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Search Indexes

The Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents

A new resource from Internet Archive, this fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.

Free and OA Resources

The digital portion of a project by the LA Public Library collecting historical photographs and oral histories of LA's Chinatown

Created by Artsy.net. Search contemporary artworks by subject matter, materials, etc

database of 1,000,000 works of art, architecture, and design by 100,000 artists spans historical, modern, and contemporary works, and includes the largest online database of contemporary art

https://primo.getty.edu/primo-explore/search?vid=BHA&lang=en_US

a research institution, cultural center, and historic site that aims to offer the region and the world the same kind of experience the original Library of Alexandria did to the scholars of that world

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States

https://blackfreedom.proquest.com/?utm_source=PQ&utm_medium=Blog&utm_campaign=BlackFreedom

2,000 primary source documents related to African American history from 1790 to the contemporary era, freely available from ProQuest.

British Library Sounds presents 50,000 recordings and their associated documentation from the Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/collections

Digital representations of items from the BMA's collections, including items not available to view in person

digital collections from California's libraries, archives, and museums containing over 2,025,000 images, texts, and recordings

The digitized collections held by the libraries of Cambridge University, one of the world's oldest universities

Created and currently maintained by cartoonist MariNaomi as a way to spotlight marginalized comics creators

Abstracts of all types of U.S. government documents, including Congressional reports, hearings, debates, and records; judiciary materials; and documents issued by executive departments.

A joint service unit (UMS3668) whose main objective is to provide the higher education and research community with the tools needed to archive, disseminate and capitalise on scientific publications and data. All articles are provided directly by the author or publication

Knowledge center for an expanded contemporary ceramic field—art, design, architecture and technology—worldwide, with journals, catalogs, online community, images and more.

"A global, collaborative sound art and mapping project that remixes the world, one sound at a time. The project covers more than 95 countries and territories with more than 3,500 sounds, and more than 650 contributing artists."

Open access content search, including images, sound and video available under the Creative Commons license

a collection totaling over 213,000 hours of programming first made available to the public for free in 2007. In addition, The Video Library records all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day.

US Government's open data. Nearly 200,000 federally collected and maintained datasets on nearly all aspects of American life and habits.

https://editorsofcolor.com/diverse-databases/

Database of diverse practitioners of a variety of fields, including photography, writing & editing, and design

55,000 maps and images online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North American and South American maps and other cartographic materials

https://archive.org/details/democracys-library

Democracy's Library brings together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations

Over a million images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries

Digitized primary sources on American Indian history, including treaty documents, speeches, memoirs, and financial and legal documents

photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and genealogical materials

https://digital-research-books-beta.nypl.org/

Digital Research Books Beta is an experimental project, now in early Beta testing, that collects digital versions of research books from many different sources, including Open Access publications, into one convenient place to search. All the materials in Digital Research Books Beta are completely free to read and most of them you can download and keep, with no library card required. The books are either in the public domain, with no restrictions on your use of them, or under Creative Commons licences that may have some conditions, but only on redistribution or adaptation

https://www.nypl.org/about/locations/schomburg/digital-schomburg

From the New York Public Library's Schomberg Center, online articles, digital exhibitions, photographs, audio and video streams, historical projects, and external links for research in the history and cultures of the peoples of Africa and the African Diaspora

https://www.doabooks.org/doab?uiLanguage=en

"Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative that provides Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to southern history, literature, and culture. Currently DocSouth includes sixteen thematic collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history interviews, and songs." Site hosted by the UNC Chapel Hill library

Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection (American Indian archive)

https://collections.carli.illinois.edu/digital/collection/nby_eeayer

A growing collection of digitized American Indian items from the Newberry in Chicago of 130,000 volumes, over 1 million manuscript pages, 2,000 maps, 500 atlases, 11,000 photographs, and 3,500 drawings and paintings

OA resource for European cultural heritage. Includes books, music, art, maps, images. From museums, libraries, galleries and archives

http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/index.html

https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/sta/ney/bib/onl.html

A free online library from Germany's cultural institute providing access to a wide range of digital media including eBooks, ePapers, eMusic, eAudios and eVideos

Image Library created by Google conatining masterpieces of art from some of the world's most famous museums. Images can be saved and shared through a Google account

http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/search/basic?vid=1&sid=3ce7e4b2-1d0d-4896-8a00-bd47e94d518c%40sessionmgr102

a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

A growing database of over 40,000 historical recordings captured from a private collection of 78 records and wax cylinders. Requires free account. Includes views of ancillary materials like record sleeves, original ads, and related documents.

https://www.eastview.com/resources/gpa/crl-irn/

The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection comprises out-of-copyright newspapers spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution

In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents more than 16,500 pages of texts, 8,300 illustrations, and more than 60 maps. The Web site is organized around thirteen defining migrations that have formed and transformed African America and the nation.

https://archive.org/details/internetarcade

a web-based library of hundreds of arcade (coin-operated) video games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, emulated in JSMAME

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQFKQXI3EhSSWSwODomZ_aw

YouTube educational channel, including ebooks, audibooks, documentaries and educational videos on history, science, technology, business, personal finance and self-development

https://library.harvard.edu/digital-collections

Free access to over 6 million digitized items from the collections of the Harvard University libraries

https://cdm16286.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p262401coll004/search

Photographs, correspondence, artists' biography reports, drawings, images of art objects and more from indigenous peoples of the Americas, particularly the Greater Southwest.

A resource created by the University of Glasgow, the Historical Thesaurus of English arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, according to the first documented occurrence of a word in the entire history of the English language

http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php

A humanities site that shows the interconnections, the web, the links, between history, the arts, and culture - and how each plays off and influences the others

https://www.jstor.org/site/collection-list/?utm_term=Explore+the+Open+Community+Collections&utm_campaign=eml_j_library_digest_06_2022&utm_content=email&utm_source=Act-On+Software&utm_medium=email&pagemark=cGFnZU1hcms9Mg%3D%3D

Over 1200 important and rare collections from libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies around the world.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) preserves and makes accessible the documentary heritage of Canada. It also serves as the continuing memory of the Government of Canada and its institutions. This heritage includes publications, archival records, sound and audio-visual materials, photographs, artworks, and electronic documents.

https://www.loc.gov/rr/record/onlinecollections.html

Collections of audio recordings held by the LOC, including the National Jukebox, the American Folklife Center, and African-American Band Music & Recordings, 1883-1923

Portal to digital collection of items in the public domain or otherwise free from copyright restrictions

https://www.loc.gov/search/?all=true&fa=partof:open+access+books

Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalogue

Catalog records and digital images representing a cross-section of still pictures held by the Prints & Photographs Division of the LOC

All subject guides created by the Library of Congress to assist research in many fields

"An online database of digital publications from the visual arts, focusing on overlooked ephemera such as artists’ ebooks, podcasts, filmed lectures, field recordings, typefaces, PDF journals and software"

https://books.google.com/books?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ&hl=en#all_issues_anchor

"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

http://mcn.edu/a-guide-to-virtual-museum-resources/?utm_source=MCN+Opt-ins&utm_campaign=e3b381d0b0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_14_10_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_352c5284a5-e3b381d0b0-208361529

https://morguefile.com/photos/morguefile/1/pop?fbclid=IwAR2PStuTAE9wyV3D9NXjtReVRTCmkActLPyFe85NlPqZEzljZ1fpDDhIltk

"Morguefile is a free photo archive “for creatives, by creatives.” Founded by Michael Connors in the early Internet days of 1996, the site was created to serve as a free image exchange for creative professionals and teachers to use in their work. This same mission remains true today"

"America's Attic", the National Archives functions as the nation's record keeper, holding millions of documents in US governance, military records, genealogy, and much more

https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/data-visualizations/?utm_campaign=wp_book_club&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_books

This visualization features a map that shows approximate locations of digitized newspapers available in the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers collection. Explore the newspapers by clicking the dots on the map and access a time slider in the lower left hand corner to interact with the newspaper publishing timeline.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/selections-from-the-national-film-registry/

Selections from the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, a list of movies deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" that are earmarked for preservation by the Library of Congress. They are not selected as the "best" American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring importance to American culture

Over 900,000 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections, featuring prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

New York Public Library Public Domain Collections

https://www.nypl.org/research/collections/digital-collections/public-domain

A multimedia dance platform. It offers free access to a unique video base: filmed performances, documentaries, interviews, fictions, dance videos.

http://archives.getty.edu:30008/o/oaister/

OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. It provides access to these digital resources by "harvesting" their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).\

"A not-for-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with its registered office at the National Library in The Hague. OAPEN is dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books." Part of an EU project to achieve a sustainable publication model for academic books in humanities and social sciences and to improve the visibility and usability of high quality academic research in Europe.

https://www.omicsonline.org/peer-reviewed-journals.php?fbclid=IwAR3eyibuWKN2OqvhO5ySwOh_Mk6ymfo3sAFx0zt4zaToyiXx2KAN-xh8qrc

http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks

International community of echolar, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory. Books and journals

Access to over a million free eBooks available for reading online; part of Archive.org

Affiliated with Oxford University. An open access and open source website with data and research on many contemporary global topics including Climate Change, Health, Human Rights, etc.

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

"An online journal and not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas", focusing on works in the public domain

PubMed Central® is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine

Created and currently maintained by cartoonist MariNaomi as a way to spotlight marginalized comics creators

Collection of contemporary art engaged with digital technologies and the internet, including born-digital art

Includes histories, photographs, and maps for over 20,000 structures and places. Mostly buildings, but also find landscapes, infrastructure, monuments, artwork, and more

San Francisco Public Library digital collections

https://digitalsf.org/islandora/object/islandora%3Aroot

San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, Sanborn Maps, San Francisco Voter Information Pamphlets, a small collection of oral histories, and digitized books in the public domain

https://www.sciencedirect.com/browse/journals-and-books?accessType=openAccess

https://shakespeareandco.princeton.edu/

Princeton University is digitizing the lending records of the Lost Generation and other members of Shakespeare and Co's lending library