Open Access Resources
- Art
- Audiovisual, Images, and Games
- General Open Access Journals, Books, Dissertations, and Theses
- General Repositories
- History
- Literature
- Reference
- Science
- Screenplays
Art
ART:21
Created by P.B.S., this website is patterned after a nationally broadcast series on contemporary art, artists, and ideas. Among other things, this site has an online lesson library, teacher materials and discussions. Full episodes are available in the PBS video portal.
Art History Project
Discover and learn about history's greatest artists, and browse artwork by movement, time period, or theme.
The Art Story
The Art Story is an educational 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2009 to demystify Modern Art and further art appreciation. It offers overviews of movements within Modern Art.
Artstor Public Collections
Artstor’s public collections offer approximately 1 million freely accessible images, videos, documents, and audio files from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials, as well as hundreds of thousands of open access images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Anyone may view and download these collections at library.artstor.org; no subscription or login required, but consult the rights data in each record to see if and how an image can be reused.
Bridgeman Images
This image archive provides over 100,000 images of fine and decorative art; scope is all periods, movements, styles, and themes in the history of art. Artworks from public and private collections are represented.
Chicago Art Institute Digital Collection
The Art Institute of Chicago recently updated its website and released a searchable database of high-resolution photographs of works in the collection. Many of these images are identified as "public domain" allowing them to be used freely, even for commercial purposes. Select "Public Domain" in the filter menu and you will find a full-resolution download link on the page. Check the copyright notice for each work.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Access to digital collections from two unique museums — the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park — that stand as one of the most visited arts institutions in the United States.
Getty Search Gateways
Contains images of artworks from the Getty Museum which are available for download without charge. Allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids.
Google Cultural Institute
An enormous digital collection of artwork spanning centuries and continents; The Google Cultural Institute brings together millions of artifacts from multiple partners, with the stories that bring them to life, in a virtual museum.
Islamic Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Conceived as a companion to the Islamic galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), this web site is intended as a general introduction to Islamic art from southern Spain to Central Asia, ranging in date from the seventh century to the present.
This website is created and maintained by "a team of researchers, editors, writers and creatives united by a shared goal of building more equitable resources for the study of art histories from the Indian subcontinent." The site is an "online platform consisting of an Encyclopedia, Courses and a Blog— which encourages knowledge building and engagement with the visual arts of the region."
MAP Museum of Art and Photography
MAP is custodian to a growing collection of over 18,000 works of art, predominantly from South Asia and dating from the 10th century to the present." The museum's website contains an extensive digitized collection which is available to access for free.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection Online
Find high quality art images. Includes approximately 400,000 of the Met's artworks available free online in high-res images.
Museum of Modern Art Digital Collection
The MoMA digital collection contains more than 81,000 works of modern and contemporary art.
Tate Modern Art Digital Collection
A high-quality collection of images that have been tagged with descriptive qualities like "hope," "nature," or death." Find an individual artwork and scroll down to EXPLORE at the bottom of the record to find links to other images, concepts or topics.
Victoria & Albert Museum
One million+ records for items held in the V&A collections. Some records have minimal information; others are very detailed. Some have high quality photographs; some have more basic images; others have yet to be photographed.
Yale Center for British Art
The majority of works in the Center’s collection are in the public domain. If a work is believed to be in the public domain and free of other restrictions, the Center’s digital images of the work in its online collection catalogue are made freely available. The rights status of the work is displayed in the online collection catalogue record.
Audiovisual, Images, and Games
Ad* Access
Presents images and information for advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines from 1911 to 1955. Focuses on these subject areas: radio, television, transportation, beauty & hygiene, and World War II.
Ad Council – Our Campaigns
Past advertising campaigns from the Ad Council’s history of public service announcements. Includes TV, radio, and print materials.
AdViews
A digital archive of thousands of television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. A project of the Duke University Library. Requires iTunes for viewing video.
African American Home Movie Archive
Created to serve as an online resource for researchers, educators, students, archive and library professionals, and other interested parties. The main feature of the website is the Black Home Movie Index, an aggregate of African American home movie collections from the early 1920s through the mid-1980s.
Amateur Movie Database
The Amateur Movie Database was developed to learn more about the world of amateur cinema. It assembles information about amateur films, filmmakers and clubs. Currently over 100 films are streaming on this site. This project helps archivists, researchers, and anyone interested in amateur filmmaking to learn more about this alternative world of filmmaking.
American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting contains more than 50,000 hours of digitized public broadcasting programs and original materials.
America at Work and Leisure
Digitized films depicting work, school, and leisure activities in the United States from 1894 to 1915 are featured in this presentation of 150 motion pictures. Highlights include films of the United States Postal Service from 1903, cattle breeding, fire fighters, ice manufacturing, logging, calisthenic and gymnastic exercises in schools, amusement parks, boxing, expositions, football, parades, swimming, and other sporting events.
Archive of American Television
Hosted by the TV Academy Foundation this archive provides access to hundreds of in-depth video interviews with TV's greatest legends and pioneers. These television history interviews can be browsed by person, show, topic or profession. New interviews and indexes are added regularly.
Audre Lorde Audio Recordings Collection
Part of the Lesbian Herstory Archives: These cassettes were donated to the Archives by different individuals and were recorded at public events including the 1979 march on Washington for gay and lesbian civil rights, a 1982 poetry reading, women's writing conferences in the late '70s and early '80s, and more.
Calisphere
Digitized images including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts that reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.
Creative Commons Search
Creative Commons has created this really useful search engine that lets you search for resources that are CC licensed. The image search is the most useful.
C-Span Video Library
The C-Span Video Library is comprised of streaming videos with indexing and brief descriptions. Closed captions are available.
Culture Unplugged
Culture Unplugged (C.U.) provides access to hundreds of documentary films that spans multiple facets of global issues, produced through a "socially and spiritually conscious" lens. Note: This link defaults to documentaries from CU's virtual film festival. Scroll down and select "Show Films from Archive" for access to more content.
Danish Silent Film Collection
The Danish Film Institute has launched stumfilm.dk, where everyone can follow the digitization of more than 400 works from the 1897–1928 period. As the films are digitized, they will be streamed on the site, accompanied by posters, photos, thematic articles, scripts and contemporary reviews.
Ensia Video Archive
"Ensia is a solutions-focused nonprofit media outlet reporting on our changing planet." Their mission is to "motivate and empower people around the world to create a more sustainable future by sharing stories and igniting conversations across sectors, geographies, ideologies and disciplines." All videos are licensed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.
EUscreen
The EUscreen portal offers free online access to thousands of items of audiovisual heritage. It brings together clips that provide an insight into the social, cultural, political and economic events that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as chronicling important historical events, the EUscreen portal allows you to explore television programs that focus on everyday experience. EUscreen is also intended to be a resource for educators, researchers and media professionals searching for new audiovisual content from across Europe. Note: see http://euscreen.openimages.eu/media for CC licensed content shared for repurposing.
Folkstreams
Provides streaming access to a large collection of documentary films about American folk, or roots, cultures. Includes essays about the traditions and filmmakers, transcriptions, study and teaching guides, suggested readings, and links to related websites. Site provides simple keyword and advanced searching, as well as ability to brose by subjects, regions, titles, filmmakers, and other categories. Video displays include links to additional, related films.
The Future of Film is Female
The Future of Film is Female amplifies the work of all women filmmakers through its funding, exhibition, and promotion programs. Our mission to support filmmakers early in their career. This is achieved through our grant program for short films, our unique programming commitment to theatrical representation of films by women, our community building with women in the industry to facilitate necessary culture change, and through ensuring equal representation of BIWOC within all of our programs. We are committed to creating industry-wide partnerships to work in solidarity towards an equitable future of film.
Gender Ads
Contains 2,500+ current print ads. Browse by gender, role, objects, or theme.
Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archives
IULMIA collection of educational and instructional films that have been digitized.
Irish Film Archive
Launched in September 2016, the IFI Player is a virtual viewing room where audiences from across the globe can instantly access the rich collections housed in the IFI Irish Film Archive. The IFI Irish Film Archive collection spans 1897 to the present day, and the most important social, political and historical events of the last century are represented, enabling us to explore our cultural identity and connect with the past.
Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download.
Internet Archive – Software Library: MS-DOS Games
Software for MS-DOS machines that represent entertainment and games. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable.
Jamendo Licensing – Royalty Free Music Tracks
Find music to use for your next film project.
Lafayette College Libraries’ East Asia Image Collection
An open-access archive of visual materials including digitized photographs, negatives, postcards, and slides donated by the Warner family. Select collections include: Sino-Japanese War Postcard, Manchuria Negatives, Taiwan Negatives, Scenic Taiwan book, and Taiwan Photographic Monthly Periodical.
LibriVox
LibriVox audiobooks are free for anyone to listen to, on their computers, iPods or other mobile device, or to burn onto a CD.
Librophile
Completely legal free audiobooks and eBooks. You can browse the latest books, search by keywords or choose more broadly by genre or language. You can often listen to chapters online, download a whole book, play a sample or subscribe using iTunes.
Lost and Found New Zealand
Thanks to a multi-year collaboration involving the New Zealand Film Archive, the NFPF, and the largest American nitrate archives, scores of “lost” American silent-era films are being returned to the big screen and shared with new audiences.
The Media Burn Archive
Media Burn Archive collects, restores and distributes documentary video and television created by artists, activists and community groups. Media Burn is a project of the Fund for Innovative TV, which has been producing challenging documentary video and television since 1990.
MIT Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive
View performances of Shakespeare from many parts of the world. Also includes essays and metadata by scholars and educators in the field.
Public performance rights are NOT included.
National Film Board of Canada
The National Film Board of Canada is a Canadian government agency that produces and distributes documentary, animation, alternative drama and digital media productions. The NFB website provides information on over 13,000 National Film Board of Canada films, and includes free access to over 2,000 films, excerpts, trailers, and interactive works for online screening.
National Film Board of Canada Indigenous Cinema Collection
A selection of Canadian films and videos produced between 1917 and 2020, all are free to stream online without any sign-in, each page also has the option to buy that film, but no purchase required to stream.
National Parks Service B-Roll Video
This webpage provides links to public domain video of some of those sites, including national parks, monuments, battlefields, historic sites and related areas. This content is great for remixing, reuse in projects and publication.
National Screening Room
Hundreds of hours of motion pictures digitized & made freely available by the Library of Congress. Movies believed to be in the public domain are fully downloadable. Permissions were granted for the inclusion of copyrighted motion pictures, which are only available as streaming files. New content is added to the National Screening Room every month.
Open Music Library
The Open Music Library is an initiative from Alexander Street to build the world’s largest free index of digital resources for the study of music. Curated by a community of music scholars, students, teachers and librarians, the Open Music Library brings together peer-reviewed journal articles, books and music scores from the world’s digital collections.
Open Video Project
A University of North Carolina project to create free repository of archival, documentary and educational video.
PBS Great Performances
Classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.
Penn Museum Film Archives
The Penn Museum Archives has an extensive collection of films that, thanks to the generosity of the Internet Archive, are nearly all available online. The online film collection consists of over 700 archival films.
Pixabay
Free photos for commercial and private use - no attribution necessary. Some photos may come from other websites, such as Shutterstock, which may not fall under public domain - check each photo to ensure that it is public domain.
UbuWeb: Film & Video
Educational resource for avant-garde film and video.
UCLA Preserved Silent Animation
The collection of animation at UCLA Film & Television Archive from the years 1930-1950 is practically without peer. Nitrate prints of classic cartoons abound, as do original negatives or best-surviving printing elements for many of the films from animation’s “golden era.” Included here are most of the Max Fleischer and Famous Studios Paramount subjects; the George Pal “Puppetoons”; the independent productions of Ub Iwerks; many of the Van Beuren “Rainbow Parade” shorts; a large number of Warner Bros. cartoons.
Unsplash
"All photos published on Unsplash are licensed under Creative Commons Zero which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash."
Wikimedia Commons
A collection of over 55,000,000 freely useable media files to which anyone can contribute.
General Open Access Journals, Books, Dissertations, and Theses
AOSIS Open Journals
Publishes open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, covering a wide range of academic disciplines.
BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
BASE provides more than 120 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. About 60% of the indexed documents can be accessed for free (Open Access). BASE covers journals, institutional repositories, digital collections and more.
CORE
CORE aggregates all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and makes them available to the public.
Digital Commons Network
The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work.
Directory of Open Access Books
DOAB provides open access to over 850 Academic peer-reviewed books from 25 publishers.
Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
GameDiscover Co Launches Free To All Pitch Deck Archive
GameDiscoverCo has started compiling a pitch deck archive to help developers understand how to present their projects to publishers, investors, and other industry players.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Humanities Commons: CORE
Full-text, interdisciplinary, non-profit social repository of articles, databases, syllabi and more, designed to increase the impact of work in the Humanities.
Internet Archive: eBooks & Texts
A sub-set of the Internet Archive. This collection is comprised of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses, contributed by the Internet Archive Community.
JSTOR – Open Content
Explore academic content on JSTOR that is open to everyone, everywhere. Search thousands of free journal articles and open access book chapters.
JURN
A multidisciplinary search engine, JURN provides you with links to various scholarly websites, articles, and journals that are all free access or open access. Specifically covering the fields of the arts, humanities, business, law, nature, science, and medicine, JURN has indexed almost 5,000 repositories to help you find exactly what you're looking for.
Library of Congress Open Access ebooks
The Library of Congress is sharing with anyone anywhere access a growing online collection of contemporary open access eBooks from the Library of Congress website.
M/F a feminist journal
This journal was self-published with ten issues appearing between 1978 and 1986. The idea of the journal developed following the ‘Patriarchy Conference’ held in London during May of 1976, which was organized by a collective of women from a number of feminist study groups - primarily in London but connecting widely across Britain - who had begun to see a need for a larger forum to discuss the development of theoretical ideas within the Women’s Movement.
Media History Digital Library
A free online resource featuring millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound.
The Modernist Journals Project
Major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. Coverage: 1890-1922.
OER Commons
OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
The Online Books Page
The website lists over 1 million free books on the Web.
Open Library
Open Library is an open source website that provides access to out of print material and material in the public domain which can be read online.
Open Research Library
Browse and search for Open Access books from various University Press publishers and providers, currently including all Knowledge Unlatched books. The Open Research Library (ORL) will eventually include all Open Access scholarly book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books.
Open Textbook Library
Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.
Paperity
Research database that promises easy access to thousands of journals from hundreds of disciplines, in one central location. All articles indexed by Paperity are Open Access (OA), with a focus on ensuring that it includes only genuine scholarly literature. Paperity’s goal is to aggregate 100% of OA literature, published in any place around the world, in any field of research.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg offers over 59,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
ProQuest Open Access Dissertations and Theses
PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. The authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access and make their research available for free on the open Web.
Wiley Open Access
Wiley Open Access is a program of fully open access journals. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are immediately freely available to read, download and share. The fully open access journals are published in collaboration with authoritative journals and societies as well as supported by internationally renowned editorial board members.
General Repositories
American Folk Art Museum
The American Folk Art Museum Archives holds institutional records and distinctive collections related to the founding and development of the field, its artists, and its networks, and has been shaped by artists, collectors, curators, and scholars. Archive materials include audio, video, photographs, ephemera, clippings, manuscripts, and correspondence, as well as expansive artist and subject files.
Archnet
Archnet is an open access, intellectual resource focused on architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, visual culture, and conservation issues related to the Muslim world. Archnet’s mission is to provide ready access to unique visual and textual material to facilitate teaching, scholarship, and professional work of high quality.
BBC Online Media
Provides online access to BBC's archives including themed collections of radio and TV programs, documents and photographs.
The British Library Digital Collection
Access to the various digital collections from The British Library. Highlights of the collection include manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs, and maps.
British Pathe
Consists of the archive of the British Pathe news corporation from 1896 to 1970. The archive covers history, social history, sports, news, and entertainment. Closed captions are not available.
CSUN Digital Library Collections
The Oviatt Library Digital Collections feature historically significant documents, photographs, oral histories, artistic works and exhibit materials selected from the Oviatt Special Collections and Archives. The majority of these collections focus on Los Angeles history with emphasis on the San Fernando Valley.
Digital Public Library of America
DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.
Europeana Collections
Provides open access to artefacts, artworks, books, videos, and sound files from across Europe.
Huntington Digital Library
The Huntington Library specializes in British and American history, literature and the history of science spanning the 11th century to the present. Its Digital Library contains maps, photographs, manuscripts, rare books, prints and ephemera. Unique collections focus on southern California architecture and technology, Jack London (author), Colorado rivers, coded Civil War messages, and Mormonism.
International Music Score Library Project
IMSLP is a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores based on the wiki principle. Users can exchange musical ideas through the site, submit their own compositions, or listen to other people's composition; this makes IMSLP an ever-growing musical community of music lovers for music lovers.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive provides open access to books, audio recordings, videos, images, software programs and more.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
A gateway to the Library of Congress's resources of digitized American historical materials. Organized into thematic collections, the original formats include manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, maps, sound recordings, motion pictures, books, pamphlets, and sheet music.
Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections
Representing more than 35,000 items, Margaret Herrick Library Digital Collections presents a curated selection of materials from the library's extensive holdings on motion picture history. Items include correspondence, photographs, sheet music, scrapbooks, lobby cards, movie ephemera, books, film magazines and industry publications. The collections also provide access to publications of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dating back to the founding of the organization in 1927.
National Archives
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an independent agency of the United States government charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. The official Archives of the United States government provide a variety of online primary sources.
National Library of Jamaica Digital Collections
The National Library of Jamaica’s (NLJ) holdings constitute the most comprehensive collection of Jamaican documentary offering an invaluable representation of Jamaica’s history and heritage. To enhance access to its rich and varied collections, the National NLJ has digitized thousands of historical photographs, prints, drawings, pamphlets, programs, manuscripts, books, rare maps and other rare and unique materials. The vast majority of these images are freely available online for public access.
New York Public Library Digital Collections
The New York Public Library Digital Gallery provides access to over 800¸000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of the New York Public Library¸ including illuminated manuscripts¸ historical maps¸ vintage posters¸ rare prints and photographs¸ illustrated books¸ printed ephemera¸ and more.
Online Archive of California
The Online Archive of California (OAC) provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California and collections maintained by the 10 University of California (UC) campuses.
Paris Museums Digital Collections
Free digital collections from the Paris Museums.
Public Domain Review – Collections
“With a leaning toward the surprising, the strange, and the beautiful, we hope to provide an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer – an archive of materials which truly celebrates the breadth and variety of our shared cultural commons and the minds that have made it.”
The Smithsonian Institute Digital Collections
A free online archive from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Smithsonian Open Access
At Smithsonian Open Access you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
Vatican Library Digital Collections
This ongoing project aims to digitize the entire library’s collection of manuscripts. This includes 80,000 codices mostly from the Middles Ages and Humanistic periods.
The Writer’s Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library
Although not an open digital collection this Library is open to the public offering a unique collection of over 40,000 items for research. Most of their collection consists of produced film, television, radio and video game scripts—many of which have received major writing awards (WGA, Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, etc). They also collect writers’ papers, books, periodicals, and other materials on the history, biography, art, craft and business of writing for entertainment media.
The World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from various countries and cultures.
History
The American Presidency Project
Database containing over 100,000 documents relating to the presidency. Focus on the public papers from the 20th and 21st centuries.
American Rhetoric: Online Speeches
5000+ full text, audio and video versions of public speeches, sermons, legal proceedings, lectures, debates, interviews, other recorded media events.
Archive of Early American Images
The Archive of Early American Images database—images of colonial North and South America from books, manuscripts, and broadsides in the library’s collection—has nearly 7,000 images and is still growing. Images in this database are accompanied by extensive bibliographical and descriptive information and are fully searchable by keyword.
Black Freedom Struggle Website
ProQuest invites you to explore the new Black Freedom Struggle Website featuring expertly selected open primary source documents. Visitors will find historical newspaper articles, pamphlets, diaries, correspondence and more from specific time periods in U.S. history marked by the opposition African Americans have faced on the road to freedom.
Black Legacy Press
Preservation and access of historical and current African American newspapers.
Civil Rights Digital Library
Provides access to online films, texts, images, and audio recordings related to the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1950's and 1960's.
David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of the Western Hemisphere, but covers other areas. Features innovative interfaces for searching by area and time range.
Digital Transgender Archive (DTA)
Online hub for digitized historical materials, born-digital materials, and information on archival holdings throughout the world; Based in Worcester, Massachusetts at the College of the Holy Cross, the DTA is an international collaboration among more than twenty colleges, universities, nonprofit organizations, and private collections.
Digitized Primary American History Resources
Guide from the University of Northern Iowa collecting links to various websites containing digitized information on American History.
The Great Depression Interviews
From the stock market crash of 1929 to the beginnings of World War II, The Great Depression tells the dramatic and diverse stories of struggle and survival during the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. Originally debuting on PBS stations in 1993, the 7-part series was met with critical acclaim, winning an Emmy for writing and a duPont-Columbia Award. These interviews are part of the Henry Hampton Collection housed at the Film & Media Archive at Washington University Libraries. Each video and transcript represents the entire interview conducted by Blackside, Inc., including portions that did not appear in the final program. For more information, please contact the Film & Media Archive.
History Cooperative
A short history of nearly everything.
Imperial War Museum Archives
Film, photos, videos, audio, documents spanning 1917 to present. The museum's focus is on conflicts from WWI on.
Royal Collection Trust – Maps from George III’s Private Collection
George III's collection of military maps comprises some 3,000 maps, views and prints ranging from the disposition of Charles V's armies at Vienna in 1532 to the Battle of Waterloo (1815).
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Moving Images Collections
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) collections includes over 4,500 moving image historical records (e.g., propaganda films, Newsreel footage) and over 7,600 hours of streaming video oral history testimonials.
University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies Video Library
Watch digitized videos of Holocaust survivors, American concentration camp liberators, lectures on the Armenian Genocide, testimonies by second generation Armenians living in Minnesota, and other lectures of note at the University of Minnesota or other campuses in the region.
Vincent Voice Library
The G. Robert Vincent Voice Library is a collection of over 100,000 hours of spoken word recordings, dating back to 1888. The collection includes the voices of over 500,000 persons from all walks of life. Political and cultural leaders and minor players in the human drama are captured and cataloged to serve the research needs of a local, national and international user base.
Literature
The Complete Works of Shakespeare
Public domain of HTML versions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems.
Discovering Literature: 20th Century
Discovering Literature is a free online learning resource that provides unprecedented access to the British Library’s unique literary and historical collections. This phase of the project features over 300 20th-century treasures from the British Library’s collection including literary drafts, rare first editions, notebooks, letters, newspapers and photographs.
International Children’s Digital Library
This is a collection of over 10,000 children’s books in at least 100 languages freely available to view online.
Internet Archive: Children’s Library
A sub-collection of the Open-Access Text Archive section of the Internet Archive. The focus is on books for children.
Reference
Merriam-Webster
Full-text of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary (10th ed.). Additional features: Thesaurus, Games, and more.
Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University houses citation resources and many other instructional materials for writing projects.
Worldcat
Provides catalog access to 38+ million holdings worldwide. Includes catalog records for books, journals, films, sound recordings, videos, etc. Open WorldCat helps you find materials in any libraries. It is very useful for locating books in your local libraries.
Science
Digital Einstein Papers
The Digital Einstein Papers is an open-access site for The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, the ongoing publication of Einstein’s massive written legacy comprising more than 30,000 unique documents. The volumes are presented in the original language version with in-depth English language annotation and other scholarly apparatus. In addition, the reader can toggle to an English language translation of most documents.
Encyclopedia of Earth
The Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) is a collaborative, open, peer-reviewed reference resource about the Earth, its natural environments, and the relationship between the environment and society.
NASA Media Library
Back in 2017 the US government made their entire media library publicly accessible and copyright free. It continues to grow. There are images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. Its 140,000 photos and other resources are available for you to see, or even download and use in any way you like.
National Centers for Environmental Information
National Centers for Environmental Information provides climate, historical weather data, local climatological data, climatological data, storm data, hourly precipitation data, and monthly climatic data for the world.
National Geographic Video
Video programs from Nat Geo TV and web only audiovisual material.
Public Library of Science
Publishing seven open access journals, the nonprofit organization is committed to facilitating openness in academic research. According to the site, "all PLOS content is at the highest possible level of open access, meaning that scientific articles are immediately and freely available to anyone, anywhere."
ScienceCinema
Contains multimedia videos highlighting the U.S. Department of Energy's scientific research. State-of-the-art audio indexing and speech recognition technology allows the user to search for specific words and phrases spoken by the presenter in these video files. Simply enter a term and the results list will point to the precise snippets of the video where the term was spoken.
Science Open
Research database that includes manuscripts submitted directly, which are evaluated in a post-publication peer review process, as well as articles aggregated from a variety of open access sources, including PubMed Central and arXiv. Registration is not required, but provides added functions such as sharing, reviewing, and collection-building.
Semantic Scholar
A unique and easy-to-use resource, Semantic Scholar harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to efficiently sort through millions of science-related papers based on your search terms. According to the site, although some articles are behind paywalls, "the data [they] have for those articles is limited," so you can expect to receive mostly full-text results. Another feature is the extensive advanced search options, which allow you to search by cell type and brain region, among other things.
U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information
Search the U.S. Dept. of Energy's scientific and technical research reports in the sciences including biology, environmental sciences, physics, energy, and other topics.
US National Library of Medicine Historic Films Collection
Collection focus: medicine, mental health, child development, public health, disease. The films and videos collection is a principal repository for biomedical moving images in the U.S. and around the world. The collection includes more than 8,000 cataloged films and video recordings from the early twentieth century through the present day. More than 900 titles date from before 1950.
Screenplays
The deadline.com Read The Screenplay Series Since late 2020, Deadline has run a series of exclusive articles featuring full-length screenplays of films nominated for awards leading into awards season. Click through to see the entire series.
1917 (2019) by Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Amsterdam (2021) by David O. Russell
The Artist (2011) by Michel Hazanavicius
A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (2019) by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster
Bones and All (2021) by David Kajganich
Booksmart (2019) by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman
Da 5 Bloods (2019) by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo, Kevin Willmott, and Spike Lee
Dolemite Is My Name (2019) by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski
Ford V Ferrari (2019) by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jason Keller
Glass Onion (2022) by Rian Johson
Honey Boy (2019) by Shia Labeouf
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) by Charlie Kaufman
The Irishman (2019) by Steven Zaillian
JoJo Rabbit (2019) by Taika Waititi
Joker (2018) by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver
Knives Out (2019) by Rian Johson
Little Women (2019) by Gretta Gerwig
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020) by George C. Wolfe
Marriage Story (2019) by Noah Baumbach
Onward (2020) by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, and Keith Bunin
Pain & Glory (2017) by Pedro Almodóvar
Promising Young Woman (2020) by Emerald Fennell
The Report (2019) by Scott Z. Burns
Saint Frances (2019) by Kelly O’Sullivan
She Said (2022) by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
Sound of Metal (2020) by Darius Marder and Abraham Marder
Toy Story 4 (2019) by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) by Aaron Sorkin
The Two Popes (2019) by Anthony McCarten