Access through Catalogs of Reviewed Sites by Subject Area

Infomine  infomine.ucr.edu  A scholarly listing of sites by subject compiled by reference librarians.
Scout Report   http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/archives  Reviews of websites by librarians.
Librarians' Index to the Internet   http://www.lii.org/ The public library version but good for popular culture.

WebPlus from Web of Knowledge. Do a subject search with their boxes. Look to the upper right of the journal article results list and click on WebPlus. The rep says they're peer-reviewed sites; my take is they are more scholarly than not, and selected for this database.

Gateways to Digital Collections

OAIster is an catalog of digital collections. You can choose text or image and search by keyword. It will tell you about the responsible party (authority).
Best of the History Websites
Google -- Search google with your keywords AND add "digital collections" (with quotation marks) to your search. This phrase is used by authoritative sites so it will bring up useful items. This is a better strategy than using google images.

Access through Known Portals

Asia-related Materials
Hmong Home Page
Jguide - a guide about Japan with links to topics from arts and entertainment to science and technology. Maintained by Stanford University.
Japan Text Initiative - an initiative designed to make texts of classical Japanese literature available on the World Wide Web.

Sample visual collections on Asia:
IDEAS An international Asian Studies database which grew out of the Asian TakeOut collection at St. Olaf.
ARTstor contains digital images of works of art from around the world

Government Documents (US and Non)
University of Michigan Document Center   This source is not to be missed!  Excellent access to international sites.
United Nations
World Health Organization
UNICEF

Access through Standard Search Engines

For Websites:
Google and all its permutations:
Google Books
Google Scholar
Google Images
Google Maps
Google News, etc.

Note: A few tips for searching Google:
AND is assumed in Google -- all words you use will be searched. If you want to use "or" it must be in capital letters to be treated as a boolean operator.
Instead of NOT, put a minus sign in front of a word: minnesota vikings -football
Quotation marks keep words in a phrase together as in other databases
Limit by domain (.edu or .gov) or to limit to a particular site by adding site:.gov or site:www.stolaf.edu/library (e.g. asia* site:.gov) (e.g. asia* site:.www.stolaf.edu)*
If you find a useful site, see who's linked to it: link:[your site here]
Find pages updated recently by using the date feature: [your site here] date:3 [3=updated in the last 3 months; you can also choose 6 months or 12 months]
[Wwith thanks to Barbara Fister, Gustavus College Library ]

For blogs and wikis:
Google's Blog Search indexes blogs from all over the world . With advanced search you can limit to words in the posting title or the blog title and limit by English.
Technorati is another standard blog index .
Lexis Nexis Academic offers an index to blog postings . On the entry page, change the checkbox to blogs. Remember to use the ! to truncate your terms if needed.
WikiIndex is a wiki for indexes to wikis .

Timing is Everything...

Just for fun, try the University of Minnesota's Assignment Calculator:
http://www.lib.umn.edu/help/calculator/

Evaluating Web Sites

On the St. Olaf Library home page there is a link to a set of questions for evaluating web sites.

Alternatively, the University of California, Berkely, Libraries have a thorough evaluation scheme which is quite useful.