Try the linguistics section of the University of Waterloo's Scholarly Societies Project , an alphabetically-arranged list of links to Web sites produced by approximately 75 academic organizations, from the Accademia della Crusca to the Yuen Ren Society for the Promotion of Chinese Dialect Fieldwork. If you focus on the study of minority languages and cultures, you might want to examine the Summer Institute of Linguistics Web page, featuring a searchable online version of the SIL Bibliography , a source listing nearly 11,000 references to academic works. And don't forget the Web sites for Cornell's own Department of Linguistics and Department of Modern Languages , both of which contain useful information on language study at Cornell, as well as relevant links to other institutions and organizations. If searching the Web is unfamiliar to you, consider attending the Reference Services Division's class, Finding What You Want on the Web . Both CD-ROM and online indexes offer a greater variety of search options than print indexes and usually cumulate several years of indexing.
Interfaces are usually easy to learn and use.
One obvious drawback of CD-ROMs is that a researcher has to come to it. Another is that very large databases may be distributed over several disks and so the advantage of cumulation can be lost. But these are minor annoyances compared to the convenience of CD-ROMs. In addition, the entire process of collecting and either printing or downloading material is much simpler from CD-ROM indexes than from other media. Here at Olin we have about twenty such resources, many of which will be of interest to linguists.