Questia, an online service designed to give college students the tools to research and write better papers more quickly, launched on Jan. 22.

Troy Williams, a graduate of Harvard Law School and now the Director, President and CEO of Questia Media Inc., created the service. The need for an online collection of credible resources came to Williams in 1997 while he was working as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Williams realized that, although he could search the full text of any law case online, he could not search the full text of virtually any other books.

“If I needed to find a quote in a book, I needed the physical book itself, and had to spend many hours browsing it in the same manner one would have 50 years ago,” Williams said. “Questia is the first service to enable people to search the full-text of a large collection of books.”

Any student who has ever written a research paper can appreciate what Questia has to offer: access of scholarly sources at their convenience.

“Students can forget worrying if the library is open late enough to find resources, forget wondering if sources needed are checked out, and forget fretting over the accuracy of the citations and format of the bibliography,” said Alyssa Graf, Richards/Gravelle Public Relations representative.

Questia is an individual subscription-based service that can be used on any computer with online service. It contains more than 50,000 titles of the most frequently cited and consulted books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences, and that number is projected to grow to 250,000 by 2003.

Questia is a fully integrated research environment with tools such as automatic footnoting and bibliographies, hyperlinking across titles, annotating, highlighting and personal folders. This means that subscribers can read the full-text of hyperlinked sources, automatically create footnotes and bibliographies, personalize text with highlighting and margin notes and save papers online so they can access them from anywhere, at anytime. Questia also has an online dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia.

Perhaps the best aspect of Questia is the convenience of the service. Subscribers have 24-hour access, seven days a week with around-the-clock customer service. This means that students can sit in their pajamas and do research from the comfort of their own home or dorm room. This also eliminates the frustration of checked-out books, torn-out pages, missing journals and the hassle and expense of photocopying.

Currently, sources available center around the liberal studies, but they will be expanded in the future to include majors such as Chemistry and Biology. Questia?s staff of professional librarians has selected and continues to select titles for over 25 majors including Religious Studies, Literature, History, Philosophy and Psychology.

Students can search the service?s entire collection for free, but a subscription fee is required to read the full-text books and to use the set of research and writing tools.

Questia is available for annual ($149.95), monthly ($19.95) or short-term ($14.95) subscriptions set up to fit the variety of students? needs.

Graf said the service is doing extremely well and has exceeded the company?s expectations. For a limited time, Questia is offering a free 48-hour trial subscription for potential subscribers to see if Questia can work for them. The free temporary trial can be reached at www.questia.com/launch.