What is background information?
Background information, or reference information, is the type of information you could get from Wikipedia. These resources will give you trustworthy overviews of a topic and provide you with basic things like dates, events and facts about your topic. Generally, you can think of this information in terms of the who, what, where and when of a topic.
Learning Languages
- Memrise This link opens in a new window
Free robust web destination for learning languages. Courses in more than 200 languages. Requires registration to set up account to track courses and progress. Memrise
- Oxford English Dictionary This link opens in a new windowThe Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the accepted authority on the English language . It is a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over a half a million words, present and past. The OED covers words from across the English-speaking world. The online version is updated quarterly. Oxford U. Press
- Referencia Latina This link opens in a new window
Spanish-language resource offering 49,000 encyclopedia entries, 50,000 images, 2,500 health reports, a Spanish-English dictionary and the full text of over 100 hundred reference books and dozens of general interest magazines in a broad array of subject areas. Its intuitive, theme-based Spanish-language interface is designed to make content readily accessible to Spanish speakers with limited online research experience. Daily updates ensure availability of the most current articles from a dozen prominent newspapers from 10 Latin American countries. EBSCO
- Google Scholar This link opens in a new window
Web search engine that indexes the full text of metadata of scholarly literature, including most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents. You can set preferences in Google Scholar to lead you to full-text available through the library.
Where to Find Background Information
- Gale eBooks This link opens in a new window
A database of full-text encyclopedias, almanacs, and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. Gale
- MasterFILE Complete This link opens in a new window
Designed specifically for public libraries, this multidisciplinary database provides full text for more than 2,000 general reference publications with full text information dating as far back as 1922. Covering virtually every subject area of general interest, it also contains full text for more than 1,000 reference books and over 164,400 primary source documents, as well as an Image Collection of over 502,000 photos, maps & flags. EBSCO