If I'm writing a feature, I like the odd learned or historical quote. Rather than just using the soundbite, it's nice if you see the original context.
Today many out of print books are available for instant access via the web. The Online Books Page gives you access to 17,000 titles in a variety of accessible formats that are available free. You can search by title or author.
You can't, of course, search their content. To do that, in a more limited way, try SearchEbooks.
BNA's Web WatchBNA is an American publisher of business and professional magazines. Its librarian, Laura Gordon-Murnane, has started a regular round-up of Internet resources, called BNA's Web Watch.
There is no search form on the site, which is a shame, so you might find it takes a bit of digging to unearth what you want. But there are lots of strong links here.
Between 1896 and 1970, the British Pathe company provided weekly newsreels for British cinemas. Now the company has placed its entire archive online, some 3500 hours of deliriously nostalgic fun.
You can search, download free low-resolution previews, or fork out for higher resolution versions to use on your own webpages and in presentations.
Registering is a lengthy process, and I'm sorry to say that when I got to the end the Windows Media Player files wouldn't run on my Mac. Shame, because I really wanted to see that 1962 Punch editorial meeting. Still, the potential is there.
At this point, I would place the hyperlink to the site, but British Pathe's terms and conditions forbid that: the company is owned by the Daily Mail, one organisation that really doesn't get the Internet.
So if you're interested, you'll just have to type it in yourself: www.britishpathe.com.
Here's another domain search tool. The SchwimmerLegal Domain Dossier neatly serves up the domain owner and technical contact and then adds a Google search to see which pages with that domain come top of the popularity pile. Once again, American/global domains only.
When I find an interesting site, I like to know who owns the domain where it lives. There are lots of sites to help you find out, but what makes Whois Source particularly useful is the fact that it will search even if you have only fragments of the name.
The disadvantage is that it only covers the US/global domains. For co.uk and so on you'll need to look elsewhere.
Here's one for editors, subs and designers who have a font they need to identify, or want to see what a particular font looks like. Identifont lets you search by name or by answering a series of cunning questions about the font's appearance.
I couldn't catch it out, and easily found all those newspaper fonts of yesteryear: Cooper Black, Tempo Heavy Condensed... If you find something you like, there are links to buy most of the fonts online, plus little biographies of the designers etc. Very nicely done.
Here comes the fluBut before it does, and you have to start churning out stories about it, you might like to take a look at the World Health Organisation's Welcome to FluNet site.
The good news is that there really is none in the UK at the moment. The bad news is that it's all over the rest of Europe. Anyway, it's all here, neatly packaged with maps and graphs for the scientifically illiterate, which is most of us.
The Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus is a stunning piece of programming. It displays the relationships between words in a a visual way.
I'm not sure it's of any great practical use, but if you like words you really should take a look at it.