Oxford English dictionary
Online version contains the 20 volume second edition of the Oxford English dictionary plus the complete contents of the three additions volumes published between 1993-97. Updated quarterly.

Oxford Reference online
Oxford Reference online brings together 100 language and subject dictionaries and reference works, containing well over 60,000 pages, into a single cross-searchable resource.

AMS books online
Around 30 free e-books published by the American Mathematical Society on a range of mathematical topics, including analysis, differential equations, mathematical physics, logic and number theory. In PDF format - Adobe Acrobat required.

Bibliomania
Thousands of free e-books, poems, articles, short stories and plays. Also study guides, dictionaries, biographies, religious texts, and popular non-fiction.

Electronic literature directory
An extensive database of listings for electronic works, their authors, and their publishers. The descriptive entries cover poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction that make significant use of electronic techniques or enhancements. Among the new forms of writing represented here are hypertexts and other interactive pieces, animated poems, multimedia works, generated texts, and works that allow reader collaboration.

Electronic text centre
10,000 publicly available texts including history, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of science. Languages include Latin, Apache, Japanese, and Chinese. 164,000 related images, including rare books, manuscripts, and book illustrations.

EScholarship editions
More than 300 free electronic editions of academic books published by eScholarship Editions, mainly in the humanities, religion, history, literature, arts and social sciences.

Glasgow Digital Library ebooks
A collection of freely available e-books on the history of Glasgow and Scotland.

Historical mathematics monographs: Cornell University Library
A collection of 512 selected monographs with expired copyrights chosen from the mathematics field. These were monographs that were brittle and decaying and in need of rescue, so were digitally scanned.

Internet sacred text archive
A freely-available archive of non-copyrighted religious and mythological e-texts. The site focuses primarily on English translations of material from African, Australian and North American indigenous cultures, Asian traditions (particularly those from South and East Asia) and Neo-Pagan and Occult traditions.

National Academies Press
Over 3,000 freely available online books and reports on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy

Oxford Text Archive
The Archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Includes online versions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora. Searchable by author or title.

Project Gutenberg
A collection of over 20,000 freely-available e-books. Searchable, with list of "top" authors and titles.

Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy
Includes editorial and copyrighted information, as well as a site search engine. Offers an alphabetical index to the philosophical entries and information on individual philosophers and their beliefs.

Electronic Journals

Academic Search Elite
Full text of over 2,000 publications, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed journals. Coverage spans virtually every area of academic study and provides information for some titles dating back to 1985.

Business Source Elite
Offers the full text of over 1,100 business publications covering management, economics, finance, accounting and international business. Full text for some publications back to 1985.

Computers and Applied Sciences Complete
Indexing and abstracts for 1,300 computing and applied sciences journals. Full text of more than 500 titles covering engineering, computer theory and systems, and new technologies.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
Access to over 1,500 quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The service will continue to grow as new journals are identified.

HighWire
A large archive containing science based, free, full text journals.

Free Medical Journals.com
Access to over 600 free medical journals from around the world, many of which offer full text articles. Some titles do not have the current archive, and many begin access from the previous years.

Chemistry central
A collection of peer-reviewed open access research and journals in the chemical sciences.

Electronic library of mathematics
Full text access to around 40 mathematical journals.

Engineering e-journal search engine (EESE)
The full text of 100 practice-oriented journals, hosted by EEVL.

Open J-Gate
An electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is provided by Informatics (India) Ltd and provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

PubMed Central Homepage
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

Reference sources
The resources on this page include dictionaries, encyclopedias, directories, statistics and news sources. They are useful for looking up definitions, addresses, telephone numbers, facts and figures. We have grouped some of the resources by subject, as well as providing a list of general resources.


Electronic Databases

ERIC
Educational Resources Reference Centre) provides access to journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. It makes available more than 1,194,000 records and 100,000 full text documents.

LISTA
Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts gives indexes to 600 periodicals in librarianship, plus books, research reports and proceedings. Coverage dates back to the mid 1960’s.Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts) gives indexes to 600 periodicals in librarianship, plus books, research reports and proceedings. Coverage dates back to the mid 1960.

Google Scholar
Google defined "scholarly" literature including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. Some linked full text may only be available to subscribers.

OAIster
A project of the University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service to create a collection of previously difficult to access, academically oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone.

Routes

What is ROUTES?
ROUTES is a library service providing quick and easy access to quality assessed Internet sites which should be useful to you if you are studying an Arab Open University course.

How the ROUTES web sites are selected
Web sites are suggested to the UK Open University's course teams by library staff after a discussion about the sort of information they feel would be of help to OU students. Course teams may also already know of sites that they would like to be included in ROUTES and suggestions come in from students. Possible web sites are then checked against a set of evaluation criteria, including factual content, currency, authorship, relevance, ease of use, copyright and stability, to make sure that the high quality of the database is being maintained.

How to search
Finding resources on ROUTES is very easy as its flexibility lets you search and browse in several different ways:

The web sites are all given descriptions so you can get an idea of the scope of a site before connecting to it.

Is it up-to-date?
The records are checked regularly by the library to make sure that the links still work and that the sites are still relevant.

Suggest a website
The ROUTES database is developing and growing all the time. If you find a web site which has been useful to your studies but isn't included on ROUTES, please suggest it to the library and we will look at it. As long as the site meets the evaluation criteria, we will then add it to the list of resources so that other students can benefit from what you've found. You can find more detail on the criteria we use for selecting resources on the ROUTES web site.

For more information or to suggest a web site contact use our feedback form.
ROUTES web site: http://routes.open.ac.uk



The Digital Library & Electronic Books