Reference books provide background information on a topic, such as definitions of terms, key figures and events, and well written overviews. They can be a useful starting point for any research project, because they fill in missing knowledge about the topic or provide you with the language of the discipline.
From the Department of Natural Resources, Canada comes an excellent electronic resource: the The Atlas of Canada.
Search selected dictionaries and encyclopedias from Oxford University Press:
Examples:
Search Sage Knowledge for indepth, authoritative background information on social sciences topics.
"The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million words, both present and past. "
