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Online Archives & Directories | References for College Classes

Archives & Directories

When you want a lot of solid resources quickly, sometimes searching and filtering results on your own is too much trouble. This is especially time consuming when you need informative sources that you can cite in a paper–academic sources. Fortunately, there are a number of websites that do the searching, sorting and cataloging for you. Here are a number of these archives and directories, covering a range of topics from historical documents to literary collections online, to even video lectures from well-know and distinguished professors.

  • Archives and Directories

    • A World of Ideas – Audio and video lectures sorted by topic and speaker.
    • Academic Blog Portal – A directory for online academic blogs, organized by university and topic.
    • American Memory – The US Library of Congress’ online library, featuring historical documents and photographs.
    • Archive Grid – An archive of online archives—find libraries and museums online.
    • Archive of Irreverent Miscellanies – The largest online archive of irreverent poetry from the olden days.
    • Archive of the Now – A collection of modern poets’ readings of their own work.
    • Archives Made Easy – A guide to archives, hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
    • Bibliodyssey – An archive of old books, preserved in digital form.
    • British Academy Portal – Online resources for those studying the humanities or social sciences.
    • DMOZ – An open-source online archive, created and maintained by people all over the globe.
    • DOAJ – An archive of free scientific and scholarly journals.
    • Economics Network – An archive of materials for economics teachers, based out of the UK.
    • Europeana – A project that aims to make public domain masterpieces accessible to everything through an online archive.
    • Fathom – An online learning resource offered by Columbia University.
    • Film Archives – An online archive of Europe’s cinematic history, including digital restorations of classic films.
    • Google Art Project – An online archive of museums, featuring virtual tours.
    • Google Books – with over 15 million individual documents, Google books makes it easy to get your hands on just about any type of publication.
    • Google Scholar – Free peer-reviewed journals online.
    • I Remain – An archive of letters from all periods of history, featuring famous people like Bach.
    • Infomine – A database of databases, where you can find information on just about anything.
    • Internet Archive – An online archive of digital resources and internet sites.
    • Intute – A free search engine for academic resources.
    • Lecture Webcasts – A search wiki for lectures.
    • Librarian’s Internet Index – An index for the Internet, for librarians.
    • Merlot – Peer-reviewed materials to help teachers and students alike.
    • Modern Mechanix blog – All you could ever want to know about popular science magazines.
    • Moma – An online modern art archive, even including some works not seen in galleries.
    • National Archives – Primary sources and lesson plans to go along with them.
    • National Climatic Data Center – An archive of weather information going back decades, supported by NOAA.
    • NetSerf – An archive of information about medieval topics.
    • North American Computing and Philosophy – An online archive of information from the 2001-2004 conferences.
    • Open Courseware Finder – Free course plan archive.
    • Open Society Archives – A historical archive online, focusing on the Cold War.
    • Poetry Foundation – This multimedia poetry magazine makes it easy to find and share poetry.
    • Prado on Google Earth – An online archive that allows for meticulous scrutiny of artistic masterpieces.
    • Prelinger Archives – Old industrial films, collected online.
    • Repositories of Primary Sources – The University of Idaho’s online archive for historical documents.
    • September 11 Digital Archive – A collection of information relating to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
    • Starting Point – A directory to help you find the directories you’re looking for, on just about any topic.
    • Tate – The online version of the museum, constantly innovating to find new ways to display exhibits.
    • The Animation Archive – A cartoon archive, featuring movies, comic strips and graphic novels alike.
    • The Foundling Hospital – An online archive of the tokens left with abandoned infants at the Foundling Hospital.
    • The Movie Title Stills Collection – A large online archive of major film title stills.
    • The Rosetta Project – Put together by language specialists from all over the world, this archive is open to the public and contains helpful material on just about every language commonly spoken.
    • U.S. Census Bureau – A great source for historical photographs and information, as well as population statistics.
    • Ubu – A free online resource for all things audio—music, lectures, poetry, etc.
    • Van Gogh’s Letters – An online archive of translated versions of the famous painter’s letters.
    • Voice of the Shuttle – Arts and humanities resources online.
    • We Love Ad – An online advertising archive, featuring funny and interesting advertisements from across the decades.
    • Windows Live Academic Search – Scholarly articles, dissertations and other academic resources available with this handy search tool.
    • World Lecture Hall – An archive on online lectures from the University of Texas at Austin.
    • Yahoo! Humanities Collection – An online resource for finding information about the arts and humanities.
    • Yorkshire Film Archive – An online photo archive, featuring photos from as far back as the 1890s.