One of the major benefits that the internet provides for researchers is the ability to find resources online in the comfort of one’s home. Typing in keywords leads one to a mass of information which makes life very simple. Moreover, it is also cost-friendly. Research, which is both a tedious and expensive job is made easier with the help of these websites!
Archive.org – This is probably the most helpful search engine when looking for sources. One can access radio transcripts, music, texts, videos, as well as other collections as well as lots of old books for free. A tip that comes in handy, is to press on the option of ‘Search Text Content’. Whichever item/ book/ text has used the particular keyword that has been typed in will come in the results, giving us a vast corpus of references to choose from!
David Rumsey Map Collection – For anyone requiring maps for their research, old or new, David Rumsey Map Collection is just the place! It contains as many as 115,000 maps and related images, of maps dating 16th century- the 21st century. It contains maps of all over the world, including, Asia, Africa, Antarctica, North America, South America, the Pacific, the Arctic, and the world.
National Digital Library India( NDLI)- Developed by IIT, Kharagpur, this website is a huge repository of books and archival materials. It has books and texts ranging from all ages, from different subjects studied in school to those for higher education. Registering on it is beneficial, as it gives you free access to lots of sources that generally require payment.
J-Stor – This website has a lot of important articles. Although one has to register and these are not downloadable without payment, it is still always worthy to make a j-stor search. It also gives a lot of reviews of books and articles from various scholarly journals.
Z Library.org – On this website, a lot of books are available and downloadable for free, therefore making it an extremely valuable source. Academic books can be so expensive, and even tedious to find, without access to a proper institutional library. If you are one of those people, this website is your gold mine.
Google Scholar- Google Scholar is a search engine powered by Google and owing to its widespread access and provides links to various articles and scholarly works which have been published about the research topic
