Reference & Research

• Academic Search Elite (Ebscohost) — This database provides fulltext articles from over 2,000 scholarly journals, many peer-reviewed, and covers virtually every area of academic study.
• African-American Heritage — A resource exclusively devoted to African American family history research. Includes such records as draft cards from World Wars I and II, the Freedman's Bank, and the US Census, as well as help finding other information sources.
• African-American History Online (Facts on File) — Provides information on more than 500 years of African-American history.
• American History Online (ABC-CLIO) — A comprehensive, accessible research collection covering American history from the first explorers through today's headlines.
• American Indian History Online (Facts on File) — Provides information on more than 15,000 years of Native American culture, history, and biographies.
• Ancestry Library Edition — Includes census, church, court and immigration records, as well as historical maps and many other genealogy resources, from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and other areas. Available at all CALS libraries.
• Annals of American History Online (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — Provides a year-by-year documentary of American thought and action. Includes speeches, writings, memoirs, poems, and interviews by more than 1,500 authors who made and analyzed American history.
• AR BookFinder — The complete list of over 100,000 Accelerated Reader titles.
• Biography Resource Center (Gale Infotrac) — Includes thousands of biographies from Gale Group print publications as well as full-text articles from hundreds of magazines.
• Black Women in America — provides expanded coverage of the achievements and contributions of African American women.
• Bookflix — An online literacy resource that pairs classic video storybooks from Weston Woods with related nonfiction eBooks from Scholastic to build a love of reading and learning. Intended for use by PreK to 3rd grade students.
• Bookletters — Book reviews, recommendations, author interviews, best seller lists, etc.
• Booklist Online — Book reviews published in Booklist Magazine from 1992 through the present If you wish to print or email from this database, please make sure your computer security is set to allow pop-ups.
• Britannica for Kids (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — An online encyclopedia designed especially for younger students. Includes Compton's Encyclopedia and other resources.
• Business Source Elite (Ebscohost) — Provides full text articles from more than 1,100 scholarly business journals.
• ChiltonLibrary (Gale Infotrac) — Includes repair and maintenance information for many popular vehicles.
• Consumer Reports (EBSCOhost)
• CultureGrams (ProQuest) — Provides concise, reliable, and up-to-date cultural information on the countries of the world and delivers an insider's perspective on daily life and culture, including the history, customs, and lifestyles of the world's people.
• Curriculum Resource Center (Facts on File) — Provides a library of printable teacher handouts for the middle school, high school and junior college curriculum.
• Curriculum Resource Center: Junior Edition (Facts on File) — Provides a library of printable teacher handouts for the elementary school curriculum.
• Dictionary of American Family Names
• Digital Sanborn Maps — The Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps for the state of Arkansas. Covers the years 1867-1970; not all years are available for all locations. (Please call 918-3000 for login and password.)
• Dissertation & Theses — The database represents the work of authors from over 1,000 North American graduate schools and European universities and includes citations for masters and doctoral dissertations from 1637 to those accepted as recently as last semester. Some full text accompanies the abstracts, or copies may be requested through interlibrary loan.

• Enciclopedia Juvenil (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — Articles in Spanish, as well as photos and images, aimed at younger students.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 — Documents the African American experience from the arrival of the first slave ship to the death of Frederick Douglass-and shows how American culture, history, and national identity have been influenced by the experience of African Americans.
• Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present — Traces the transition from the Reconstruction Era to the age of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, up to and including the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — An online encyclopedia designed specifically for public libraries. Includes the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other resources.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — Includes Encyclopaedia Britannica, but geared toward the needs of college and university students.
• Encyclopedia Britannica School Edition (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — Gives teachers and students access to four complete encyclopedias geared toward classroom topics. Offers resources developed by teachers and correlated with Arkansas state curriculum standards.
• Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages
• The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
• ERIC (Ebscohost) — The Educational Resource Information Center, with digests, citations and abstracts from almost 1,000 education-related journals.
• FirstSearch — Provides access to several databases including Worldcat, which is a catalog of books, videos and other materials owned by libraries across the country. Please call 918-3000 for login and password.
• Ferguson's Career Guidance Center — Provides detailed information on more than 3,300 careers in 94 different industries and allows you to polish your interviewing and job skills, find sample cover letters and resumes, and research scholarships, schools, internships and more.
• Foundation Directory Online — A database of foundations that make funding available to nonprofit organizations. Available only in the Reference Department at the Main Library.
• Foundation Grants to Individuals Online — A database of foundations that make funding available to individuals in the form of scholarships, fellowships, grants, awards and other financial support. Available only in the Reference Department at the Main Library.
• Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia (Ebscohost) — A general encyclopedia that covers a variety of subject areas.
• Gale Discovering Collection — A database of information from Gale Group print publications on topics such as history, literature, geography and cultures, and science.
• Gran Enciclopedia Planeta (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — A Spanish language encyclopedia that features 145,000 articles, as well as timelines, an atlas and a dictionary.
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Art and Architecture
• The Grove Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts

• Health and Wellness Resource Center (Gale Infotrac) — Includes magazines, newspapers, journals, directories and other information on health- and wellness-related topics.
• Health Source: Consumer Edition (Ebscohost) — This database provides consumer health information on many health topics including medical sciences, nutrition, childcare, sports medicine and general health.
• Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition (Ebscohost) — A database with fulltext from many scholarly journals and indexing from many journals.
• Heritage Quest (Proquest) — Includes searchable images of U.S. Federal Census records, digitized family and local history books, an index to genealogical and local history periodicals, and other genealogy resources.
• Index Arkansas — an index to articles and other information published in county history journals as well as selected statewide magazines, newspapers and books. Check the CALS catalog to see which of the titles are available at CALS and submit an Interlibrary Loan request if the title is not available at CALS.
• International Encyclopedia of Dance
• International Encyclopedia of Linguistics
• Kids Search (Ebscohost) — Articles and other reference materials for students in grades K-5.
• LearningExpressLibrary.com (Learnatest) — An interactive database with practice tests and tutorials for many standardized academic and licensing tests, such as the GED, SAT, Nursing, Real Estate, etc. Access: Sign in as new user and create personal account using your library card number as your user name.
• Legal Collection (Ebscohost) — A database of full text articles from scholarly law journals.
• Literature Resource Center (Gale Infotrac) — Includes biographies, bibliographies and critical analyses of more than 120,000 authors from hundreds of sources including Gale Group print publications and scholarly journals.
• Litfinder — An index to poetry, short stories, essays, speeches and plays, many in full text.
• Marcive — A searchable catalog of all U.S. government publications published since July 1976.
• MAS Ultra-School Edition (Ebscohost) — Provides fulltext articles from hundreds of popular magazines, as well as pamphlets, reference books, biographies, primary source documents and images, all intended for high school students.
• Masterfile Premier (Ebscohost) — A general periodicals database with full text information from more than 2,050 publications including magazines, reference books, primary source documents and images.
• Mergent Online— A database of business and financial information on US and international publicly-held companies.
• Middle Search Plus (Ebscohost) — A database of fulltext magazines, biographies, primary source documents and images, all intended for middle school and junior high students.
• Newspaper Source (Ebscohost) — A database with selected articles from about 30 national and international newspapers, as well as some regional newspapers, and television and radio transcripts. Some articles from The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette October 2000 through September 2002 are indexed.
• Novelist — (Ebscohost) — Includes subject headings, reviews, summaries and more for over 135,000 fiction titles. Use Novelist to find other books by a favorite author, or similar books to a title you've already read.
• Novelist K-8 — (Ebscohost) — Includes information on many titles popular with students in grades K-8, arranged by instructional unit, theme or topic. Teachers can find appropriate fiction to complement classroom instruction.

• The Oxford Companion to World Exploration
• The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
• The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children's Literature
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Global Change
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World - Provides information about major world developments from 1750 to the present, with close attention to social, economic, cultural, and political topics.
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History

• Primary Search (Ebscohost) — A database of fulltext magazines intended for elementary school students.
• Professional Development Collection (Ebscohost) — A database of fulltext journal articles of interest to professional educators.
• Reference USA —Includes directory listings for over 12 million businesses and 120 million households in the United States.
• Regional Business News (Ebscohost) — Provides indexing and some fulltext from regional business publications. Arkansas Business is indexed from July 1996 through May 2001.
• Science Online (Facts on File) — Provides printable diagrams and illustrations, as well as more than 1,100 science experiments, thousands of biographies, definitions and essays on major topics and issues in science and technology.
• SIRS Researcher (SIRS) — Provides fulltext articles on topics such as aging, the environment, substance abuse, and many other social issues.
• Student Research Center (Ebscohost) — Articles, primary source documents and other reference materials for researchers in grades 6-12.
• TOPICsearch (Ebscohost) — Provides information about current events which are likely to be discussed in the classroom. Includes more than 1,000 fulltext periodicals.
• Webster's Third International Dictionary, Unabridged (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — A comprehensive, unabridged dictionary of the English language, with over 472,000 entries.
• World Atlas (Facts on File) — Provides printable maps and flags as well as statistical information for states, countries and regions around the world.
• WorldCat — Search the collections of libraries in this community and around the country to find books, music, movies, etc.
• World Data Analyst Online (Encyclopaedia Britannica) — Provides current and historical statistics on 217 countries. Users may create tables and charts, and may export information to a spreadsheet.
• World History: The Modern Era (ABC-CLIO) — Provides globe-spanning coverage of events from 1500 to the present.
• The World News Digest (Facts on File) — Provides an archival record of domestic and international news, covering major political, social, and economic events since November 1940.

Live Chat with a Reference Librarian

Get live help from librarians via instant messaging with this service. Use the box below to contact us. Once you have initiated a chat session, DO NOT leave the Ask-a-Librarian tab or this page, as that will close your chat session. This service is available Monday - Thursday, from 4 - 7 p.m.

If you have a question at another time, please contact us by phone, email, or in person. If you leave a message on the chat service when we are offline, please include contact information so we can respond. This service is best used for quick questions and answers. If you have a more in-depth question, please call or visit us.