A portal or gateway site is the best place to begin research. These sites, which are intended to serve as "jumping off" points, will lead the researcher to a variety of useful sources that have been selected because of their relevance or quality. A portal site may include thousands of links on a wide range of topics, or may be very specific in scope and point to a small number of resources.
Portal sites may allow keyword searching, provide topical, hierarchical browsing (drilling down) or both search and browse capabilities. Another useful starting point for research is the search engine, particularly those that are subject-specific.
American Cultural History: The Twentieth Century
http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decades.html
Created by the reference librarians at Kingwood College (Texas), this resource guide covers all decades of 20th century American cultural history. Divided into sections according to decade, the guide functions as a hypertextual bibliographic essay, outlining the major events, important persons, and cultural trends of each decade, and linking users to related Web sites and print materials. The strength and value of this guide, compared to other metasites, is that it provides cultural and historical contexts for its compilation of resources.
Beliefnet
http://www.beliefnet.com/index.html
A substantial vortal with encyclopedic information on all the major religions as well as news and feature articles. Includes links to sacred texts and other sites of religious interest on the Web.
intute: arts & humanities
http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
Intute organizes over 18,000 Web resources for education and research and makes them searchable by keywords or browsing. These resources are "selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists."
Online Literary Criticism Collection
http://www.ipl.org/div/litcrit/
A resource guide to critical and biographical Web sites about authors and their works that can be browsed by author, by title, or by nationality and literary period. The sites are carefully selected, and only those deemed authoritative are included.
VoS: Voice of the Shuttle
http://vos.ucsb.edu/index.asp
A structured and briefly annotated guide to online resources that "at once respects the established humanities disciplines in their professional organization and points toward the transformation of those disciplines as they interact with the sciences and social sciences and with new digital media." It includes both primary and secondary resources. The site can be searched by key word or browsed through a subject hierarchy.
The Internet Public Library Subject Collections (IPL)
http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/
Core internet resources are arranged by discipline and then by more specific subject area. An option is also available to find associations or serials related to the subject. These sites have been selected and organized by librarians. A link to pathfinders on very specific topics is also available.
Search Engine Guide
http://www.searchengineguide.com/
This guide indexes over 3,000 directories and search engines. Organized by category and searchable by keyword.
What Shakespeare sites are recommended by intute: arts & humanities?
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