Alumni, Visitor, and Publicly Available Resources: Open Access Databases and Journals

• WorldCat: WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and collections. You can use WorldCat to determine citations for books, journals, and other media, locate a copy near you, and even request a copy for delivery.

• Google Scholar: Use Google Scholar to search for scholarly literature. Once you have a citation you can request it through Interlibrary Loan at your local library. You can use Google Books to preview books you are interested in before requesting them.

• CIA World Factbook: The Central Intelligence Agency's annual World Factbook provides a reliable resource for information on independent states, dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabitable regions, and oceans.

• JSTOR is a digital archive of more than 1,500 academic journals and other scholarly content. JSTOR Register & Read is a program offering free, read-online access to individuals who register for a MyJSTOR account (6 free articles a month). Register & Read includes approximately 75 journals.
• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA): The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science.
• Perseus Digital Library: Digital collections of ancient texts and translations, secondary sources, maps, and images; provided by Tufts University.
• Making of America: Making of America is a digital library of primary sources about "American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction."
• ERIC: Maintained by the U.S. Department of Education, the Educational Resources Information Center is a digital library of educational literature.
• POPLINE: Bibliographic database about population, family planning and related health issues. Includes links to free, full-text documents. POPLINE is maintained by the K4Health Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/Center for Communication Programs and is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
• National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS): Contains full-text publications and summaries of publications from the NCJRS Abstracts Database. "Established in 1972, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally funded resource offering justice and drug-related information to support research, policy, and program development worldwide."
• Brookings Institute: The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization which conducts and disseminates independent research. Research Topics include arms control, children and families, crime, economic development, global health, k-12 education, and social issues. Some reports must be purchased.
• Council on Foreign Relations: The Council on Foreign Relation is an independent, membership organization, think tank, and publisher. It researches and publishes information about a variety of topics such as democracy and human rights, health, international peace and security, and society and culture.
• The Urban Institute: The Urban Institute "gathers data, conducts research, evaluates programs, offers technical assistance overseas, and educates Americans on social and economic issues." Research areas include economy; education; health and healthcare; employment; immigrants; and race, ethnicity, and gender.
• Pew Charitable Trust: The Pew Research Center uses "impartial, fact-based public-opinion polling and other research tools to track important issues and trends." The Center's research covers multiple topics in the social sciences field including: demography, economics, immigration, politics, religion and social trends.
• American Factfinder: Provided by the US Census Bureau, American Factfinder features population, housing, economic, and geographic data.
• Anthropological Index Online: The index to current periodicals held in the Anthropology Library at the Centre for Anthropology, The British Museum.
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN): The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a database of social science research and is composed of various specialized research networks. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 384,300 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 315,000 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.
• Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts: The Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts database indexes more than 600 periodicals, plus books, research reports and proceedings. Subject coverage includes librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management, and more. Coverage in the database extends back as far as the mid-1960s.

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): DOAJ is a free, full-text quality controlled directory which provides access to a variety of journals from many disciplines and in many different languages.

• Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR): OpenDOAR is an authoritative directory of academic open access repositories.

• INASP: The INASP provides a directory of free and open access online resources. Coverage includes the following disciplines: agriculture, biology & life science, chemistry, earth sciences, engineering & technology, environment, humanities, information & communication technologies, mathematics & statistics, medicine & health sciences, physics, and social sciences.

• OAIster: OAIster is a union catalog of millions of records representing open access digital resources.

There are many excellent guides to genealogical sources available on the web. Some, such as Cyndi's List, are free, and others, such as Ancestry.com, require a subscription. Here are a few places to check out:

• FamilySearch: Probably the largest, freely-available resource for genealogical information. Includes census enumeration forms, indexes, catalogs, family trees, tutorials, an in-depth encyclopedia of genealogy, and more.
  • See their very useful wiki for more help.​
• Cyndi's List: Contains thousands of links to Internet-based genealogy resources, organized by regional and subject categories.
• USGenWeb Project: Portal to free web-based United States genealogical sources, organized by state.
• National Archives and Records Administration: Resources for Genealogists: Tutorials, guides, and some digitized records.
• USA.gov: Family History and Genealogy: This site includes links to federal family history and genealogy related websites.
• Library of Congress: Local History and Genealogy Reading Room: This site provides information about using the Library, collection, and database subscriptions available at the LOC. Also, includes bibliographies and guides, the American Memory Project, and search tips.
• National Archives: Resources for Genealogists: This site has information about searching the collections, guides to genealogy research, genealogy related articles, caring for family records, a calendar of genealogy events, and military records.
• United States Census Bureau: Genealogy: This site has links to the Age Search Service, which for a fee, search confidential records 1910 to 2000 transcripts, Frequently Occurring Surnames, and Census Then and Now.
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services: Genealogy: This site includes information about the fee based search of historical immigration and naturalization indexes and then ordering the records, and research guidance in immigration history topics.
• US Department of Veterans Affairs: Gravesite Locator: This database provides a search for burial locations of veterans updated daily. Includes VA National Cemeteries, state veteran cemeteries, and for veterans in private cemeteries with graves marked with grave markers (post 1997).
• National Park Service: Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System: This database contains information about men who served in Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War and how to access the records. The site also includes histories of Union and Confederate regiments, links to descriptions of significant battles, and selected lists of POW records, cemetery records, medals of honor, and monuments.
• US Bureau of Land Management: General Land Office Records: Search for land patents, surveys, land status records, and CDI documents by location, name, and description. Images of the documents may be available.

• Science.gov: Gateway to selected, authoritative science resources from US government agencies and departments. Search or browse selected science websites, or use the 'index' to view resources on selected topics.
• HighWire Press: HighWire Press is a large archive of free full-text science articles and is maintained by Stanford University.
• Public Library of Science (PLoS): The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy group. Everything they publish is freely accessible to the public. Research ranges from biology to medicine to tropical diseases.
• Agricola: The National Agricultural Library, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, produces the AGRICultural OnLine Access database. This database contains records for books and articles on agriculture and its allied disciplines.
• PubMed: Produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, PubMed contains millions of citations dating back to the mid-1960s in the the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences.
• MedlinePlus: Produced by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, MedlinePlus includes health topics pages, information from a variety of health and medicine organizations, and links to authoritative health information.
• Health Information Portal: Developed by librarians at the University of Illinois, this website provides links to commonly used health databases such as PubMed, as well as subject links for more than 30 health specialties, including aging, alternative medicine, genetics, medical imaging, oncology, substance abuse, toxicology and veterinary medicine.
• AMA Doctor Finder: This American Medical Association site provides addresses, specialties, education and other background information on licensed physicians in the U.S. and its possessions. Search by physician name or medical specialty.
• Merck Manual: Home edition of the popular medical information guide.
• RxList: Source for prescription drug information. Includes an A-Z list of drugs, as well as a visual pill identifier
• PILOTS: PILOTS indexes articles about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental-health conditions caused by traumatic events. PILOTS is produced by the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and sponsored by the United States Department of Veteran Affairs.
• BioMed Central Journals: BioMed Central publishes over 230 peer-reviewed open access journals which are available to the public for free in subjects related to science, technology and medicine.