Research for Writers, World Builders, and Other Types of Nerds

WorldCat is the world's largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.  Worldcat allows you to search many libraries at once for an item and then locate it in a library nearby; find books, music, and videos to check out; and find research articles and digital items (like audiobooks) that can be directly viewed or downloaded

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a service that indexes high quality, peer reviewed Open Access research journals, periodicals and their articles' metadata.  The Directory contains over 11,000 journals and over 7000 articles searchable at the article level.

HathiTrust Digital Library is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than 100 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide.  Currently there are over 13 million digitzed volumes.

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 all countries and cultures.

Library and Archives Canada’s (LAC) collection is the shared documentary heritage of all Canadians and spans the entire history of our country. The collection contains materials in all types of formats from across Canada and around the world that are of interest to Canadians.  Collections include books, government documents, architectural drawings, maps, digital photos, video recordings, artwork, and more.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the United States of America's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.  Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

Narrow down search results for complex searches by using the Advanced Search page. For example, you can find sites updated in the last 24 hours or images that are in black and white.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

A lot of serious scholarship is locked behind paywalls, however, most major institutions these days require that Masters and PhD students deposit a free copy of their finished thesis in an open access repository, free to the world. This resource provides you with a list of the "world's" institutional repositories.