Digital Collections

Open Access Resources

The Opening of Science and Scholarship – Open access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary copyright and licensing restrictions. Publius Project, Feb. 5, 2009; a brief introduction to open access is here, an overview is here.

Franklin Virtual Schools – Are you considering a GED? This program is an alternative to the GED test for many students 18+! It enables you to register, learn and test completely online at your own pace in the comfort of your own home! The FVHS Adult High School Diploma program format is similar to the GED but offers some significant benefits. GED Online

MIT Open Courseware

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

Visit: ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

P2PU — Peer To Peer University

P2PU advertises:

Learn anything with your peers. It’s online and totally free.
At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

Visit at https://p2pu.org/en/

The Open University

The Open University is a world leader in modern distance learning, the pioneer of teaching and learning methods which enable people to achieve their career and life goals studying at times and in places to suit them.
Visit: http://www.open.ac.uk/

All Subjects

Academic Earth “thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars”

DSpace@MIT search MIT’s online institutional respository

Google Scholar

Internet Archive

Open Library

Spoken Word Services a repository of digital audio resources; create a free account to use; for educational use only

World Lecture Hall “free online course materials from around the world”

Worldcat locate books, articles, DVDs, CDs in a library near you

Business

Body of Knowledge ” … a database containing citations and abstracts of literature (journal articles and books) on the subject of quality and performance improvement.” Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Computer Science

ACM Digital Library Association for Computing Machinery

IEEE Xplore search “technical literature in electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics” at the non-member “guest” level

Libra Academic Search a free computer science bibliography search engine, from Microsoft Research Asia; search in English or Chinese

Criminal Justice

NCJRS National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Economics

Discussion Papers non-members can search for abstracts of discussion papers from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (UK)

Education

AMSER Applied Math and Science Education Resources

TRC Teacher Reference Center; a free index to education literature for teachers and administrators; from EBSCO Publishing

Environment

GreenFILE a free environmental literature database from EBSCO Publishing; “… provides indexing and abstracts for more than 384,000 records, as well as Open Access full text for more than 4,700 records.”

Language

Linguistic Bibliography Online

Law

Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports

  1. CRS Reports from the National Library for the Environment, 2048 reports on the environmental and related topics
  2. Open CRS Network CRS Reports; currently listing 18,944 reports
  3. WikiLeaks recently released 6,780 reports

Legal Education Commons from CALI, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction; contains over 700,000 federal court opinions

Public.Resource.Org government information; for background see NY Times article, Feb. 12, 2009.

Library and Information Science

LISTA Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts; a free database of literature abstracts dating back to the 1960’s; from EBSCO Publishing

Science

CERN Document Server search over 900,000 bibliographic records, including 360,000 full-text documents

Science Research Portal a free search portal developed by Deep Web Technologies

Virtual Technical Reports Center links to Institutions that provide either full-text or abstracts to technical reports, preprints, reprints, dissertations, theses, and research reports of all kinds.

Techniques

Research Sources, Techniques, Tools

academhack tech tools for academics

Academic Productivity a blog that reviews research and writing tools

CiteULike “citeulike is a free service for managing and discovering scholarly references”

Connotea “Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists; Completely free, no download.” Review of Connotea (2008).

DiRT Digital Research Tools Wiki; for researchers in the humanities and social sciences

Legal Education Commons from CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction; contains “… legal education materials including syllabi, podcasts, presentations … ”

Recommended Search Strategy “Search with peripheral vision”

7 Things You Should Know About Personal Learning Environments

7 Things You Should Know About Zotero

Web Cite an on demand archiving system for web references