Dictionaries and general reference help
Access to Research
Access to Research gives free, walk-in access to over 15 million academic articles in participating public libraries across the UK. Students and independent researchers can now access many of the world's best academic papers from leading publishers who have made their journal content available for free. Start by viewing which articles and journals are available from home, then visit a Kent library where you can view the full text the full text on a public computer.
Visit the Access to Research website.
Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopaedia
This 17 volume encyclopaedia – the completely revised and updated 2003 version of the original work published in Germany in 1960 – incorporates recent developments in the animal world. You can use it online and download sections to your eReader to read or listen to at your convenience.
Sign into our collection of Gale Databases and select the "Gale eBooks" to access Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopaedia.
Oxford English Dictionary
Widely acknowledged as the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of English in the world. It also traces the evolution of more than 600,000 words during the past 1500 years through 3.5 million quotations from a wide range of sources.
Visit the Oxford English Dictionary website.
Oxford Reference
Oxford Reference brings together 2 million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopaedias spanning around 25 different subject areas.
Visit the Oxford Reference website.
Free websites
Britannica
Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos and more.
Wisden's Cricketing Almanack Archive
The online archive gives access to the famous Almanack from 1864-2011 including Cricketer of the Year essays, the best features and articles, editors' notes from each edition as well as reports and scorecards from every Test and one-day international.