Writers' Online Research Resource

The Gale Group, people who put out useful directories and other reference materials usually found in libraries, offers an interesting online service, AccessMyLibrary - News, Research, and Information that Libraries Trust. If you have an account with a member library (only in the US, sorry), you can research topics from newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals and other publications your library holds. MyAccess claims to cover 29,614,182 articles from A Friend Indeed to Zap2It.

When you find an article, you're presented with a snippet of the beginning, which ranges from a few lines to a couple of paragraphs. To read the full article requires selecting a library you belong to (it might even be your public school's) and entering, well, I'm not sure what. They say "bar code" but present a text box. Because the San Diego Public Library is part of a different online catalog, and that's the only library I belong to, I can't test out this part myself. I'm guessing the box wants your library card number. You can also have a password for some libraries. An alternative way to see articles is by signing up for a 30-day free trial membership.

Using this type of service rather than just doing a general search of the web ensures that the reference sources have already been vetted by authorities (librarians or information specialists). This provides you with more reliable and dependable results, especially important if you're a freelancer and need to send an editor a list of sources for an article that you write.