Beautiful Old Texts, Available Online
The Internet’s collection of old manuscripts and texts is not only growing in size but improving in quality. With a few clicks of the mouse you can zoom in on some of the earliest Hebrew scrolls, the handwritten works of Leonardo da Vinci or Jane Austen, and the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. Above, the Dead Sea Scrolls. See more.
Royal Society Journal Archive Made Permanently Free to Access
Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available.
Treasures in the archive include Isaac Newton’s first published scientific paper, geological work by a young Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated account of his electrical kite experiment. And nestling amongst these illustrious papers, readers willing to delve a little deeper into the archive may find some undiscovered gems from the dawn of the scientific revolution – including accounts of monstrous calves, grisly tales of students being struck by lightning, and early experiments on to how to cool drinks “without the Help of Snow, Ice, Haile, Wind or Niter, and That at Any Time of the Year.”
Includes the world’s first peer-reviewed scientific journal! This is BIG, folks. Check it out.
JSTOR makes early content free
“JSTOR, an online system for archiving academic journals, has announced it is making journal content published prior to 1923 in the United States, and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR. Making this content freely available is a first step in a larger effort to provide more access options to independent scholars and others without access to an institutional subscription….” (JSTOR, Sept. 6 ) [text via American Libraries Direct]
Brilliant step, JSTOR. I knew you were one of my favorite databases for a reason.
PubMed - The way all scholarly research should be.
In case anyone was wondering (which you weren’t, but I’m telling you anyway, because you should know), the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed is amazing.
In their own words:
PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.It is basically indexes scholarly medical journals, and includes abstracts of articles. It’s beautifully streamlined, and if the full text of an article is available for free (somewhere on the web) there should be a link taking you directly to where you can download it.
I’ve had to do a lot of medical research recently at work, and it’s one of these things that people don’t know about, so it very easily makes you (as a researcher) look very capable, when really it’s the capable thing (so to speak).
ALSO! More reliable than WebMD (and the like), largely because they’re not under the influenced of advertisers’ money, The National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus is also phenomenal.
MedlinePlus is the National Institutes of Health’s Web site for patients and their families and friends. Produced by the National Library of Medicine, it brings you information about diseases, conditions, and wellness issues in language you can understand. MedlinePlus offers reliable, up-to-date health information, anytime, anywhere, for free.You can use MedlinePlus to learn about the latest treatments, look up information on a drug or supplement, find out the meanings of words, or view medical videos or illustrations. You can also get links to the latest medical research on your topic or find out about clinical trials on a disease or condition.
This has been a public service announcement.
Word! I use PubMed all the time at my job (reference at a health sciences library). It’s a great resource because unlike other medical databases, like CINAHL and Medline, it’s FREE.
Digital Libraries Wasted
No surprise there… perhaps we don’t advocate these libraries enough for students. I come in contact with MANY students every day who have no idea the advantages they have in their very own libraries.
This article is mainly about USC but I think it applies to everyone.
Often, students only frequent the libraries for a quiet place to study, to use a computer or to print. USC appears to be well aware of the evolution toward online resources and has continually updated its subscriptions to educational databases or purchased additional e-resources to encourage student research. Whether students use these resources, however, is another case.
(from TO BE SHELVED)
Click here to see the database of Penguin’s Science Fiction Covers.
It’s a nonfiction nerd’s fantasy: a database of nearly 30,000 feature stories, meticulously organized, sleekly presented, and fully searchable — by author, by publication, by topic.
Byliner.com, which launches today, wants to be the Pandora of narrative nonfiction. It offers users a recommendation service that suggests new authors they might like, as well as automatic Facebook updates whenever a favorite writer publishes a new story. It also offers writer profile pages that gather their long-form stories from across the web together with links to the Amazon pages of their published books.
The site is already large and impressive. It has the “follow me down the rabbit hole” appeal of Wikipedia (one page leads to another, and suddenly you’ve spent an hour on the site), paired with the ambience of a gentleman’s club: elegant design, good service, a certain tone — like the rustle of electronic pages as Serious People Read.
