Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations. Our web guide is VOA's Art Chimes.
This week, it's a free online library with an emphasis on the top names in reference books and more.
"Bartleby.com is a website that allows the intellectually curious to find a full suite of English-language reference works - encyclopedia, dictionary, usage guides, quotation database - to get the answers that they might be looking for," says Steven van Leeuwen, the head of Bartleby.com.
The site's free, online reference shelf includes the Columbia Encyclopedia, the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, and many other high-quality reference works.
One-third of Bartleby's users come from outside the United States, so you'll be in good company if you want to brush up on your English skills with classics like The Elements of Style and H.L. Mencken's The American Language.
"Well, English usage is one of our most-used categories. We find that a large percentage of our users are people who do writing as part of their daily jobs. They're information workers. And they come to Bartleby for authoritative answers to their English usage questions," says van Leeuwen.
Bartleby also features a small number of classic novels and some 18,000 poems for your reading pleasure. In fact, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was Bartleby's very first book, published online in 1994.
Bartleby is fully searchable, and browsable, too, and it's understandable why students find it a great resource.
"Almost half of our usage is in schools. And so now, at the peak of the fall semester, we're seeing the largest usage, which would be upward of a half a million people a day."
Join them for high quality reference books, novels, poems, quotations and more at Bartleby.com, or get the link to this and more than 200 other Websites of the Week, from our site, voanews.com.
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