Research Resources

This is a list of various online research resources (some free, some paid-for) I’ve found useful. It’s mostly here for my own reference, but if you’re here, I hope you find something of use!

General

• Archive.org
• Archives Hub, brings together descriptions of thousands of the UK’s archive collections
• University of Florida Digital Collections
• The World Digital Library, a Library of Congress collection of “cultural treasures and significant historical documents including books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films”.
• Oxford Reference, a collection of online versions of Oxford University Press reference works. Account required, but it's available through some library accounts in the UK.
• The Digital Public Library of America — "images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the United States".

Language

• The Oxford English Dictionary

Current

• The UK Office for National Statistics

Misc

• BBC Genome — complete listing of what was shown and when
• Library Hub Discover — brings together the catalogues of major UK and Irish libraries
• British Library Catalogues & Collections
• Royal Academy Exhibitions
• The Old Bailey Online 1674–1910
• International Advertising and Design Database
• Firms Out of Business — mainly publishers, literary agencies, etc.
• Bank of England Inflation Calculator 1209–2018
• The UK National Archives
• National Records of Scotland
• National Library of Scotland Maps

Historical records, newspapers & other periodicals

• Historical Directories of England & Wales (University of Leicester) — various directories from the late-19th and early-20th century
• The Gazette — Official Public Record of the UK
• Newspapers at the Library of Congress — not sure if this has anything different from the next link:
• Library of Congress — All Digitized Newspapers
• The British Newspaper Archive PAID-FOR
• Newspapers.com PAID-FOR
• Hathi Trust digital library
• Welsh Newspapers
• The Guardian 1791–2003 PAID-FOR
• New York Public Library Digitized Collections
• Heidelberg historic literature — digitized, including Pan magazine
• OZ Magazine
• Luminist — pulp magazine archives
• Modernist Magazines Project
• Modernist Journals Project
• Masonic Periodicals Online
• The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals
• A Vision of Britain Through Time — includes historical maps, census reports, etc.
• Publishers Weekly 1872–2016, at Archive.org.
• British Book News 1940–1993, at Archive.org.
• British History Online — nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary content relating to British and Irish history.
• Hansard online, the official report of all UK Parliamentary debates.
• Timetable world, an online collection of historical transport timetables and maps from around the World.
• Charles Booth's poverty maps of London.
• California Digital Newspaper Collection.
• Gallica — historical French newspapers online.
• Euro Docs: Online Sources for European History
• Google advanced booksearch, includes some newspapers.

Articles & academic papers

• JURN — search free academic articles, chapters and theses
• JSTOR — academic journals, primary sources, and books
• Media History digital library — millions of pages of books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound
• The Unz Review — searchable database that has indexed a large number of periodicals
• The Internet Archive’s Scholar search engine.

Family history

• FreeBMD — births, marriages & deaths indexes
• Find My Past (UK) PAID-FOR, with some free records.
• Ancestry (UK) PAID-FOR
• Scotlands People PAID-FOR
• Probate & Will search (UK) PAID-FOR
• Family Search
• Deceased online search free, records PAID-FOR
• Gravestone Photographic Records
• Scotland's Places — historical documents
• Scottish Indexes — historical documents
• Archive.org's Genealogy collection
• Ellis Island passenger records search
• Britain and Ireland SNP and Surname mapper.
• Historical Scottish Post Office Directories.

Data & utilities

• Google Trends — "explore what the world is searching"
• Google Ngram viewer — see the historical frequency of use of words and phrases

Fantasy, SF & horror

• ISFDB — The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• ...and the ISFDB’s page of bibliographic resources.
• The Fourth Edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Encyclopedia of Fantasy — online version of the 1997 book
• The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film + Television
• The Locus Index to Science Fiction covers 1984 to 2009
• The FictionMags Index
• The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database — database of historical material; books; articles; news reports; interviews; film reviews; commentary; and fan writing
• The Grand Comics database
• The Fanac Fan History Project, contains a lot of scanned fanzines.
• The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
• Archive of Mallorn, the Journal of the Tolkien Society

Books & writers

• Author and Book Info.com — information on about 180,000 authors and 550,000 of their books.

Copyright

• WATCH — Writers, Artists and Their Copyright Holders database
• US Copyright Office records database
• The Stanford Copyright Renewals database, for works published in the US between 1923 and 1963.