Open Access (OA) refers to a series of principles and practices through which research is distributed online with no institutional/monetary barriers and with full reuse rights. Traditionally, open access has referred to materials published by peer-reviewed journals, but the term can apply to any research output including books, monographs, theses/dissertations, conference papers/proceedings, and more. The Open Access movement also encompasses open data, open educational resources, and open science. Here, we have gathered a number of open access resources, including traditional peer-reviewed content along with digital collections, reference materials, and other sources available free-of-charge.
Video: Open Access Explained! Piled Higher and Deeper (PHD Comics) (2012).
See the following links to learn more:
This box contains a selection of Open Access Media Studies journals. For additional media studies-specific open access resources, see the websites linked below:
For additional general open access resources, see the following:
This box contains a small selection of Open Access books. If you are looking for additional selections, consult the links below:
Access to freely available e-books in the fields of humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design. punctum focuses on authors who want to publish books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing.
Free, full text, downloadable ebooks for books out of copyright in the U.S. Project. Project Gutenberg has the goal of making information, books, and other materials available to the public in forms that are easy to read, use, quote, and search. Includes access to electronic text listings, recent releases, newsletters, articles, and other archives.
Shared digital library created and designed by partnership of major research libraries.
HathiTrust makes the digitized collections of some of the nation’s great research libraries available for all. HathiTrust was initially conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia to establish a repository for those universities to archive and share their digitized collections. HathiTrust will quickly expand to include additional partners and to provide those partners with an easy means to archive their digital content.
A collection of mechanical puzzles.
The Indiana University Lilly Library and the Digital Collections Services present the online Jerry Slocum Mechanical Puzzle Collection, which embodies a lifetime pursuit for the intriguing, the perplexing, and the compelling. Unlike word or jigsaw puzzles, mechanical puzzles are hand-held objects that must be manipulated to achieve a specific goal. The Rubik's cube and tangrams are popular examples. Confounding and delightful, precise and whimsical, the puzzles in the Slocum collection represent centuries of mathematical, social, and recreational history from across five continents.
When complete, the Slocum collection database will allow researchers and puzzle enthusiasts to search and browse the largest assemblage of its kind in the world, with over 30,000 puzzles. The puzzle classification system used in this database was developed by Jerry Slocum on the basis of a scheme set out by Professor Angelo Louis Hoffmann in the now-classic 1893 book, Puzzles Old and New, and has been adopted by puzzle collectors and enthusiasts in several countries.
Puzzles types include:
1. Put-Together Puzzles - Object: Putting puzzle together (e.g., Tangrams)
2. Take-Apart Puzzles - Object: Taking puzzle apart (e.g. Puzzle Boxes)
3. Interlocking Solid Puzzles - Object: Puzzle disassembly and assembly (e.g., Cube)
4. Disentanglement Puzzles - Object: Puzzle disentanglement and entanglement (e.g., Chinese Rings)
5. Sequential Movement Puzzles - Object: Moving puzzle parts to attain goal (e.g. Rubik's Cube)
6. Dexterity puzzles - Object: Manual dexterity to solve puzzle (e.g., Cup and Ball)
7. Puzzle Vessels - Object: Filling vessel or drinking without spilling (e.g. Puzzle Jugs)
8. Vanish Puzzles - Object: Explain vanished or changed image (e.g. Loyd's Get Off the Earth)
9. Folding Puzzles - Object: Fold object to specified pattern (e.g., Fifth Pig Puzzle)
10. Impossible Puzzles - Object: Explain how object was made or why it behaves in seemingly impossible ways (e.g., Arrow thru Bottle)
The LGBTQ+ Library Catalog contains materials pertaining to asexual, bisexual, gay, intersex, lesbian, transgender, and queer issues. These resources include books, videos, CDs, and periodicals. This collection is intended to be a resource for both research and entertainment.
The LGBTQ+ Library provides lending services to the entire community; anyone can register to become a patron with a photo ID.
Media Collections Online (MCO) provides a means for collection managers and select scholarly projects to provide online access to audio and video recordings.
MCO supports a variety of access restrictions, including public access, IU-only access, and restricted access based on network ID or group membership. Online media can be embedded in other websites to support online exhibits or scholarly publishing. Collection managers can put content into MCO one-at-a-time using a web application, or in batches using a dropbox with descriptive metadata in a spreadsheet.
Online platform for the global new media art community supporting the creation, presentation and discussion of contemporary art that uses new technologies.
See our Selected Newspapers and Periodicals box for more open-access popular publications.
Access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages. Search historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
Produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.
German-Jewish periodicals published between 1806 and 1938
This project offers the most comprehensive collection of German-Jewish periodicals on on the web. These periodicals are reflective of religious and political controversies within the German-Jewish community during the 19th and 20th centuries, and offer insight into the social and cultural history of Jews in Germany.
Spanish periodicals online, 17th-20th centuries from the Spanish National Library.
La Hemeroteca Digital forma parte del proyecto Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, que tiene como objetivo la consulta y difusión pública a través de Internet del Patrimonio Bibliográfico Español conservado en la Biblioteca Nacional.
Virtual repository of historical Mexican periodicals. Includes nearly nine million digital pages.
Provides access to digital images of Indiana's historic newspapers.
Hoosier State Chronicles is operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. The Indiana titles digitized through NDNP are also available at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, along with over 8 million newspaper pages from around the United States.
Database with items on journalists, public relations practitioners and media in films, television, radio, fiction, commercials and cartoons.
Includes materials from the IJPC Journal and the IJPC Database, as well as student research and class materials.
The IJPC Journal is an online, interdisciplinary journal and its purpose, the editors state, "is ... to investigate and analyze, through research and publication, the conflicting images of journalists in every aspect of popular culture, from film, television, radio, fiction, commercials, cartoons and comic books to music, art, humor and video games demonstrating their impact on the public's perception of journalists." The first issue appeared in the fall of 2009.
IJPC Database, as of 2023, contained more than 98,000 items on journalists, public relations practitioners and news media in television, films (movies, movies made for TV and miniseries), fiction (novels, short stories, plays and poems), cartoons, comic books, comic strips, non-fiction (documentaries, news, sports), radio, humor, commercials, games, early references, music (songs compositions), internet websites, and art.
Chronicles 189 years of Russian history, from the first newspapers established by Peter the Great to the fall of the Romanovs. Includes out-of-copyright newspapers spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The collection’s core titles are from Moscow and St. Petersburg, complemented by regional newspapers across the vast Russian Empire.
Includes over 1,000 newspaper titles from Mexico’s pre-independence, independence and revolutionary periods (1807-1929). PLEASE NOTE: registration is required to download PDFs.
Covers Mexican partisan politics, yellow press, political and social satire, as well as local, regional, national and international news. While holdings of many of the newspapers in this collection are available only in very short runs, the titles are often unique and, in many cases, represent the only existing record of a newspaper’s short-lived publication.
Access to newspapers covering culture, and politics throughout the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the years of provisional government and civil war, and the birth of the People’s Republic. PLEASE NOTE: registration is required to download PDFs.
The first half of the twentieth century began with the demise of China’s last imperial dynasty, the Great Qing, and ended with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. Following the 1912 establishment of China’s first post-imperial government, the Republic of China, the country experienced both industrial and social revolution, a civil war during which communist and nationalist forces battled to shape the country’s future, and looming external threats during both world wars.
Outdoor Indiana is the official publication of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (formerly the Department of Conservation). The magazine debuted in February 1934. The online version includes issues from February 1934 through November-December 1993. Issues 2020 to present can be found on the Indiana Department of Natural Resources website.
For our extensive list of Image Databases and Stock Photo websites, see the Image and Audiovisual Resources tab.
Over 14,000 Kodachrome slides by amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman (1896-1972) about his travels in the United States and abroad.
Taken by amateur photographer Charles Weever Cushman between 1938 and 1969, the images document an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies. The collection is part of the Indiana University Archives. The richly saturated Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white, "a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray," writes Eric Sandweiss, IU Carmony Chair and Professor of History, in an essay included on the collection's Web site. "In Cushman's work," he observes, "the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present."
An image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research.
The Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a non-commercial online image database of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, or manuscripts made in the tradition of books before printing. DS unites scattered resources from a consortium of many libraries into a union catalog for teaching and scholarly research in medieval and Renaissance studies. It provides unprecedented access to illuminated and textual manuscripts through digital cataloging records, supported by high resolution images and retrievable by various topic searches. DS enables users from the most casual to the most specialized to study the rare and valuable materials of academic, research, and public libraries. It makes available collections that are often restricted from public access and includes not only recognized masterpieces but also understudied manuscripts that have been previously overlooked for exhibition or publication. DS fosters the public viewing of non-circulating materials otherwise available only within restricted access libraries. As a visual catalog, DS allows scholars and beginners to verify with their own eyes cataloguing information about places and dates of origin, scripts, artists, and quality. Special emphasis is placed on the touchstone materials, i.e., manuscripts signed and dated by their scribes, thus beginning the American contribution to the goal established in 1953 by the Comité international de paléographie latine (International Committee of Latin Paleography): to document photographically the proportionately small number of codices of certain origin that will serve stylistically to localize and date the vast quantities of unsigned manuscripts. DS publishes not only manuscripts of firm attribution but also ones that need the attention of further scholarship and traditionally would have been unlikely candidates for reproduction. Because it is web-based, it also allows for updates and corrections, and as a matter of form individual records in DS can and do acknowledge contributions from outside scholars. DS encourages interaction between the academic and the library world to build a growing and reciprocally beneficial body of knowledge. DS looks to the needs of a very diverse community of specialists: medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists, literary scholars and art historians. At the same time DS recognizes a broader user community in the public that values rare and unique works of historical, literary and artistic significance.
This collection of Stephanie C. Kane’s ethnographic photographs documents everyday life and holidays among the Emberá people living along the rivers of the Darién tropical forest between 1983 and 1985. The photographs also include images of the Wounaan and Catio (along with the Emberá, the three indigenous groups known collectively as the Chocó) and people of African descent.
The archives of the Franchthi Project include color images, an extensive collection of black and white negatives and contact prints, copies of the excavation notebooks, the original inventory books for all finds and correspondence related to the Franchthi Cave located near the southwestern tip of the Argolid peninsula across the bay from the fishing village of Kiladha, Greece.
In 1967, Tom Jacobsen began directing excavations inside the cave, under the sponsorship of Indiana University, Bloomington, on a permit issued through the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The Franchthi Project collection also includes proceedings from a symposia held in Bloomington, a few soil samples, copies of the volumes in the Franchthi publication series, copies of many articles by Franchthi staff, and other related documents.
The collection, dating from 1917-1960 and housed in the Lilly Library, consists primarily of photographs by Frank Michael Hohenberger, 1876-1963, Brown County photographer and newspaperman.
The Hohenberger collection documents the life, customs, and scenes of the hills of Brown County, in addition to other areas of Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Mexico.
This is the collection of anthropologist Fred McEvoy’s photographs from his 1967-1968 research among Sabo labor migrants in southeastern Liberia.
Provides access to digital images of Indiana's historic newspapers.
Hoosier State Chronicles is operated by the Indiana State Library and funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act. The Indiana titles digitized through NDNP are also available at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America, along with over 8 million newspaper pages from around the United States.
Image Collections Online showcases image collections curated by libraries, archives, and other cultural-heritage institutions of Indiana University.
Image Collections Online (ICO) includes a variety of historical photographs and images of cultural objects from the Lilly Library, the IU Archives, the Archives of African American Music and Culture, the Liberian Collections, the IU Map Collections, and others. Collection managers interested in submitting their collections for inclusion in ICO should contact the IU Libraries' Digital Collections Services department.
Media Collections Online (MCO) provides a means for collection managers and select scholarly projects to provide online access to audio and video recordings.
MCO supports a variety of access restrictions, including public access, IU-only access, and restricted access based on network ID or group membership. Online media can be embedded in other websites to support online exhibits or scholarly publishing. Collection managers can put content into MCO one-at-a-time using a web application, or in batches using a dropbox with descriptive metadata in a spreadsheet.
Open Access repository for digital content related to the history and cultural memory of Mexico. Includes written documents, photographs, videos, audio files, books, oral testimonies, and traditions from various archives, libraries, federal and municipal collections, as well as private collections.
Cultural Linguistic Archive of Mesoamerica (CLAMA) / Central American and Mexican Video Archive (CAMVA) collection consists of historical records from El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico from 1970 through 1999. More than 200 hours of video, audio, and photographic digital materials from these countries histories are used for instructional purposes.
TRAIL identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports.
The mission of TRAIL is to ensure preservation, discoverability, and persistent open access to government technical publications regardless of form or format. Technical reports communicate research progress in technology and science; they deliver information for technical development to industry and research institutions contributing to the continued growth of science and technology.
Collection of photographs of the Gary Works steel mill and the corporate town of Gary, Indiana.
The U.S. Steel Gary Works Photograph Collection is a series of over 2,200 photographs from the Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana University Northwest, in Gary that document the construction and growth of a town conceived and built by United States Steel Corporation. The website also features learning activities for students in grades 4-12.
An online collection of more than 140,000 images of rare and unique library, museum, and archives collections across the United Kingdom.
The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a Research Centre within the Library and Learning Services Department at the University for the Creative Arts, and specializes in the management, storage, presentation, and archiving of digital images and other arts-based assets. VADS was founded to provide services to the academic community 14 years ago, and since that time it has built an online collection of more than 140,000 images of rare and unique collections from libraries, museums, and archives in universities and colleges across the UK, which are made available online for the purposes of learning, teaching, and research.
Below are a selection of Media Studies and Communication Organization in the United States. For additional organizations, see the following resources:
Indiana University GradGrants Center (GGC)
National Communication Association Resources:
See also:
See below for calls for paper (CFPs) and conference lists:
Below is a selection of conferences focusing on Media Studies:
For additional resources, explore our related LibGuides. A LibGuide (which is what you are reading right now) provides research assistance and resources compiled by IU librarians:
Jordan Schonig Film & Media Studies YouTube Lectures. Jordan Schonig is a professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at Texas Christian University. His YouTube videos cover film theory and film analysis.
Video: Walter Benjamin and Aura: "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" Part 1. Jordan Schonig (2021).