This page lists interesting freely accessible web resources that have come to our notice—so it is a rather random collection—added to on a regular basis. The most recent entry is at the top.
Old Maps Online http://project.oldmapsonline.org/ A gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world. It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.
Locating London’s Past http://www.locatinglondon.org/ Search a wide body of digital resources relating to early modern and eighteenth-century London. Based on a fully GIS compliant version of John Rocque’s 1746 map as well as an 19th century map and today’s Google Maps equivalent. Fascinating.
Paris Review interviews http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews The excellent Paris Review recently opened up this archive, containing a half-century worth of its fascinating interviews with some of the greatest literary figures in modern history.
Encyclopedia of Life http://eol.org/ Aims to cover all life-forms on Earth (animals, plants, fungi, protists and bacteria).
The Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ Launched by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, in partnership with Google to offer ultra high-resolution images of the ancient biblical manuscripts ‘at a level of detail never before possible’.
ChemSpider http://www.chemspider.com/ “Access to millions of chemical structures [...] ChemSpider is the richest single source of structure-based chemistry information.”
SciVee http://www.scivee.tv/ YouTube for scientists
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE) http://jove.com/ A video journal for biological research.
OpenWetWare http://openwetware.org/ “An effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering.”
Web-based art projects:
- BBC Your Paintings focuses ‘specifically on oil paintings, and specifically those in public ownership in the UK—the vast majority of which aren’t in galleries, and so probably wouldn’t ever be visible by other means’. A joint initiative between the BBC, the Public Catalogue Foundation (a registered charity) and participating collections and museums from across the UK.
- Art Project (powered by Google) http://www.googleartproject.com/ ‘A unique collaboration with some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums to enable people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.’ Uses Google Maps technology to zoom into paintings and Google Street View technology to travel around art galleries. So far includes over 1,000 paintings mostly in the public domain. Update April 2012: now expanded to to 30,000 high-resolution artworks appearing in 151 museums across 40 countries.
- JISC OpenArt ‘a partnership between the University of York, the Tate and technical partners, Acuity Unlimited, will design and expose linked open data for an important research dataset entitled ‘The London Art World 1660-1735’
- Artfinder ‘a place to go to view art (online) from galleries around the world, build your own collections, receive recommendations about other artworks you might like to see (and maybe go and visit for real)’ NOTE: THIS SITE APPEARS TO BE ‘UPGRADING’ AT THE MOMENT (June 2011)
Digital Scriptorium http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/ ‘a growing [freely accessible] image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research’
Data.gov.uk http://data.gov.uk/ ‘over 5,400 datasets available, from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies and local authorities’
International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) http://imslp.org/ ‘a music library to provide music scores free of charge to anyone with internet access [...] one of the largest collections of music scores in the world. It has more than 85,000 scores written by 4,800 composers, and a fledgling recording collection consisting of more than 1,700 recordings’. [Otherwise known as The Petrucci Music Library]. See this article in the New York Times.
Google SVG scaleable graphic search http://www.google.co.uk/ Find Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) by picking SVG from Google’s advanced search option or adding filetype:svg to the end of your search terms. SVGs as used here are simple graphics ‘elements like lines, circles, polygons and more complex shapes. Unlike the images typically returned by most search engines (for example, JPG, GIF and PNG), SVGs can be stretched to any size without the quality of the image suffering…’
Books N-gram Viewer (Google Labs) and Culturomics http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ and http://www.culturomics.org/Resources/A-users-guide-to-culturomics View Google Books data to see the frequency of word usage over time. Enter any single words or phrases and see their usage between the years 1800(or earlier)-2000. Also see paper in Science: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/15/science.1199644. This resource uses data from 5.2 million books—estimated at around 4% of all books ever published—digitized by the Google Books Project. Google has now scanned a total of 15 million books [as at October 2010].
AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) http://amser.org/ Interesting repository of academic resources. Sign up for their newsletter (requires free registration).
Free blank sheet music http://freeblanksheetmusic.org/ Free downloads of blank sheet music in PDF format for a variety of instruments, ensembles, and clefs, including tablature for guitar, bass, and other instruments.
Abbreviations.com http://www.abbreviations.com/ ‘the web’s largest acronyms & abbreviations directory’ . For instance, look up journal title or bibliographic abbreviations.
Screenonline http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ Screenonline, from the British Film Institute (BFI), is an online encyclopaedia of British film and television featuring hundreds of hours of film and television clips. (also see www.tv-ark.org.uk for more historic tv, now also has overseas content).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy http://plato.stanford.edu/ A freely accessible comprehensive online encylopedia ‘maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field’.
UNdata http://data.un.org/ ‘…brings UN statistical databases within easy reach of users through a single entry point. Users can now search and download a variety of statistical resources of the UN system’.
The Plant List http://www.theplantlist.org/ World’s largest plant database. ‘The Plant List is a working list of all known plant species. Version 1 aims to be comprehensive for species of vascular plant (flowering plants, conifers, ferns and their allies) and bryophytes (mosses and liverworts).’
