Online Archives & Directories

These are samples / starting places for general research, either containing large collections of free primary and secondary source materials (archives) or organized links to such materials around the web and/or physical library networks ( directories). More can be added as students come across them.

General / Most Disciplines

• Jstor: www.jstor.org 
A supposedly-not-for-profit database of tens of thousands of academic articles on all subjects, especially strong in the humanities. The articles that are in the public domain are available from Jstor for free, though most are also at other sites; there is afree individual programme in order to qualify for not-for-profit status, but they’ve intentionally designed it to be virtually useless and funnel you into the paying programme, as I found a few years ago when I went to the trouble of signing up all of our students. Downloading Jstor articles (probably to distribute not-for-profit) led to Jason Swartz's arrest, prosecution, and suicide, as we shall see in the course. 
• Internet Archive: https://archive.org/  
Massive library of public domain texts of all kinds. It’s especially useful for history and cultural studies, and pre-1930 literature. Note: Enter your search into the second field down, NOT the one that says “Wayback Machine”. It recently had an online-lending library of copyrighted texts, but got into trouble with the commercial publishers when they expanded access for use of schoolchildren in lockdown, so it seems to have been shut down. This also includes:
• The Wayback Machine: https://archive.org/web/ 
(Part of the Internet Archive, above) An archive of the internet itself, enabling you to track down citations of websites that have closed/disappeared, explore a topic’s internet presence on a certain date, etc.
• Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/ Website of free materials for students, including 800 ebooks and 1,000 audio-books (mostly classics), over 1,000 films including some actually good classic movies (not only public domain), 1500 online courses from universities (whatever that translates to in each case) as well  as a section of more curated material geared at K-12 students and use in at-home scenarios.
• LibraVox: https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio 
(Also part of the Internet Archive, above) Large, free library of audio books (most of texts in the public domain, though not all); could be useful for students with reading disabilities when using older texts.
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/ 
A kind of peer-reviewed search engine, that searches for your terms among various academic hosting platforms like Jstor, Muse, etc. Can be helpful in finding articles, but many search results are still behind a firewall unless you subscribe to the host website. It also has some apps for organising your research documents, if you like to outsource that part of the process to robots. I’ve not personally found google scholar useful as a researcher, but I haven’t explored all of it and many people do like it, so it’s worth checking out.
• The Smithsonian Digital Library: https://library.si.edu/digital-library
 Digitized and prepared materials from the Smithonian; seems to have a pretty decent selection of scientific material of various kinds, as well as a big archive of historical manuscripts and ephemera.
• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals): https://doaj.org/
 A kind of open-access version of Jstor with tons of academic journals across disciplines (5 million+ articles).
• Europeana: https://www.europeana.eu/en/collections 
Materials drawn from European museum collections; mainly humanities-related, but with some material pertaining to the sciences.   
• Open Research Library: https://openresearchlibrary.org/home 
Open-access collection of scholarly articles, similar to Jstor or DOAJ above; quite a few articles, but with a poor interface; articles are organised by discipline and beyond that pretty randomly. 
• UPenn Online Books Page: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ 
A huge kind of wild-west directory of random titles available digitally (3 million+ titles); lots of stuff on many topics, including contemporary publications, but not boolean-searchable so its usability is limited.

For Humanities

• Foreign Affairs Magazine Archive: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ 
Our school subscription gives us access to International Relations  online edition, but more importantly its full online archive which includes all issues stretching back to the 19th Century, so it’s a great resource for all 20th Century as well as contemporary geopolitical projects. Ask Olchar for the Password.
  
• Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ 
Huge collection of public domain texts, most of them from the 19th Century or earlier, primarily humanities texts (especially literature and philosophy). Not as comprehensive as Internet Archive (for instance) but here all of the texts have been transcribed by humans (not digitally scanned) and so are much more readable and searchable in html form.
• Bartleby.com: https://www.bartleby.com/titles/ 
A bunch of free classics ands reference books – like Project Gutenberg Junoir.
• The Library of Congress has two possibly useful portals: 
Historical primary documents, scans: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ 
“Ask a librarian” feature for students to instant-message live librarians for advice: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/
• The National Archives: https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog 
Primary documents available online.
• Digital Public Library of America: https://dp.la/ 
Primary & Archival Sources relating to US History.
• Google Books: https://books.google.com/ 
Scanned books online; it includes passages from a lot of copyrighted matrerial, but doesn’t make the whole book accessible, and the algorithm often prevents you from accessing more than an appetizer of what you’re trying to read. When texts are in the public domain, you can sometimes download them in their entirety for free.
• Historical U.S. Newspapers Online: https://libguides.bgsu.edu/USNewspapersInternet 
A sizeable database of connecting various separate online archives; I intend to explore it a bit further.
• Old Maps Online (Yes, that’s the actual site title): https://www.oldmapsonline.org/ 
Database of historical maps held in various online collections.
• ABYZ News Links:  http://www.abyznewslinks.com/
 Simple database of international online newspapers organised by region and country (in their native languages)
• The Luminist Archives: http://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/ Free-to-read full copies of Sci-fi, fantasy, and weird fiction books, periodicals, and assorted texts.