FREE QUALITY RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS, ACADEMICS AND LIFELONG LEARNERS

1. FREE QUALITY RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS, ACADEMICS AND LIFELONG LEARNERS Stephen Perry IRO for Central Africa Washington, D.C. 202-453-8295

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

3. Four important revolutions taking place in the Internet • > Free Databases of articles: • EX: www.doaj.org • > Free Books: • EX: http://demo.openlibrary.org • >Better, More Precise Search Engines www.lii.org, www.ipl.org

4. 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

5. 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: • http://www.blueroom.com/ • google/

6. http://www.blueroom.com/google

7. Google for Power Searchers:http://www.accrediteddldegrees.com/2008/google-for-librarians-50-tips-tools-and-resources-for-power-searching/

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

9. 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: www.ipl.org

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

11. Note that the IPL has a search engine: www.ipl.org

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

13. Infomine tries to categorize the best of the Web by Library of Congress Subject Headings: http://infomine.ucr.edu

14. Here are some subject headings for English Language

15. Here are some free English Language dictionaries identified through Infomine

16. Specialized Search Engine for Research Studies: OAISter: www.oaister.org

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

18. Another useful search engine is Virtual Libraries, updated constantly: www.vlib.org

19. Here is the Virtual Library for Engineering for example:www.vlib.org

20. Here are some useful directories of quality information compiled by resource experts: http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/alpha.htm

21. New York Public Library Links:http://www.nypl.org/links/

22. Alcove 9 from the Library of Congress is a directory of quality, free resources: www.loc.gov/rr/main/alcove9

23. Here is a listing of free reference sites chosen by experts at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/virtualref.html

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

25. 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: http://library.albany.edu/usered/

26. Another tutorial teaching Information Literacy skills is provided by the U of California, Berkeley: includes free handouts http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html

27. A free dictionary in many languages is: http://www.wiktionary.org/

28. Speaking of Wikis, one which has scholarly material, contributed only by experts is the new Scholarpedia: www.scholarpedia.org/

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

30. 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: http://content.cdlib.org/escholarship/ • A Subject index may be found at: • http://www.escholarship.org/editions/index_subjects.html

31. University of California: Free Academic Books

32. Another useful site is the University of Pennsylvania Free Online Books: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html a browseable collection of over 30,000 books

33. WikiBooks just emerged as another source of books, including educational textbooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

34. Educational Textbooks may be found at: http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator/open_textbooks

35. The University of Virginia now has an E TEXT Page at: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/

36. One can read scanned books at this site: http://demo.openlibrary.org/

37. 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

38. Other sites where you can access full text books free are: • Online Books through the Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/hum60.60.00/ • International Children’s Digital Literature, Full Text, in 20 Languages: http://icdlbooks.org/ • Google Books: http://books.google.com/ • Also see Google Scholar for information about books and authors: http://scholar.google.com/ • Google Book Search: http://www.google.com/books?hl=en Besides being able to search for actual books, this search also lets you find keywords and phrases that appear in books.

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

40. 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 www.doaj.org • Includes the full text of over 3,800 journals arranged by subject category. • This is what the site looks like

41. DOAJ: www.doaj.org

42. Here are journals in the category of literature in DOAJ:

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

44. The full text: all free!

45. 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.

46. More sites where one can retrieve full text articles are below: • University Of Houston Libraries: Scholarly Journals Distributed Via the World Wide Web http://info.lib.uh.edu/wj/webjour.htmlThis 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: http://ejw.i8.com/Includes the best web sites and free E-Journals in over 40 different academic disciplines, constantly updated.

48. Results of SSRN SEARCH ON GENDER STUDIES

49. FULLTEXT OF ONE OF THE ARTICLES

50. Other sites for full text articles are • ☼ Gateway for Free Ejournals: http://www.icast.org.in/ejournal/ejournal.php☼ Free E-Journals: http://www.e-journals.org • ☼ Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/ Absolutely free access to scholarly EJournals such as Cosmos and History, Fast Capitalism, Film-Philosophy, Image and Narrative, and Postcolonial Texts. • ☼ HighWire Press http://highwire.stanford.edu/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.”