Arts and humanities

Subject_gateways
Databases
Encyclopedias
News_sources
Internet_sources
Journals
Books
Images

Subject gateways 

Artcyclopedia
The fine art search engine. A comprehensive index of every artist represented at hundreds of museum sites, image archives, and other online resources.

Intute: Arts and HumanitiesA free online service providing access to websites selected and evaluated by subject specialists. 

Databases 

ROUTES
ROUTES is a database providing access to selected quality-assessed freely available internet resources, selected by course teams and the Open University Library's Learning and Teaching Librarians.

Electronic Literature Collection
A collection of multimedia literature by a variety of authors and poets.

American Masters Database
Database of biographies of selected American figures in the arts.

Axis: the online resources for contemporary art
UK based contemporary arts site featuring profiles of professional artists and curators, interviews, discussions, art news, debates and showcases the artists to watch.

Getty Provenance Index
Searchable database of information related to the history of collecting and the provenance of individual works of art, primarily of Western European paintings. Contains indexed transcriptions of archival documents, sale catalogues, and museum provenance files from all over the world.

Online Historical Population Reports
Access to the complete British population reports for Britain and Ireland from 1801 to 1937, supported by ancillary documents. Full text of documents may be searched, also searchable by date and location.

Reading Experience Database 1450 - 1945
An Open University database. RED's mission is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945. Searchable. You may also contribute to the database

Beazley Archive
A freely available database on classical antiquities, built on the John Beazley collection. Includes photograph, drawings, and images of artefacts, a dictionary, books, and a searchable database. Sections on Greek art, pottery, gems, and sculpture

Cecilia
A database containing information on collections of music materials of all kinds held in libraries, archives, museums and other repositories in the UK and Ireland.

Statistical accounts of Scotland
Freely available sources for study of Scottish life from the 18th and 19th centuries. NOTE: Clickable map not included in free access.

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Encyclopaedias

Wikipedia
A freely available collaborative encyclopedia.

The Free Dictionary
Online dictionary (Houghton Mifflin), thesaurus (Collins) and encyclopaedia (Columbia), with English and American audio pronunciation, translation to other languages and other features such as word games.

News sources

Pathe News
The Pathe News archive has been digitised and is now online. It contains the entire 3500 hour British Pathe Film Archive which covers news, sport, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970. At present, access and low resolution "preview" downloads are free. Microsoft Windows Media Player is required to view the clips.

ITN Source : moving footage
Over one million hours of footage and moving imagery from over three centuries. News, drama, celebrity, comedy, music, wildlife, natural history and film. It represents the footage libraries of Reuters, ITN, ITV Productions, Fox News & Movietone, Channel 9 News, UTV, Asian News International and other specialist collections. Register for access. Open University academics should contact their Media Project Manager if they would like to discuss using material from ITN Source in course production. ITN and Reuters footage also available via NewsFilm Online

London gazette
Searchable archives of the London Gazette, Britain's continuously-published newspaper, dating back to the late seventeenth century. Includes the Edinburgh Gazette and Belfast Gazette. Note that to save searches users will need to register.

News on Screen (previously British Universities newsreel database - BUND)
Resource of British newsreel coverage from 1910 to 1979. Covers topics such as fashion, sport, crime, leisure, transport and two world wars. Searchable. Includes 80,000 digitised production documents and links to 40,000 downloadable newsreels from the British Pathe collection

Internet sources

Art Galleries
This page on the Virtual Library web site provides links to homepages belonging to national art galleries and museums around the world.

Galleries, museums and private collections (708)
a collection of web links from ROUTES.

ArchNet: Digital Library
ArchNet is an international online community for architects, planners, urban designers, landscape architects, conservationists, and scholars, with a focus on Muslim cultures and civilisations. The Digital library contains details of many of the important structures and buildings across the Arab world.

Great buildings online
This gateway to architecture around the world and across history documents a thousand buildings and hundreds of leading architects, with 3D models, photographic images and architectural drawings, commentaries, bibliographies, web links, and more, for famous designers and structures of all kinds.

ArchSearch
A Freely available catalogue from the Council for British Archeaology which contains records of over 1 million archaeological sites and monuments. Archived data includes fieldwork projects and lab-based studies which can be downloaded and analysed off line

British Library for Development Studies
Covers books, articles, online sources and courses; claims to be Europe's largest research collection on economic and social change in developing countries.

BRIDGE: Briefings on development and gender
Provides access to a range of information sources and services on gender and development. Index of policy documents, assessments and evaluations; also contains the full text of guidelines, reports on gender issues, country profiles and statistics.

Read Print
Freely available collection of classic fiction, poetry, essays and non-fiction. Includes all Shakespeare plays, and biographies of authors.

Documents online
Online access to The National Archives' collection of digitised public records, including both academic and family history sources. Documents are separated into topic-based categories, which can be searched or browsed. They are divided into two main areas - Family History and Other Records.

Irish History Online
An authoritative guide to what has been written about Irish history from earliest times to the present. Searches can be made by author/editor, by title or keyword from title, by subject, by journal title or series, or by publication details.

London Lives 1690-1800
Primary source database of 240,000 records of 18th century London and Londoners, searchable by name. Material includes parish, hospital and guild records, coroners’ reports, poor relief and criminal justice reports. Users may create individual accounts for increased functionality and the ability to contribute to the database

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Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ provides free access to selected scholarly journals. It can be browsed by title or subject, as well as searched for keywords.

Bentham Open Access
A collection of over 200 peer-reviewed open access journals in all disciplines

IESR
Academic and other source searching for print, image and other format material in the arts and humanities, social sciences, health and medicine, science and technology. Site is still under development.

IRS: Institutional Repository Search
Searches UK HE and other institution’s repositories. Provides summaries of articles and links to full text. Working demonstration version

Internet library of Early Journals
ILEJ makes available substantial runs of digitised 18th and 19th century journals. Freely available over the Internet, but registration is requested. Includes the Gentleman's Magazine. Large page images may be slow to download.

Nineteenth Century Serials Edition
Fully searchable, free, online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers.

RIAN
Portal allowing searching across the seven Irish universities and the and Dublin Institute of Technology’s open access repositories.

Welsh Journals Online
Free online, searchable, access to a selection of 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century Welsh and Wales-related journals held at The National Library of Wales and partner institutions. These materials cover a very wide range of subject areas, including humanities, social sciences, science and technology.

Books

Project Gutenberg
The first and largest single collection of free electronic books, whose copyright has expired in the USA.

Bible.com
A freely-available gateway to the Bible online. Contains links to various different versions and translations of the Bible in numerous languages available on the internet.

Early Western Korans
A collection Korans and Koran translations in eight languages, 1537-1857

Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The complete dramatic works of Shakespeare in full-text, categorised by type of work i.e. comedies, history, tragedies.

Historical text Archive
An independent site giving links to online history resources arranged by continent, topical history, including war, women and teaching, and type of resource.

The Internet Poetry Archive
The archive includes the selected works of contemporary poets from around the world. The entry for each poet comprises audio clips of the poet reading several poems, the poet's comments on the works, a photograph, texts of the poems, a critical biography of the poet prepared by a scholar familiar with the poet's work, and a short bibliography. Poems are presented in their original languages, as well as in English translation. Jointly produced by the University of North Carolina Press and the UNC Office of Information Technology.

WorldCat
References to over 1 billion items in 10 000 libraries worldwide.

Bibliomania
Thousands of free e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays. Also study guides, dictionaries,biographies, religious texts, and popular non-fiction. American site. Searchable.

Scholar’s Lab / Electronic text center
10,000 publicly available texts including history, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of science. Languages include Latin, Apache, Japanese, and Chinese. 164,000 related images, including rare books, manuscripts, and book illustrations.

Glasgow Digital Library ebooks
A collection of freely available e-books on the history of Glasgow and Scotland.

Internet sacred text archive
A freely-available archive of non-copyrighted religious and mythological e-texts. The site focuses primarily on English translations of material from African, Australian and North American indigenous cultures, Asian traditions (particularly those from South and East Asia), Neo-Pagan and Occult traditions.

Oxford Text Archive
The Archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Includes online versions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora. Searchable by author or title.

Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy
Includes editorial and copyrighted information, as well as a site search engine. Offers an alphabetical index to the philosophical entries and information on individual philosophers and their beliefs.

Bartleby.com
This site offers a selection of ancient and modern titles in full text. The collection includes poetry, literature, essays and general reference works. Search by keyword, or browse by author, title or subject.

UC Press e-books Collection 1982 - 2004
More than 300 free electronic editions published by eScholarship Editions, mainly in the humanities, religion, history, literature, arts and social sciences.

Historical Monographs Collection (Cornell University Library)
Selected monographs with expired copyrights chosen from a variety of disciplines. These were monographs that were brittle and decaying and in need of rescue.

BHA: Bibliography of the History of Art
Searchable abstracts of the literature of the history of visual art and material culture in Europe and the New World from 1975. The database includes the Répertoire de la litterature de l’art (RILA).

Images

Arts and Humanities Data Service
The Arts and Humanities Data Service is a national service setup to collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from research and teaching in the humanities. It encourages scholarly use of its collections through an online catalogue.

British Library Images Online
Images from two millennia of world history. The collection includes images of people, natural history, religion, conflict, travel and exploration, and social history. There are free samples which can be downloaded for personal use.

Freeze Frame
A searchable collection of photographs illustrating polar exploration from the 19th century. A JISC digitisation project, hosted by the University of Cambridge. Includes resource packages including biographies, expedition summaries, history of polar photography, and galleries of photos by topics such as ships, and wildlife.

VADS
This service provides access to over 100,000 images by searching across multiple online digital collections of visual art works.

World Digital Library
Freely available primary materials from countries and cultures around the world, comprising images, sound recordings, journals and movies. Searchable, and can be browsed by topic, time, place and type of item. Supported by Unesco

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