Welcome
One of the most subversive things we can do these days is to roll our own search engine. The reasons to do so are numerous. I find that doing so saves time, deprives massive corporate entities of my valuable attention and some of my data, and unleashes my inner amateur librarian to curate and organize my interests in a space that I control.
This list should be considered an open educational resource (see “CC-BY-4.0 License to Share” below), created by the author mainly for her own use. As such, I make no claims as to its comprehensiveness but do intend to continue expanding and nurturing it as my research evolves. Some lacuna are present. All mistakes in spelling or obsolete hyperlinks are mine.
CC-BY-4.0 License to Share
ideaspeak.us – research tools by Christine Bush is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://ideaspeak.us/research-tools/. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://ideaspeak.us/research-tools/#LicenseToShare.
Because this resource is published on WordPress.com, the source code for this page is convoluted. If you would like to use my list of research tools as a template for your own, you will find this file contains a clean, un-styled export of the HTML5 code for this resource.
If you wish to bookmark this page, but would prefer not to scroll through the Welcome message each time, then set your bookmark to http://ideaspeak.us/research-tools/#Index.
Index of Research Categories
Academic Resources
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- WorldCat from OCLC
- WorldCat Lists
- Open Syllabus Project
- Actual syllabuses can only be retrieved via API access
- Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Emergent Academic Resources
Archives
- Ancestry.com
- Internet Archive
- Also see: Wayback Machine
- Archives Hub (UK)
- Archives for London
- British National Archives (UK)
- American National Archives (US)
- arXiv.org
- Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection (75,000 images/CC licensing)
- Genealogy Bank
- OpenCulture.com
- Prelinger Archives (over 60,000 “ephemeral” films)
- TED Talks
- WikiLeaks
- Big Map Blog
- British Library Department of Cartographic and Topographical Materials
- Cartographic archives of the British Museum
- Gallica (National Library of France cartographic collections)
- Levanthal Map Center at the Boston Public Library
- Library of Congress Geography and Map Reading Room
- Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division of the NYPL
- David Rumsey Map Collection
- USGS Historical Topographic Map Explorer
- GeoData(R)@Berkeley
- USGS National Map
- NOAA Digital Coast
- NOAA National Geophysical Data Center
- OpenGeoPortal Project
- Connected Histories
- (federated search of British historical sources 1500-1900)
- History Is A Weapon
- (Useful for researching historical sources, but the site itself is not rigorously edited enough to be used as a source itself.)
- MuseScore.com sheet music collection
- Open Goldberg Variations
- Petrucci Music Library (A project of the International Music Score Library Project)
Audio Archives
Cartographic Archives
Geospatial Archives
Historical Archives
Musical Archives
Temporal Archives (Timelines)
Video Archives
Booksellers and Reviews
Booksellers
- Advanced Book Exchange
- Alibris
- Folio Society
- History Book Club
- Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)
Book Reviews
Broadcast Sources
- Aljazeera America
- Associated Press
- British Broadcasting Service
- Democracy Now!
- National Public Radio (US)
- Public Broadcasting System (US)
- Reuters
Economics
- Economist magazine Intelligence Unit
- Economist magazine Markets and Data
- G8 Official Site
- G8 Information Centre
- G20 Official Site
- G20 Information Centre
- International Monetary Fund (IMF)
- New Development Bank (BRICS)
- BRICS Information Centre
- World Bank
- World Trade Organization (WTO)
- North American Free Trade Agreement Secretariat (NAFTA)
- Office of the U.S. Trade Representative – NAFTA
International Economic Groups and Agencies
World Trade Organization
Encyclopedias
- Artcyclopedia
- Encyclopedia Britannica
- Encyclo.co.uk (Sources)
- Genderpedia.net
- Grove Music Online (the authoritative musicological resource; available through some libraries) $$$
- New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (print only)
- Scholarpedia
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- WorldBook
Governing, Regulating, Human Rights Organizations (by Region)
Africa
Asia
Central America
Europe
International
Middle East
North America
Canada
Mexico
United States of America
Excecutive Branch
- The White House
- United States Cabinet Departments
- National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Judicial Branch
Legislative Branch
South America
South Pacific
Investigative Journalism
Journals
Archives and Indexes
- Cogent Open Access journals
- DeepDyve (great for independents without access to university library) $
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)
- Google Scholar
- HighWire
- ProjectMuse (access limited to federated institutions)
- PubMed (citations, biomedical literature)
- Questia $
- Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)
- Taylor and Francis Online $$
- Taylor and Francis Open Access
- Wiley Online Library $$$
High Profile Academic Journals
- Harvard Law Review
- Nature (International Journal)
- New England Journal of Medicine $$
Topical
- Fremontia (California Native Plant Society)
- Botanical Studies (OpenAccess Journal)
- American Journal of Botany
- Native Plants Journal
- New Phytologist
- Cartographic Perspectives (Open Journal of the NACIS)
- The California Geographer
- Mapping The World (T&F/Free Access)
- 2600-The Hacker Quarterly
- Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
Botany
Cartography and Geography
Science (General)
Technology
Libraries
- Biblioteca Vasconcelos (Mexico City)
- Bodleian Library
- British Library
- Digital Public Library of America
- ibiblio: The Public’s Library and Digital Archive
- Library of Congress
- New York Public Library
- Open Library
- Prelinger Library
- Project Gutenberg
- WikiSource
- World Digital Library
- American Library Association Fact Sheet
- (University of California) Berkeley Library
- Duke University Libraries
- Harvard Library
- New York University Libraries
- Stanford University Libraries
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries
- Yale University Libraries
Major University Libraries
Magazines
- ArcNews (Geospatial IT industry news from ESRI, Inc.)
- The Atlantic
- Audubon (magazine of the National Audubon Society)
- The Economist
- Humanities (Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities)
- National Geographic magazine (from the National Geographic Society)
- The New Yorker
- Smithsonian magazine (from the Smithsonian Institute)
- WIRED
Museums
- British Museum (Research)
- Getty Research Institute
- Hermitage Museum Digital Collection (St. Petersburg, Russia)
- Smithsonian Museums (Research Center)
- apexart
- Ashmolean Museum (Art & Architecture/Oxford University)
- California Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco)
- The Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston
- Denver Art Museum
- de Young Museum (San Francisco)
- Fine Arts Museums of Belgium
- Guggenheim Museums (Findings Blog)
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA Research)
- Louvre (Paris)
- Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)
- Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles)
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA New York)
- Nasher Museum (Durham, NC)
- National Museum of Australia
- The National Gallery (UK) (London)
- National Gallery of Art (US) (Washington, DC)
- Philadelphia Museum of Art
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Museums of Art
Newspapers
Archives and Indexes
- ProQuest Historical Newspapers
- Newspaper Archive (“World’s Largest Collection”)
- World-Newspapers.com
High Profile Daily Newspapers
- Financial Times
- The Guardian (UK, US, AUS editions available)
- International Herald Tribune
- New York Times
- The Telegraph
- The Times
- Wall Street Journal
- Washington Post
Reference
- Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook
- Oxford English Dictionary $$ (free access available to OED Online via some local libraries)
- Reference.com
Research Software
- Beautiful Soup (Python-based web page data extraction)
- ColorBrewer (Color advice for cartography
- DataCatalogs.org
- Data-Driven Documents (D3) Javascript library
- DataWrangler (alpha release from Stanford Visualization Group)
- DataWrapper (“Create simple, correct and embeddable charts in minutes”)
- Evernote (knowledge management)
- Gephi (cluster graphs)
- Google Earth (GIS)
- Google Ngram Viewer (historical word usage trends)
- Infogra.am (Commercial infographic software service)
- Knight Lab TimelineJS
- MapStory (map stories)
- Mendeley (reference manager/PDF organizer)
- Network Workbench (cluster graphs)
- Open Knowledge Foundation Frictionless Data (data)
- OpenRefine (A free, open source, powerful tool for working with messy data)
- Overview (Document analysis, visualization)
- ProPublica Tools/Data Store (data)
- School of Data: Seven Ways To Create A Storymap (map stories)
- CartoDB OdysseyJS
- ESRI ArcGIS Story Maps
- Leaflet Playback plugin
- JourneyMap (Leaflet plugin)
- Knight Lab StoryMapJS
- OKFL TimeMapper
- Tour Builder (for Google Earth)
- Serendip-o-matic (digital artifact exploration)
- Timeglider (timelines)
- Tor Project (anonymizer)
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects Wikimedia Projects
- Zotero (reference management)
Unrecoverable and As-Yet-Unrealized Sources
…But new materials are continually being scanned, and the same methods that build a compelling historical argument one year may undo the argument the next because of new fodder for the keyword searches. In some cases, the answers to historians’ questions may lie forever out of reach, because they were printed in very minor publications that will never be captured by Google or ProQuest; or printed in sources now lost, like the newspapers in the British Museum destroyed by a German bomb in World War II; or discussed orally without ever being printed anywhere; or printed and digitized but expressed in discourse whose semantics cannot be matched by Boolean searching of words and phrases.
Fred R. Shapiro, Yale Law School
“Who Wrote The Serenity Prayer?“
”The Chronicle Review” (May 2, 2014)
Recommended Reading
- The Uses of Being Wrong
by Daniel W. Drezner - Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein
- The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English dictionary by Simon Winchester (US). Also see: The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester (UK)
