More and more Americans are experiencing problems with their credit, and in a rather ominous trend, the year 2005 saw a record number of personal bankruptcy filings. The first site offered here was created by the American Radio Works documentary group, and it profiles the current state of personal bankruptcy, along with offering some investigative reporting on the credit reporting industry....

In recent times, the ability of middle-class persons to secure adequate health care insurance has been compromised by a number of factors. These are the findings of a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released in March 2010. The work chronicles state-by-state health coverage trends since 1999, and it was prepared by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) at the...

Started in 1971, the Barnard Center for Research on Women has welcomed a wide range of visionaries and public intellectuals in recent years, including Anna Deavere Smith, Sister Helen Prejean, Winona LaDuke, and Lani Guinier. Along with their very fine lecture series and other such public programming, they have developed a delightful website which contains a number of features that can only be...

In 1964, the University of Idaho Library received a collection of over 200,000 nitrocellulose and glass plate negatives taken by Nellie Stockbridge and one T.N. Barnard. Barnard was the founder of a prominent photo studio in Wallace, Idaho, and he ran the establishment for ten years until 1898, when he sold it to Nellie Stockbridge. Both individuals had a keen interest in the environment around...

The web makes finding reference works rather simple, and Bartleby.com has been kind enough over the past few years to put more than a healthy offering of their publications online at no cost to voracious readers and the generally curious. On this corner of their site they have brought together over one hundred popular nonfiction works. Visitors can meander through "The World's Famous Orations",...

For law students, learning about the world of legal citations is key. For many years, the standard reference work on legal citation was a manual known as "The Bluebook". This work has been revised numerous times over the years, and this online version appeared in May 2007. It is offered here as a public service, by the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University's Law School, and it...

In the early 1850s, some Basque people became disillusioned by the pickings in the gold fields of California. A number of them decided to raise sheep instead and spread across the American West. This vast digital collection from the University of Nevada at Reno brings together hundreds of images that document the Basque experience in the West and Europe. The images here include shots of...

The tagline for the Bata Shoe Museum is "For the Curious". It's an appropriate motto, as this provocative museum in Toronto contains over 10,000 shoes within its prodigious holdings. The museum opened in 1995, and visitors to this site can traipse through sections such as "Exhibitions" and "Collections" to learn more about their interpretive mission and their thematic areas. Most visitors will...

The BBC (or "Beeb" to those in the know) provides high-quality investigative news reports and thoughtful conversations on topics ranging from the Middle Ages to globalization. The BBC Caribbean Service ceased broadcasting in 2011, but users may utilize these archives for news articles about the Caribbean region until that time. This archived version of the BBC Caribbean site includes a Caribbean...

How do time zones work? Perhaps equally important is why do we even have time zones? The BBC News group has created this interactive and fun exploration of time zones for the general public. After a brief introduction, visitors can continue on to a globe complete with tabs that read, "Where time collides", "Split time", "The politics of time", and "What time is it in space?" Clicking on each of...