging from 'Armenian' to 'Urdu'. It also offers Multilingual Dictionaries,
Specialty English Dictionaries, Thesauri and Other Vocabulary Aids, Language
Identifiers and Guessers, An Index of Dictionary Indices, and A Web of On line
Grammars.
The Xrefer reference search engine meta searches and cross references several
encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations, and a number of subject
specific titles. After a simple keyword search, initial returns consist of a brief description
and the source. Full returns can vary significantly in length, some quite brief, with a
useful collection of cross references and adjacent entries displayed on the right hand
side of the browser window.
The Research Institute for the Humanities in Hong Kong offers extensive links
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