This list includes recommended databases in which you can begin many research topics. It includes databases catering to all levels of user, not just undergraduates. Content of these databases can include reference sources like encyclopedias or dictionaries; articles that give an overview of a topic, issue, controversy, or recent event; or that provide broad coverage to assist in narrowing or refining a research topic. After you have used these databases for background research on your topic, you can move on to more subject-specific databases. Many provide full-text sources, otherwise use the citations they provide to request copies via your local library's interlibrary loan service.
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Background Notes (U.S. State Department reports)Background Notes include facts about the land, people, history, government, political conditions, economy, and foreign relations of independent states, some dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty. Background Notes are updated/revised by the Office of Electronic Information and Publications of the Bureau of Public Affairs as they are received from the Department's regional bureaus.
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Biodiversity Heritage LibraryBHL contains scanned, historic, biological literature from major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions: books, journals, and more. Content can be downloaded as PDF, ASCII, or just the images contained within the object. 1480-present.
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CIA World Fact BookThe World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. The Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as flags of the world, a physical map of the world, a political map of the world, and a standard time zones of the world map.
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WorldCat DiscoveryWorldCat Discovery is Virginia Tech's instance of WorldCat. It is a catalog and research tool that allows you to search across most of the University Libraries holdings at the same time: the books and other physical materials held in the Library and a significant proportion of our online resources (e.g. ebooks). You can also use it to search the collections of other libraries that use WorldCat by expanding your search to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), other libraries in the Commonwealth of Virginia, or Libraries Worldwide. Access to items not owned by the University Libraries is through integrated links to ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan).
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Wolfram MathWorldWolfram MathWorld provides full-text reference articles (with bibliographic citations), a glossary of mathematical terms, downloadable Mathematica notebooks, and a guide to Mathematica.
