ARTFL Project: Roget Form If composing poetry for your sweetheart involves supplementing your limited vocabulary with obscure, multisyllabic words, you must have this digital version of Roget's familiar thesaurus at your side. When you search on a phrase, word, or headword (category of synonyms), you immediately jump to the appropriate section of the thesaurus's text. The item you typed in is highlighted, and hypertext links to other, related sections are easily accessible. Just be sure you know what effluvium means before you use it in your Shakespearean sonnet. humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/ROGET.html

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations John Bartlett's publication of witticisms and poignant sayings--one of the most important accessories a front parlor can have--is even better in HTML. Instead of thumbing through multiple indexes, you can now search electronically for keywords or pick authors from chronological and alphabetical listings. With quipsters ranging from Lord Byron to Muhammad Ali, you'll always have words on hand to woo that intriguing person in Marketing or insult the office rival who keeps sending you nasty e-mail. www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett

Britannica On-line You may want to pull the Britannica salesman out of the azaleas; this household name in reference materials now offers the world's first on-line encyclopedia. You will have to pay for full access ($25 registration fee and $150 per year for home use), but you can apply for a free trial period or peruse the brief on-line demo. Should you choose to buy, you get the same content as the standard bound version, articles not yet in print, the Britannica Book of the Year, and Webster's Dictionary. www.eb.com

CityNet Whether you are piling five children and a grandmother into the family station wagon or taking the Concorde to the French Riviera, your annual getaway can benefit from CityNet, one of the most extensive travel manuals ever compiled. CityNet provides detailed descriptions, guides, maps, photos, magazines, and transportation information for cities and hamlets in every country from Scotland to the Cote d'Ivoire. Soon you will know more about the world's great vacations than Chevy Chase. www.city.net

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare If you are among those who insist the Web is 'full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,' behold this HTML monument to the Bard himself: the standard works of Shakespeare now digitally accessible and neatly arranged in hypertext format. Plays contain separate links for each scene, synopsis, or dramatis persona but can also be viewed as continuous text. An integrated hypertext glossary even lets you instantly look up those arcane Elizabethan words that were so baffling in junior high. the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

The Encyclopedia Mystica No matter how far society advances, we still cling to our myths. Atlantis and Avalon, Beowolf and Theseus, sprites and unicorns are all alive and well on the Web thanks to Encyclopedia Mystica, a thorough collection of mythology, folklore, and legends (albeit with spartan graphics). Before the gnomes, goblins, and hobbits take over your machine, you can submit your own articles to the encyclopedia, peruse links to related pages, or browse an extensive bibliography of sources. www.bart.nl/~micha/mystica.html

The Global Health Network This hangout of choice for interns and hypochondriacs covers countless injuries, ailments, remedies, and elixirs. As its name implies, The Global Health Network is a truly worldwide collection of sites, including the Poisons Information Database at the National University of Singapore, the Canadian Diabetes Association, and the Nottingham School of Public Health. If this flurry of Web browsing has made you ill, you've come to the right place. www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet.html

History of Science, Technology and Medicine If your cohorts continue to beat you at Trivial Pursuit because you can't remember where Lucy was discovered or who invented calculus, log on to the History of Science home page. This subsite of the World-Wide Web Virtual Library contains an excellent biographical dictionary, documents on every area of technology, a directory of scientific institutions, and electronic journals. Relativity and quantum mechanics are covered, but you'll have to go elsewhere for Silly Putty and Slim Fast shakes. www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/hstm/hstm_ove.htm

Internet Public Library The University of Michigan has more to offer than just a catchy fight song. Michigan's Internet Public Library has succeeded in migrating all the varied resources of your local bibliotheca into the digital realm. IPL's reference materials, children's sites, reading rooms, and exhibit halls let you bone up on your accounting, enjoy a bedtime story, pore over the world's great banned books, and delve into African American history. Hail, hail to IPL, champion of the Web. ipl.sils.umich.edu

The Tech Classics Archive In a world of Achilles' heels, Oedipus complexes, platonic relationships, and cesarean sections, you ought to know your classic texts as well as you know your sitcoms. The Tech Classics Archive provides such an education with translations of 376 Greek, Roman, and Italian texts, including Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Machiavelli's The Prince. Considering its keyword search tool and its author, title, date, and translator indexes, you may even discard your Cliffs Notes collection. the-tech.mit.edu/Classics