McGILL WEB GEMS

From biodiversity to online dictionaries

By Mark Shainblum | Come explore the hidden gems and secret places on the websites of McGill University and its affiliated institutions.

The Canadian Biodiversity Website

http://canadianbiodiversity.mcgill.ca/

A fascinating, well-designed website about biodiversity across Canada, produced by McGill’s Redpath Museum. It provides an overview of what the term “biodiversity” actually means, and why it’s become such a hot topic in the face of global warming and environmental degradation. It also provides a thorough overview of Canada’s different ecozones, species distributions and conservation issues, among many other environmentally critical things we should all know.

McGill Library Online Dictionaries

www.mcgill.ca/library-findinfo/ref/c-d/lang-dictionaries/

It’s one of the endless corollaries to Murphy’s Law: the dictionary on your bookshelf (if it’s actually on the bookshelf and not propping up a wobbly table) is always missing the specific definition you need. No problem. McGill’s Library website offers free, full-text access to virtually all of the most important English and French dictionaries and thesauri, including the Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Le Nouveau Petit Robert, the Concise Oxford-Hachette English-French Dictionary and many, many others.

There’s also a selection of Arabic, Chinese, German, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Japanese and Latin dictionaries, and some fascinating specialty dictionaries like the New Dictionary of Eponyms and The Dictionary of Slang.

Like all other McGill Library websites that offer access to outside databases, to access these dictionaries you need to be logged on to an on-campus computer or a remote computer with McGill’s virtual private network running.

Please send your favourite McGill website mystery-places to mark.shainblum@mcgill.ca.