This month we have details of an exciting new competition, expert research and resourcing tips from Lorraine Mace, Ten Tops Tips shows you how to prepare for and write travel articles, Student Success provides you with your monthly dose of motivation and the Useful Websites, End Note and Inspiration hopefully live up to their names

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Expert Advice

By Lorraine Mace

This month I’ve collected a range of online reference sites, all of which are useful for those of us who have limited access to English language libraries and museums.

Dictionaries
Ask Oxford has built a database on grammar, usage and words, as well as giving a quote of the week, word of the day, spelling help and origins of words and phrases. www.askoxford.com Cambridge http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ and Mirriam Webster www.merriam-webster.com/ are both good online dictionaries and http://thesaurus.reference.com/ is useful when an alternative word is needed.

Quotes and Sayings
www.quotesandsayings.com/ is a wonderful site to find quotes by subject or author, excerpts from speeches and poetry, and a good selection of proverbs and sayings. The site also provides the full text of several books by Arthur Conan Doyle and the following works by Shakespeare: ‘All's Well that Ends Well’, ‘As You Like It’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, ‘The Tempest’ and his sonnets.

Museums
www.24hourmuseum.org.uk is a gateway to various UK museums, galleries and heritage attractions.

www.britishmuseum.org/ provides access to a database of about 5,000 artefacts from the British Museum's collections.

www.cornucopia.org.uk/ produced by the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council, is an online database of more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries.

www.iwm.org.uk/ The Imperial War Museum covers conflicts from the First World War to the present day.

www.museumspot.com/ is an American site that provides information on museums and galleries worldwide.

www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ the National Gallery Search allows you to explore by artist, subject, theme or title.

www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/ the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television gives details of the collections which include the world's first negative and the earliest television footage.

www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp the National Portrait Gallery lists collections by name of artist or sitter, by medium, or by subject.

www.nhm.ac.uk/ the Natural History Museum has details of the museum's collections, information about research, details of services and access to the catalogue.

www.tate.org.uk/ the Tate Online gives access to works in the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives.

Fee-paying sites

The British Library http://www.bl.uk/ gives online access to this incredible resource and offers copies of documents for a fee.

http://oxfordreference.com/pub/views/home.html Over 175 subject dictionaries and the World Encyclopaedia cover everything from art to physics, as well as bilingual dictionaries including French, German, Spanish and Italian.

www.britannica.com/ is the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Lorraine Mace lives in France and is a columnist with Writing Magazine and deputy editor and writing agony aunt for Words with JAM. Lorraine, a tutor for Writers Bureau, is the co-author, with Maureen Vincent-Northam, of The Writer’s ABC Checklist (Accent Press). Visit her website for news of a new flash fiction competition: www.lorrainemace.com