Internet Primary Resources

Student resources on the net are an abundance of sites that can be a mission to rifle through to establish usefulness. When your schedule is tight already, sifting through websites is an unnecessary bother that will often end in frustrating requests for money. In some cases finding excellent free resource sites necessitates going off-shore but that doesn’t always mean a compromise on quality or relevance. For example the HKust Institutional Repository has reams of content and data on offer and although some is in Chinese, there are volumes of English material accessible for nearly every field of study.

The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is mildly annoying because of the way the plain text is laid out in a pageless scroll but the library of free books and ebooks is impressive so it ranks in our books as a worthwhile resource. The Directory of Open Access Journals has a similar problem although not with the text itself but in scrolling alphabetically through articles to find what you need. But again, the scrolling is worth the effort for the value of information provided which includes journal articles on a multitude of topics which are free to for students to peruse (but not use of course).  The best thing about the Directory of Open Access Journals site is that there seems to be more articles here written in the past few years than there are at other sites. Most other sites only offer publications which have passed their copyright expiry dates and so are available freely in the public domain.

If you can handle a lot of flash imagery another free site, particularly for American fiction and classics, is Bartleby.com but beware, there is so much advertising it is difficult to remain focused.