A wealth of undiscovered treasures awaits you at the Martindale Reference Desk. Started by Jim Martindale in 1994 as a project at the University of California at Irvine, this site has expanded to 40 different “centers of information”. Martindale tracks usage from over 125,000 users in 150 different countries on a daily basis. He updates the site on a weekly basis and offers access to a wide diversity of online resources. Though the user will delight in the vast quantities of resources available here, navigating the site may cause some frustration. Users must scroll through a clunky navigational layout to locate the information resource they seek. The amount of available resources keeps increasing; but the site’s design has not been updated to improve quicker access to information links. In fact, a print out of the first screen is actually 16 pages long.
Poor navigational layout aside, this reviewer decided to start at the top to begin discovering the breadth of materials available from this site. “World wide overview” seemed the most logical place to begin. Indeed, a wide range of materials is offered under this heading including the world daily reports,country information, communications,demographics, transportation, postal codes, maps of the world, and an A to Z listing of subject dictionaries and encyclopedias. The world daily reports are a fascinating component of this site. Here, you will find links to any type of information that is relevant to the current time. Of course you can find the current weather via satellite; but you can also check out the planet’s position, locate jobs world wide, or check up on the latest coordinates of the B‐10A iceberg. The world daily reports are accessible from each section of the Martindale Reference Desk.
Also available from the opening page are links to the various information centers. Each center concentrates on a particular subject area or resource type. Especially interesting and useful is the Calculators Online Center. Links to over 9,625 calculators are available to perform quick or complex calculations on every topic imaginable. Subject related centers offer a multitude of teaching files, multimedia courses/textbooks, multimedia tutorials, databases, journals and more. Most links are nicely annotated to give the user an overview of what to expect from each resource.
Although there are very extensive information centers covering the arts and humanities, the major focus is on the science, math, and health centers. There are centers for chemistry, physics, biosci/biotech,mathematics, geoscience, materials science, and engineering. The health centers which are broken down into separate categories of information by health‐care topic are so extensive that they are also located on a separate site called Martindale’s Health Science Guide (http://www‐sci.lib.uci.edu/∼martindale/HSGuide.html).
Resources at The Reference Desk range from the scientific to the general. There is something for everyone, whether it be for teaching, learning, professional research, or for everyday information needs. One thing that sets this site apart from other virtual reference desks is the incorporation of so many teaching resources for educators to use in the classroom. One could easily spend days exploring the resources available here on any given topic area. For fun, be sure to check out the “Enjoy, have fun and be creative” area. The biggest problem with using the Martindale Reference Desk is getting lost in its extensive list of links. When using this site, it is a good idea to bookmark your favorite links; otherwise it may be difficult to locate them again.
