Questia
From Wikinfo
- For criticism see Criticism of Questia
Questia is an online library. It claims to be the largest online library in the world. As of 2007, it has over 1,500,000 titles covering the humanities and social sciences; subjects include history, philosophy, economics, political science, literature, education, psychology, sociology, etc. It excludes subjects like business and science.
Questia was built for high school students, college students, professors and their needs for research. It's software and setup are geared toward easing the gathering of material such as quotes and references and collecting all sorts of information one might need to complete papers, articles, books. The Questia library facilitates the gathering of information with search functions, a work space to hold findings, the use of highlights, bookmarks and even a figurative bookshelf.
Questia requires a subscription fee in order to use its services.
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Library holdings
Questia contains aprox. 67,000 books from cover to cover. These include both fiction and nonfiction. It contains recent books as well as out-of-print titles. From academic journals, it comprises over 155,000 articles from Journal of Pschology to World Affairs. It has over 185,000 magazine articles and over 1.1 million newspaper articles. Moreover, reference books, such as Columbia Encyclopaedia, American Heritage Dictionary and Roget's II Thesaurus, can be found there.
All these things can be found and read in their entirity on the internet.
Membership
Questia has a financial membership fee. This membership fee is broken down into three parts according to one's need for it. There is a monthly, quarterl $99.95. It also has a lifetime membership fee of $399.00.
Questia tools
Questia has many interesting tools that facilitate research and notekeeping. First, it has a work section that allows one to create projects for one's field of interests. Next, it allows one to highlight phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs in source material and places it in one's project folders. It has a feature that one can also highlight and make notes when inspiration hits and it also stores this under one's project headings.
Questia allows one to bookmark whole books that one can return to over and over again easily.
The search engine of Questia allows for searching across the whole spectrum, from books to journals to newspapers or for searching within a book or journal for the word or phrase one is looking for. Searches can be done by title, author, keywords or all three.
See also
- Project Gutenberg online source for ancient and out of print books
- Dictionary.com
External links
- Questia's home page: http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp
