Authors on the Web: URLs

by Melisa Michaels

Web Pages: Who Needs 'Em?

• SFWA Web page has many links useful to writers including all the major search engines and catalogues (you can go directly to them, but you'll miss all the other good stuff like model contracts, the art gallery, and the articles on writing).
• Free access to Medline through Healthgate for answers to medical questions
• A perpetual calendar for dates past, present, or future
• Time-Life Virtual Garden for information about gardens where you live or where your fiction is set
• Information on the US Postal Service, including rates
• United Parcel Service rates and package tracking
• The Copyright Act of 1976, as amended (1994)
• A search engine of copyright holders (North America and Great Britain only, so far)
• The Library of Congress, with exhibits, events, services and publications, searchable historical collections, and more.

• BookWire is the place to start when looking for any sort of information about publishing.
• ISFDB, a database with information about SF/F books and authors
• Ingram Book Group has a wealth of information and links
• Publishers Weekly, with bestseller lists updated weekly, four days before they appear in print
• SF reviews
• Writer Resources and Literary Arts Allied Collective both publish many useful links and other resource materials
• Singular "their" in Jane Austen and elsewhere: anti-pedantry page.

• Amazon.com, an online bookstore that has a new Associates Program whereby authors can earn royalties for books sold as a result of being advertised on the authors' Web pages.
• Book Stacks Unlimited, Future Fantasy Bookstore, and Other Change of Hobbit as well as Amazon.com all encourage direct links from an author's description of her book to the store's listing of it, making ordering the book convenient

• US Geological Survey
• CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics
• Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Home Page
• Chaos at Maryland
• NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
• SEDS (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) Internet Space Warehouse
• National Air and Space Museum's reference library collection of images from space missions
• Three-dimensional starmaps
• Cornell University Department of Astronomy
• American Astronomical Society
• Cambridge Astronomy Home Page is the entry point for the Royal Greenwich Observatory, The Institute of Astronomy, Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, and a wide range of information, photos, and other astronomical links. There's also information here about Cambridge: the University, the town, network links, transportation, etc.
• the Social Science Information Gateway
• Mythology and Folklore
• Web resources of interest to anthropologists

• MapQuest pinpoints on a map any address in the US. Barbara Paul says she once wanted to use the name of a restaurant on 57th Street in Manhattan; "MapQuest gave me a list of about 30, with addresses and phone numbers, and showed me on the map where each was located."
• MapBlast , a similar service with which you can locate a detailed street map from almost any street address in the United States
• The Perry-Casten~ada Library Map Collection has maps of almost anywhere in the world as well as historical maps and a fine collection of map-related sites

• Private Investigation Home Page is the starting place for info on PIs
• The Law Network is the same for questions on law
• The Central Intelligence Agency 's home page includes their World Factbook, maps, and much more.
• The United States Intelligence Community home page has information about the thirteen government agencies "that carry out the intelligence activities of the United States government."

• The Alternative Dictionaries are interactive (you can add entries) dictionaries of slang, "dirty" words in languages other than English, as "these are...usually difficult to find in common dictionaries, and it takes some courage to ask a native speaker."
• The Hackers' Dictionary is available in several versions on the Web. This one is searchable.
• Feudal Terms of England is a basic, nearly plain-text file with no hyperlinks
• BritSpeak provides a guide to "English as a Second Language for Americans."
• The Middle English Collection at the University of Virginia is a list of hyperlinks to publicly accessible texts provided by the Oxford Text Archive, including some Chaucer, Dunbar, Henryson, etc.
• Hypertext Webster Interface
• Roget's Thesaurus , 1911 edition
• Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 1901 edition
• William Strunk, Jr.'s The Elements of Style, 1918 edition
• The Encyclopedia Mythica, an encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, mysticism, and more
• Esperanto Online Dictionaries (in Esperanto)
• The WWW Acronym and Abbreviation Server, where one can search for an acronym and see its full form
• A Reverse Dictionary: type in a definition and it gives you a list of words
• A Rhyming Dictionary

• Dr. Dave's U.K. Pages