In the old days, I used to love hanging around libraries, skimming the stacks for titles that caught my eye and spending an afternoon reading about whatever topic struck my fancy that day. That was long before I had children, much less such a crammed schedule. Although I’ve never lost my love of libraries, I haven’t set foot in one for over a year. I just don’t have time. Which is not to say that I’ve lost any of my love for them. I’ve simply learned to look online to satisfy my curiosity.

Until now I’d found online libraries to be largely disappointing. Most have sparse selections, poor formatting, and are little more than scanned copies of outdated volumes.

Then there’s Questia, an online academic library that sets the standard for what digitized libraries should be.

Let me tell you now, folks, this is a site I am actually using and know I’ll be a fan of it for some time to come.

As a writer and homeschooling parent, the kind of information I need in any given week is all over the board. One day I might want to read up on children’s learning styles and that night be curious about symbolism in literature. I’ve yet to find Questia lacking on any subject I’ve searched, and with over 70,000 books and 1.6 million articles in just about every category you can imagine, from art to psychology and everything in between, I guess that’s not so surprising.

They make learning about new subjects easy, too. Don’t know precisely what you’re looking for? All you have to do is type in your keywords and search their predefined research topics to retrieve a listing of categories containing your terms.

My search on “child learning styles” led to over 29,000 results… a bit more than I’ve got time to read this week. Fortunately, I don’t have to read them all at one time. Questia’s innovative search engine allows me to narrow my search further, then add titles of interest to my online bookshelf using one click.

The easily accessed bookshelf screen appears as a pop-up box, which means it’s contents are continually accessible. Just keep adding to it as you browse your results then use it when you’re ready to start researching your topic further.

Making research efficient is really where Questia shines.

I’m an avid note-taker, the kind who likes to mark her books up and cross-reference them. I’ve even been known to do this with some of my more beloved works of literature if, say, a Salinger passage reminds me of something Hawthorne once wrote.

That habit is one that’s stood between me and enjoying online research in the past, since I’ve always found it annoying to have to keep a hard-copy notebook (or even a separate computer file) to supplement what I’m doing online. (Librarians, I’ve noticed, tend to get a bit twitchy when I forget the book’s not mine and jot notes in the margin.) I have to take notes for information to really sink in to my brain.

Questia’s innovative research browser lets me do just that. In addition to taking notes on-screen, the browser allows users to bookmark pages, highlight particular passages, and generate citations and a bibliography with one touch. I’m still addicted to maintaining hard copies for my files, and Questia lets me print the page — with my notes and highlights. There’s also a dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia built in to the browser, so all the tools I need to research and write about a project are on one screen.

But Questia’s not just for academic research. The online library also contains thousands of classics, with everything from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to The Origin of Species.

At first glance, Questia’s subscription fees might seem a bit steep at $19.95/month ($49.95/quarter), but I easily spend the annual cost of $99.95 every month at the bookstore. With the price of gas what it is these days, that 30-mile round trip really adds up — and so do the double-shot lattes I wind up ordering every time I go, too. (Don’t even ask me what I paid in library fines over the past year. I’m afraid to know the total.)

You don’t have to take my word for it, though. Questia is now offering over 5,000 FREE books online. Check it out, and remember there’s no due date on your books when you read them online.

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