Reference Tools

Texas General Reference

• Texas newspapers
• Texas State Data Center  Texas statistics
• Handbook of Texas Online  encyclopedia of Texas history and culture
• State of Texas Website
• Texas Historic Sites Atlas
• Texas Almanac
• Texas Fact Book 2006

 

General Reference

• Reference.com  great starting point, with dictionary, thesaurus, almanac, and other tools
• Dictionaries: Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Cambridge, Dictionary.com, Encarta
• Thesauri: Merriam-Webster, Thesaurus.com (Roget's), Encarta
• Legal Dictionaries: Findlaw, Law.com, Jurist
• Lexical FreeNet  this program searches for relationships between words, concepts, and people 
• Acronym Finder  comprehensive database of acronyms and abbreviations
• About.com  crammed with free, useful articles on thousands of topics 
• Answers.com  excellent general information resource
• Wikipedia  an oddly rich resource -- often the only source -- but rely warily
• Librarians' Internet Index access to general information missed by search engines
• Complete Planet  Deep Web Directory searches beyond search engines
• Direct Search  another way to access the Invisible Web
• Infomine  particularly good for academic-level information
• Encarta Encyclopedia
• Highbeam Library Research  search vast collection of articles from leading publications
• Bartleby Quotations
• Columbia Encyclopedia
• CIA World Factbook  U.S. Government's geographical handbook w/ maps
• Alcove 9  Library of Congress's annotated website directory
• Avalon Project  historical documents published by Yale University
• How Stuff Works  useful articles on a variety of topics

 

Useful Tools

• currency converter
• language translator
• conversion calculators
• simple interest calculator
• mortgage loan calculator with amortization
• Texas mileage calculator
• Martindale's Online Calulators  22,000+ calculators for just about anything
• Mobil Travel Guide
• Microsoft Clip Art Gallery
• Automobile Valuation:  Kelly Blue Book, NADA, & Edmunds

 

Maps: 

• Google Maps
• Terraserver
• Acme Mapper  easy-to-use system with satellite imagery and topo maps
• Texas County Map
• Texas Topographic Maps
• USGS Topographic Map Viewer

• Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection  extensive map collection at University of Texas 

• Odden's Bookmarks  exhaustive directory of Internet map resources

 

Investigative Tools

• AnyWho  one of the better people-search utilities
• reverse phone number search
• toll-free # lookup
• reverse address search
• zipcode lookup
• reverse area-code search
• area-code map
• Melissa DATA  assorted free lookups (some require registration)
• Black Book Online
• Virtual Gumshoe free resources for investigators
• Search Systems  free public-records directory
• Pretrieve  free public-records metasearch search engine
• PublicData.com  $ site
• KnowX.com  $ site
• Accurint  $ site
• PeopleData  a powerful free tool for locating someone  
• Skip Trace Professionals  $ service, but more thorough than most
• skipease  free public-record and people search
• Bank Account Search  $ site
• Aircraft Search
• Texas Unclaimed Property Search
• Texas Criminal History Search
• Texas Sex Offender Registry
• National Sex Offender Search  free service that searches all states 
• Texas Inmate Search
• Birthdatabase.com  has over 20 million birthday records gathered from public records
• Texas Death Records
• Texas Marriage Records
• Texas Divorce Records
• Driving Records  $ site
• Business Credit Reports  businesses aren't protected by the Fair Credit Reporting Act
• Tom Green County Records: Marriage, Birth, Death, & Assumed Name