Internet Research Research-It! (http://www.itools.com/research-it/research-it.html) is a very comprehensive site for doing specific kinds of research. It contains Webster's and computing dictionaries, Roget's Thesaurus, Bartlett's Quotations, definitions of English acronyms (you can look up what an acronym is in the dictionary, just like I had to ), anagrams (did you know you can create 80 3-word sets from the word "development"?) and translate words to and from English, French and Japanese. There's also a search tool of the King James Bible, a variety of searchable maps and atlases, the CIA Factbook from 1995, telephone area code and 800 directories, a currency exchange table, a database of ticker symbols and stock quotes, and links to a zip code database and the tracking systems of UPS and FedEx. (Whew!) Also check out Find-It!, which allows you to search the World Wide Web using Lycos, OpenText or Yahoo; browse shareware.com for that perfect program you always needed; search Dejanews and search the Internet Address Finder for that long-lost friend. Another very helpful site for finding out all kinds of information about a wide variety of subjects is the Argus/University of Michigan Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides (http://www.clearinghouse.net/). Here you'll find links to home pages and textual information in the following general areas: Arts & Entertainment, Business & Employment, Education, Engineering & Technology, Environment, Government & Law, Health & Medicine, Humanities, News & Publishing, Regional Information, Science, Social Sciences & Social Issues. A quick browse-through showed that I could get information on everything from Amy Grant music to Labrador Retrievers to adoption legislation to World Wide Web design, and a lot more in between. The Internet Public Library (http://ipl.sils.umich.edu) includes a large reference division, a section for children and teens, and a reading room for reading books, serials, and newspapers that are available on the Web.The WWW Virtual Library (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview.html) resembles a reference library or college library and covers a myriad of subjects.Culture Finder: The Internet Address for Performing Arts (http://www.culturefinder.com). The site is well-organized, loads quickly, and is quite informative and useful if you're into classical music, opera, performing arts series, dance, theatre and/or Broadway. These are the types of events included in their database that you can search through from the Calendar option. You can search by type, date and city for the "perfect" evening on the town. You can also get an alphabetical listing of the 500 performing arts organizations covered by the service, as well as a geographical listing. Cities in the U.S. and Canada are covered right now, and Europe, Asia and South America will be included soon. You can also do specific searches for composers, conductors, performers, organizations and works. The information you receive includes date, time, place and ticket prices, as well as phone/fax numbers for ordering tickets. Other areas on this site include news and columns which cover news about the performing arts and weekly columns on classical music, the dance scene in New York City, the inside track of the theater world and a CD review of the week. The Library includes Classic CD Online, an online version of Britain's leading classical music magazine, the NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, and the Classical Music Answer Man. (Watch out Kevin! You have competition! ) The What's New area includes names and schedules of newly added organizations. It's a lot of fun to find out what's happening in the cultural arts in your home town or the town you're headed to on vacation.Doctorline (http://doctorline.com) is jam-packed with information and links for the health care consumer. Doctorline's first major area is Health Information. Here you will find a short glossary of common medical terms and a listing of some toll-free health lines. According to their introductory page, they are also working on an information bank for signs and symptoms of high incidence illnesses. This will be part of this area when it is complete. Health Products is the area for marketing (read: advertising) of health and medical product or service companies. Only a few have made use of this space so far. Health Professionals and Facilities are two areas where you can look through a listing of doctors, dentists, chiropractors, psychologists, podiatrists, optometrists, physical therapists, and pharmacists, as well as hospitals, nursing homes and rehabilitation centers. These are organized by state, then city/town and specialty. Again, this site appears to still be in development and has only a limited number of listings. (For example, there is only one listing for the whole state of Ohio.) The most likely reason for this is that having yourself listed/linked to this page costs money. Health care professionals, health care facilities, or companies have to pay anywhere from $41 a year for an e-mail link to $178 a year for a full home-page on this service. Linking to your already-existing home page costs $99 a year. The best part of this site, in my opinion, is the Health Links area. Here you can find links to many disease-specific or general health information, as well as names and addresses of many HMO and health care plans in your state. If there's a specific health-related site you want to find, this would be a good place to start looking.There are several of nice tools that will show you road maps of an area: MapQuest, at http://www.mapquest.com/ MapBlast, at http://www.mapblast.com/ Lycos RoadMap, at http://www.lycos.com/roadmap.html With these services, just type the address of where you want to see, and you'll get a map within seconds. They only work for U.S. addresses.Rivendell International Communications has provided a language dictionary and translator page on the Web (http://rivendel.com/~ric/resources/dictionary.html). It contains pointers to searchable and browsable dictionaries with one way and both way translations. It points to a language for travelers page, with translations for basic words, numbers, shopping, travel, directions, places, and time and dates. In addition, a free translation (any of five languages) service is offered for messages of 200-300 words. Dictionaries, of course, vary in size and reliability, but the advantage of this site is that it is a gateway to dictionary and translation services for over thirty languages. Note that at this time, most of the dictionaries translate from and/or to English, but the language for travelers page will translate from any of 29 languages. (Site description courtesy of InterNIC Net Scout, Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin - Madison.)This fantastic site offers images of flags of the 192 independent countries, arranged alphabetically. Be patient: the graphics-heavy web pages can be slow to load. It's at http://www.wave.net/upg/immigration/flags.html