Useful links

Click here to access the national web site of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honors society.

Click here to access the home page of McNeese’s women’s studies program.

Click here to access the Banners web site, with a list of cultural events held at McNeese State University.

Tips and Guides. Under this heading, the McNeese library has a good introduction to doing library research, including help for doing research on the Web.
Critically Analyzing Information Sources, from the Cornell University library; a general guide to evaluating sources of information, which applies to the Web as well.
Critical Evaluation of Resources, by Margaret Phillips of the University of California at Berkeley library. Like the preceding, its critera are also applicable to Web resources.
Guidance for doing research on the Web, including pointers for critical evaluation of material found there, from the library at the State University of New York at Albany.
ICYouSee, A Guide to Critical Thinking about What You See on the Web, from the Ithaca College (N.Y.) library.
Evaluating Quality on the Net, by Hope N. Tillman, Directory of Libraries at Babson College, Babson, Mass. A serious paper, written by a librarian for librarians and other information specialists.

The value of these sites is that is that their links have been screened and selected by experts in each field, giving you some assurance of finding reliable information there--more assurance than if you just did a Google or Yahoo search.
The Open Directory Project, an ongoing Web directory owned by Netscape and carried on by a worldwide army of volunteers; may be the best general guide to the Web. (For a study of the project, click here.)
The WWW Virtual Library. The Virtual Library states that it "is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the Web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs [such as Yahoo], it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the web." However, over the years the Virtual Library has become uneven, as some topics are kept updated by eager volunteers while others are neglected.
Recommended Links, the McNeese library's excellent classified guide to good information sites.
Internet Reference Links, selected by research staff of Cornell University libraries.
Librarians' Index to the Internet, from the Library of California (the California state library).
The Internet Public Library, created and maintained by the University of Michigan School of Information. It's a guide to the best materials in all areas on the Web organized as a library.
Refdesk, an excellent center for all kinds of reference and information sources on the Web.

Don't neglect to check the sites listed in the previous section--the Open Directory Project, etc.--for links in these fields. The McNeese library history links are particularly good.
Scholar´s Guide to the WWW, with links to the best history, humanities, and social sciences sites, by Richard Jensen, emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
H-Net, the Humanities and Social Sciences Online network, at Michigan State University.

Department of History at the University of Kansas, the best gateway to history sites on the Web; this is also the WWW Virtual Library's History site.
History--Internet Resources, links from the library of Central Queensland University, Australia.
The Library of Congress's American Memory, the best site for U.S. history and culture. Amazing!
Frazar Library Government Document Department´s historical documents.

For the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, go to SocioSite, based at the faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It has links to everything, including sociology courses online and many online data bases for research.

GovSpot is a nonpartisan government information portal designed to simplify the search for the best and most relevant government information online--resources are evaluated by an editorial team for quality, content, and utility. It is part of StartSpots, another general guide to the Web, maintained by StartSpot Mediaworks, Inc., which also maintains LibrarySpot, a virtual reference library of high quality.

If you need to work on your English writing skills, visit Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL). It covers everything from grammar to resumes and job application letters, with handouts, exercises, and samples.

Guide to the various citation and style forms--Turabian, MLA, etc., from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas library.
A Brief Citation Guide for Internet Sources in History and Humanities, which I recommend for my classes.
Citation Styles, a guide to citing Internet materials in the various style guides--MLA, Chicago, etc., provided by Bedford/St. Martin's Press. (Note: Chicago Style = Turabian, which the McNeese History Department uses in Humanities 201 and History 410.)

A good book on Web use is Janet E. Alexander and Marsha Ann Tate, Web Wisdom: How to Evaluate and Create Information Quality on the Web (Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999). Call no. TK5105.888.A376 in the McNeese library and also (appropriately enough) available as an on-line book there.

For Internet research in History, Dennis A. Trinkle and Scott A. Merriman have edited a series of books published by M. E. Sharpe. Each book comes with a CD-ROM which has the book's full text with links to the Web sites the book discusses and evaluates:

The History Highway 3.0: A Guide to Internet Resources, 3d ed. (2002). 672 pp. D16.117.H57 in our library.
The U.S. History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources (2002). 320 pp.
The World History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources (2002). 416 pp.
The European History Highway: A Guide to Internet Resources (2002). 248 pp.

This list of links was compiled by Dr. Thomas Fox.