Getting The Goods

Research Access Strategy for Independent Researchers

This is the sixteenth installment in the series Get Your Facts Straight: Research Skills for Writers. For more about this 18-part series, including the complete schedule and the Table of Contents with links to all the other articles in the series, click here.

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For independent researchers, which is to say anyone who does not have full access to an academic research library and its extensive suite of services, research access can sometimes be challenging. The Internet, vast as it is, doesn’t always give us what we need. Even when it does appear to provide what we’re looking for, it can be difficult to verify sources and evaluate information quality online.

Independent researchers need to have a strategy in place for how to get access to the information they need and want when they are without full access to research libraries. This isn’t always easy, but it helps to know what some of the options are.

In this brief guide, I break down information access for independent researchers into two categories, online and offline resources. The list of online resources is just that, a lightly annotated list of reliable information sources, online libraries, and databases that can be accessed by anyone regardless of whether you have an institutional library affiliation. I encourage all researchers to explore these, bookmark them for later use, and make regular use of them.

The offline resources is a short how-to that covers some of the basic reasons why and how you might access research library materials without an institutional affiliation.

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Online Resources

HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust provides reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law. Integrated text and data mining tools permit searching and data usage of the entire corpus, and other integrated services will emerge as they are developed.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, that is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. The Internet Archive’s goal is to provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. It began in 1996 as a means of addressing the burgeoning need to archive the otherwise highly ephemeral content of the Internet. Today it hosts have 28+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and works with 1,200+ library and other partners through the Archive-It program.

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 75,000 free eBooks with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Books in Project Gutenberg are available in epub and Kindle formats and can be read with any browser.

The Library of Congress. ()

Library of Congress Resources

• Library of Congress Ask A Librarian is an online reference desk of exceptional quality and professionalism.

• The Library of Congress Index of Research Guides provides free and up-to-date research guides to the Library's collections, as well as subject guides prepared by Library of Congress staff.

• Library of Congress Digital Collections is the portal through which all of the digitized content housed by the Library of Congress can be explored and used.

• Library of Congress Databases is the portal through which users can explore and use all the databases that are available via the LoC. Note that while some can be accessed remotely, others can only be accessed from the Library of Congress.