Most of the time, if I want to find something out, Google and Wikipedia are pretty much guaranteed to provide what I'm looking for, leveraging the wisdom of crowds as they do in their rather different ways. I've installed James Hall's Googlepedia extension for Firefox which displays the best hit from Wikipedia alongside the Google results for whatever I search for, which produces some wonderfully serendipitous distractions from time to time.

There are, though, occasions when something a little more authoritative or detailed is required, or at least of interest, but whilst much is online, not all is on open access. Of course, for those in HE there's access to any number of high quality resources via institutional subscriptions. I've only recently discovered though that the UK public libraries are now providing free home access for all their readers to quite a number of premium resources, through a two year deal through the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council, which I sincerely hope will be extended beyond March 2008. The list of online resources varies from county to county. Here in Surrey, we get a pretty good range, including the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) and ODNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), which I really value, and which would set me back £460 a year if I were to subscribe to both as an individual: suddenly my Council Tax doesn't seem quite so bad! We also get Grove Music and Grove Art, Britannica, the splendid NewsUK archive (a close match to LexisNexis for UK newspapers) and KnowUK, which includes a whole host of reference works such as Who's Who and the Which guides. Hampshire replaces KnowUK with the less comprehensive Credo Reference, but also adds the Times Digital Archive.

It really is brilliant that the MLA has had the vision to secure a deal like this for our libraries and their readers. What a shame though that this splendid service provided through the county libraries isn't integrated into the national educational network - of course all school children can access these resources through joining the library, but why not provide automatic access through the RBC and LA portals too?