Reference Online - subscription-based electronic services for English public libraries

Famous First Facts
Play Index
World Authors
Current Biography Illustrated
Current Issues: Health
Science Full Text Select

Famous First Facts
Reflecting the content of the acclaimed Famous First Facts, Fifth Edition in print, the electronic edition of Famous First Facts offers fast access to entries on thousands of inventions, discoveries, and first happenings in American history—from the date of the earliest human artifacts found in America, in 10,000 B.C., through 1997.

Search by subject categories, keywords, personal names, city, state, date, and year.

For over half a century, Joseph Nathan Kane’s Famous First Facts has been a staple of reference collections everywhere. Historians, researchers, students, teachers, and librarians have relied on Famous First Facts as the most comprehensive, most authoritative, and the most accessible collection of facts anywhere.

Play Index
The online version of a popular reference in libraries since 1949, Play Index lets users search tens of thousands of plays by criteria useful for finding works that match curricula, holiday themes, social issues, historical commemorations, specific genre and style and much more. The database is also designed to find scripts that match users’ production resources, with searching by number of roles, roles by gender, and grade level. Descriptive annotations also summarize the plot and note musical requirements (chorus, singing, dancing, etc.) and number of sets (scenery, interior or exterior).

• Cites more than 31,000 plays published individually or in collections from 1949 to the present.
• Covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including one-act plays, pageants, plays in verse, radio and television plays, and classic and historical plays.
• Search for plays by title; author; subject (culture conflict, marriage); style (symbolism, experimental theater); genre (comedy, melodrama, musical); cast type; and more.
• Limit results to plays with a specific number of male and/or female roles, or size of total cast.
• Search for plays appropriate for preK-6, grades 7-12, and adult.
• Search over 600 monologues for auditions or course assignments.
• Full publication details help you locate each play.
• Links to full text of plays available on the web.
• Updated continuously, with new material added to the database at least weekly.

World Authors 800 B.C. to Present
Nearly 11,000 authors—the greatest writers of all time—are included in this expansive full-text database of biographies and bibliographies. Coverage encompasses a wide variety of nations, cultures and eras: from classical Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, through acclaimed writers today.

Profiles include poets, novelists, dramatists, chroniclers, essayists, scientists, and theologians writing in over 30 languages, including Italian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Icelandic.

• Coverage of every author a student is likely to encounter in high school and college.
• Search by name, titles of works, genre, gender, place of origin, date of birth, and more.
• Annual updates

Current Biography Illustrated
Reflects the entire contents of the printed monthly Current Biography—a trusted resource in library collections since 1940. Your patrons will appreciate reliable information about the people making today’s headlines plus historical figures back to World War II, with coverage of celebrities, politicians, business people, writers, actors, sports figures, artists, scientists, and many others.

• More than 25,000 articles and obituaries.
• Lively, substantive biographies, averaging 2,500 words
• More than 19,500 images
• Profiles feature subject’s own views, attitudes and opinions, as well as observations of journalists, colleagues, and associates.
• Searching by name, profession, place of origin, gender, ethnicity, birth/death dates, titles of works, and keyword
• Profiles feature bibliographies of works about the subject and article citations
• Database grows by 450 new profiles per year.

Current Issues: Health
Current Issues: Health focuses on a wide range of health topics with articles selected by H.W. Wilson editors to offer a thorough and balanced overview. From eating disorders to food safety, from alternative medicine to cloning, from euthanasia to travel and health, here's where library users can turn for information to enrich their understanding of issues at the leading edge of health and medicine.

• Eighty carefully-chosen topics (and growing).
• Some 30 full text articles per topic
• PDF page images deliver all the illustrations, charts, and graphs essential to research
• Links to automated WilsonWeb searches of thousands of journals expand on and update each topic
• Links to primary sources and helpful web sites enhance topic coverage
• More than twenty new topics each year

Science Full Text Select Edition
This 100% full text science database includes all the full-text content from Wilson’s acclaimed Applied Science & Technology Full Text, Biological & Agricultural Index Plus, and General Science Full Text databases, plus additional related science periodicals indexed by other Wilson databases, including Readers’ Guide Full Text and Wilson OmniFile Full Text.

• Full-text articles from over 360 periodicals, including more than 160 peer-reviewed titles
• PDF pages deliver all the charts, graphs, diagrams, and illustrations essential to science research
• Abstracts of 50 to 150 words let users know instantly if an article is useful to their research
• Up-to-date subject headings keep pace with science and technical developments
• Helps libraries with a limited collection of science periodicals provide access to a broad range of important science literature
• Daily additions

For further information on all products and to request a free trial see www.hwwilson.com/mla.htm  

website: www.hwwilson.com  

How to Subscribe
If you wish to subscribe, first take a look at the  Model Licence  (Word 92KB)

For pricing information please use the contact details below quoting MLA's Reference Online.

Stephanie Piddington: s.piddington@thompsonhenry.co.uk
Thompson Henry Limited
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