FREE QUALITY RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS, ACADEMICS AND LIFELONG LEARNERS Stephen Perry IRO for Central Africa Washington, D.C

THE FOUR REVOLUTIONS NOW ON THE INTERNET What are these four revolutions?

Four important revolutions taking place in the Internet > Free Databases of articles: EX: > Free Books: EX: >Better, More Precise Search Engines

And, the Fourth one > Distance Education Sites: Free Lecture Notes, Free Student Projects, Syllabus of Course contents, Student Papers, Exams, Answers to Exams > Lectures available in audio, video or text Examples: >ocw.mit.edu, open.yale.edu, youtube.com/ucberkeley

Google is NOT a Professional Search Engine, BUT, if you going to use Google, use it well: here are some guides for using Google better GOOGLE: Guides to using Google most efficiently: google/

Google for Power Searchers: 08/google-for-librarians-50-tips-tools- and-resources-for-power-searching/ 08/google-for-librarians-50-tips-tools- and-resources-for-power-searching/

PART ONE: Alternate Search Engines to Google: please give these a spin! These are fantastic for your research!

Here are some other quality Search Engines you might find useful; these all provide sites that have been evaluated in advance by subject experts. One of my favorites is the Internet Public Library through the University of Michigan:

Note the Reading Room Links on the right hand side that give access to free electronic books, journals and newspapers

Note that the IPL has a search engine:

Librarians Index to the Internet: has a search engine, categories and a featured site.

Infomine tries to categorize the best of the Web by Library of Congress Subject Headings:

Here are some subject headings for English Language

Here are some free English Language dictionaries identified through Infomine

Specialized Search Engine for Research Studies: OAISter:

Here is a sample search on Rwanda in OAISter: OAISter searches 20 million records and so retrieves heavily specialized research studies, all free

Another useful search engine is Virtual Libraries, updated constantly:

Here is the Virtual Library for Engineering for example:

Here are some useful directories of quality information compiled by resource experts:

New York Public Library Links:

Alcove 9 from the Library of Congress is a directory of quality, free resources:

Here is a listing of free reference sites chosen by experts at the Library of Congress:

Now that you know some alternative search engines and a few directories for quality information, where do you find free tutorials for more information?

The SUNY ALBANY SITE in the previous slide teaches skills: how to search better, how to evaluate what you find, and how to avoid plagiarism The site address is:

Another tutorial teaching Information Literacy skills is provided by the U of California, Berkeley: includes free handouts nfo.html nfo.h

A free dictionary in many languages is:

Speaking of Wikis, one which has scholarly material, contributed only by experts is the new Scholarpedia:

PART TWO: FINDING FREE ONLINE BOOKS EXCELLENT, and LITTLE KNOWN SITES HERE

Now, let’s look at the area of free books and how to get them on the Internet One useful site is the University of California Press making available some 2000 free academic books on all topics: p/ p/ A Subject index may be found at: ns/index_subjects.html

University of California: Free Academic Books

Another useful site is the University of Pennsylvania Free Online Books: a browseable collection of over 30,000 books

WikiBooks just emerged as another source of books, including educational textbooks:

Educational Textbooks may be found at: ducator/open_textbooks ducator/open_textbooks

The University of Virginia now has an E TEXT Page at:

One can read scanned books at this site:

Here is the actual scanned book from a real library : one can flip pages just like a real book: over a million books available in full text format

Other sites where you can access full text books free are: Online Books through the Internet Public Library: International Children’s Digital Literature, Full Text, in 20 Languages: Google Books: Also see Google Scholar for information about books and authors: Google Book Search: Besides being able to search for actual books, this search also lets you find keywords and phrases that appear in books.

PART THREE: FINDING FREE ONLINE ARTICLES AND DATABASES Give these sites a try for finding articles, full text, online

How about free articles? Where can you access these? One of the best new free sites is the DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals at Includes the full text of over 3,800 journals arranged by subject category. This is what the site looks like

DOAJ:

Here are journals in the category of literature in DOAJ:

And, here is a full text article from the journal titled COMPOSITION

The full text: all free!

Social Science Research Network: www. ssrn.com Have to register first, but registration is free. The next few slides demonstrate SSRN’s research capabilities: SSRN covers papers given at International Conferences as well as published articles, many of these peer-reviewed.

More sites where one can retrieve full text articles are below: University Of Houston Libraries: Scholarly Journals Distributed Via the World Wide Web This directory provides links to established Web-based scholarly journals that offer access to English language article files without requiring user registration or fees. Free E-Journals Arranged By Subjects And Themes: Includes the best web sites and free E-Journals in over 40 different academic disciplines, constantly updated.

Results of SSRN SEARCH ON GENDER STUDIES

FULLTEXT OF ONE OF THE ARTICLES

Other sites for full text articles are ☼ Gateway for Free Ejournals: ☼ Free E-Journals: ☼ Open Humanities Press: Absolutely free access to scholarly EJournals such as Cosmos and History, Fast Capitalism, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, and Postcolonial Texts. ☼ HighWire Press HighWire recently loaded their 5 millionth article. “A division of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press hosts the largest repository of high impact, peer-reviewed content, with 1189 journals and 5,028,291 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made 2,014,513 articles free. With our partner publishers we produce 71 of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals.”

Also don’t forget about the free reading room from the Internet Public Library: arranged by broad topics

THESES AND DISSERTATIONS: FULL TEXT For serious research and research projects

If you want free access to theses and dissertations, here are two excellent sites. ☼ Theses and Dissertations from the University of Maryland: ☼ Theses and Dissertations from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]

Here is what the Maryland site looks like

Here is the actual full text of the dissertation, all 549 pages, free!

Now that you know how to find free books and free articles, want to know other secrets? This is from the Sawyer Library at

Here are other sources for finding free valuable publications. One is the Student Corner at

The Student Corner site gives you access to free books and free electronic journals in many fields. America.gov offers free webchats and articles of interest and the opportunity to share your opinions with others.

Example of a free publication in Student Corner: Outline of American Literature See others below

America.gov also comes in Language Versions: here is the French version:

Interested in American Studies? Here are two great sites: this is the American Memory Project from the Library of Congress.

Cross Roads Project from Georgetown University

Here is their Encyclopedia of American Studies

URLs The American Memory Project of the Library of Congress contains millions of digitized documents in all formats and in all fields of study pertaining to American society and history: The Crossroads Project at Georgetown may be found at:

Other free resources: Biography.com Here is a Bio of Abe Lincoln as one example

FREE VIDEOS FOR EDUCATIONAL AND TEACHING RESOURCES FROM

Where to find free videos explaining concepts in detail? is a great resource.

Note this free English language program on 15 free videos, completely viewable

VoD means Video on Demand: seeing videos requires free registration; entire video viewable

PART FOUR: FREE DISTANCE EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR YOUR INTELLECTUAL GROWTH AND FOR PROFESSORS TO SEE HOW OTHERS HAVE APPROACHED A TOPIC.

Distance Education Sites; great for Educational Advisors and prospective students wanting to explore what an American style Education is all about

EXAMPLE OF MIT COURSES ON LITERATURE: ALL FREE!

Here are free online class courses at Yale, available for download; courses are not for credit. This is a class on the American Novel.

Note this course on Richard Wright’s BLACK BOY (and all other Yale Courses) is available for download in video, audio and one can even print out a transcript of the lecture

Another free and new site is Academic Earth

URLs for these and other resources are as follows: Academic Earth: Yale University: (really excellent!) MIT University: Tufts University (see especially Medical/Dentistry online courses): University of California at Berkeley: Video Courses of actual classes given at Berkeley: Utah State University (especially excellent for International Economics) Johns Hopkins University: Notre Dame University: University of California, Irvine: OCW Consortium: Click on Memberswww.ocwconsortium.org Open Educational Resources: A clearinghouse of free teaching and learning resources – from K- 12 lesson plans to college curriculum.

Other resources to consult Check out IRO Steve Perry’s Wiki for bibliographies in many subject areas, all updated. You can find for example bibliographies that go into greater depth on free resources and a complete listing of all Free IIP Resources and available language versions. Available at:

THE END: THANK YOU! IRC LUSAKA developed a WIKI at: This site has this Powerpoint and the Researchers Toolkit Let us know your feedback on this and other resources that are useful for your work.