The Basics:Quick Lookups and Computer Tips

Go ahead, ask me anything. Because that is my job at the local public library: to answer any question that is asked of me, as factually and completely as I can.

You can imagine how tough this was before the age of the internet. We librarians would flip through card catalogs or volumes of indexes, year by year, to find citations for books or magazine articles. We then followed these pointers to the shelf, where we paged through books or journals to see if they held the needed information. Bingo? We would scratch the result on a piece of paper.

We librarians keep a shelf of books near our desk labeled "Ready Reference." These are books that offer quick answers to frequently asked questions: dictionaries, maps, encyclopedias, phone books, and almanacs.

Today, the Ready Reference bookshelf gathers dust, because when someone comes into the library and asks me a question, I almost always swivel to my computer to look it up. When I find the answer, often in seconds, I send it to the laser printer and then hand the printout to my satisfied customer. Next question?

Librarians have favorite websites that we use all the time to quickly answer patron questions. First among them, of course, is Google.

There's a reason that Google became a verb: It makes the vast web usable. Here are some tips to make it work even better.

Google

www.google.com

When those clever Stanford boys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, found a better way to trap relevant search results on the internet, the World Wide Web beat a path to their door. Now, their invention has grown so clever that it even compensates for typing errors and completes our questions, like a spouse.

Still, librarians know that Google can work even better with a couple of tweaks. My favorite is to clump a search phrase together with quotation marks. For example, sometimes I remember one line of a poem and want to know the rest of it. So I go to Google and type, "I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth." (I put it in quotes so that Google searches the phrase as a piece.) Sure enough, when I click the search button, up pops the poem "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

If you use Google but are not getting the results that you want, try using its Advanced Search page (www.google.com/advanced_search). Here you can restrict your query to specific sites (like YouTube) or leave unwanted words out of a query. For instance, if you want to know more about cats called jaguars, you can ask Google to refrain from searching for the car of the same name.

Words

Google can also work as a dictionary. When I don't know the meaning of a word, I sometimes go to Google and type define: and then the term. I get a list of definitions from various sources.

Here are a few specialized online dictionaries, including one from Google.

Merriam-Webster Online

www.merriam-webster.com

All of the most necessary writing and reading tools are here: your plain vanilla English dictionary, a thesaurus, a Spanish-English dictionary, and one that defines medical terms and then pronounces them aloud. I keep MerriamWebster in all my internet shortcut lists for easy access.

Urban Dictionary

www.urbandictionary.com

Conan O'Brien recently described someone as "crunked up." Crunk? What does that mean? Search the Urban Dictionary to find the definition of slang terms. In this case, crunk is a combination of the words crazyand drunk. Be aware that this is one of the least vulgar definitions in the Urban Dictionary.

Google Language Tools

www.google.com/language_tools

Here's Google again, this time with tools for translating text. Need to understand a French web page? Want to know how to say something in Spanish? Just want to know what a "Buchladen" is? Google Language Tools offers a machine translation on the fly. The translated prose isn't always smooth, but it is usually clear enough to make out the meaning. It even translates Chinese!

People

Who uses telephone books anymore? If a person owns property, has a listed land line phone, or has a presence on the web, it is easy to find him or her using these free tools.

The Official WhitePages

www.whitepages.com

Find listed phone numbers for people and businesses in the U.S. The WhitePages also does reverse searches with phone numbers and addresses. When I entered my address, I got my name, my number, and a map to my house!

Infobel

www.infobel.com

Calling Europe? India? Search telephone directories across the globe through this site.

l23people.com

www.123people.com

This site not only searches phone books and property records, but also Facebook and MySpace. It finds email addresses and mentions of a person's name in blogs and news stories. 123people.com can find obscure references on the web, but the correct results are often mixed with lots of false hits. I found several women with my exact name across the nation.

Ancestors

To find evidence of ancestors is to feel a deep link with your family across time. Although many genealogical databases charge for searching their records, there is much information that is available for free. Here are some starting points for building your family tree.

Social Security Death Index

ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com

This site finds birth and death dates for those who collected payments from Social Security and then passed on.

FamilySearch

www.familysearch.org

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints runs this search site...