~ Early Web Links ~

Maintained by Melody Orfei, this page serves as a comprehensive directory of Massachusetts Special Education Parent Advisory Councils (SPED PACs) that have an online presence, organized alphabetically by town. Each entry notes the year the PAC went online, site size, hosting platform, and available features like email lists and Facebook groups, making it an invaluable resource for parents navigating special education advocacy across the state.

A specialized web tool by Ben Bullock that lets users draw kanji characters by hand with a mouse and have them automatically recognized, making it invaluable for looking up unfamiliar Japanese characters. The site also offers multiple lookup methods including multiradical, four-corner, and SKIP codes, with support for over a dozen interface languages.

Shadow Libraries is a curated directory of pirate library resources, aggregating links to free ebook sources like Anna's Archive, LibGen, Internet Archive, and more. It organizes access methods by type including direct downloads, torrents, IRC channels, Telegram bots, and online reading platforms, making it a handy one-stop reference for free digital book access.

Greg McVerry is a digitally networked scholar based in East Haddam, CT, whose site INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION explores the intersections of literacy, digital learning, and making through articles, blog posts, poetry, and podcasts. Organized around the motto 'Make. Hack. Play. Learn.', the site reflects his academic and creative philosophy that learning is interest-driven, production-based, and deeply tied to digital tools and networked communities.

No Web Without Women is an educational showcase highlighting the pivotal contributions of women in computer science and technology, featuring profiles of pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, and Grace Hopper with historical images and clear explanations of each innovation. The site makes a compelling case for how foundational technologies like algorithms, wireless transmission, and compilers owe their existence to overlooked female inventors and scientists.

Education Creations offers a curated collection of free educational links for teachers, homeschoolers, and parents, with categories covering gifted education resources, reading, phonics, math, and fun learning sites. The broader site also includes free worksheets and curriculum samples organized by grade level, making it a handy hub for K-6 classroom materials.

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, created by Eric Lease Morgan in 1994, is a curated collection of public domain and open access documents focused on American and English literature and Western philosophy, designed to support a liberal arts education. Visitors can browse thousands of texts by author, title, or tag, with links to repositories like Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive.

Lexilogos, created by Xavier Nègre, is a comprehensive reference portal aggregating dictionaries and lexicons for Old and Middle French from the 9th through the 16th centuries, including the renowned Godefroy dictionary and the DMF. Researchers and language enthusiasts will find an impressive collection of searchable historical dictionaries, travel narrative corpora, and scholarly lexicographic resources covering medieval French dialects and Romance languages.

David R. Gagnon, a Boston University biostatistics professor, compiled this reference page of curated web links spanning search engines, online dictionaries, e-book repositories, translation tools, and general internet utilities. A classic early-web link collection, it serves as a personal portal to resources like Project Gutenberg, Bartlett's Quotations, and various web reference tools.

An interactive reference chart organized like the periodic table of elements, cataloging over 100 visualization methods including pie charts, mind maps, Venn diagrams, timelines, and more exotic types like hyperbolic trees and flight plans. Hovering over each element reveals a tooltip definition, making it a handy at-a-glance guide for anyone working in data visualization, information design, or graphic facilitation.