Academic Reference Resources

BASE or Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic open access web resources. BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. The database provides more than 50 million documents from more than 2,700 sources. You can access the full texts of about 75% of the indexed documents.

DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.

Google Scholar provides a simple way to search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources for relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Thematic Resources

Academic Earth presents free online video lectures from universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Michigan, Harvard, MIT, Princeton,Stanford, and Yale in various subjects.

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information to help learners find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites. Includes thousands of hand-selected and relevant pictures, slide-shows, videos, audio-clips, documents and other primary source materials. Sign up to dig deeper and see everything the site has to offer! Username: iselibrary Password: ise123

Countries and Their Cultures is a prime Social Studies resource on World's countries and cultures for adolescent learners.

The Electric Typewriter collects great articles and essays on a variety of topics by the world's best journalists and authors.

Encyclopedia of Science is an online A to Z Science, technology, mathematics, philosophy, etc. resource maintained and updated by astronomer-author David Darling.

Europeana Digital archive of European countries and cultures allows you to explore millions of items from a range of Europe's leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Books and manuscripts, photos and paintings, television and film, sculpture and crafts, diaries and maps, sheet music and recordings, they’re all here. No need to travel the continent, either physically or virtually! There is a Free iPad app is available on iTunes.

Fact Monster is a free online reference for Primary school students. Online almanac, dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus. 

Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank fighting devastating misconceptions about global development. Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics and promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.  Check out the subsection of their page Dollar Street to see how people really live. The book "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling available from ISE library goes with the theme. 

Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format. Now the Internet Archive includes: texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections, and provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities. 

Khan Academy offers a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

“New Khan Academy Learning Flow.” YouTube, Khan Academy, 15 Aug. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQQjbq0gMmE.

Pros and Cons The purpose of this site is to provide resources for critical thinking and to educate without bias. It researches issues that are controversial and important, and present them in a balanced, comprehensive, straightforward, and primarily pro-con format at no charge.

World Digital Library makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures and significant historical documents on one site, in a variety of ways. Content on the WDL includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films

The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities

Wonderopolis helps you to discover a new wonder each day. Explore, imagine, laugh, share, create, learn, smile, grow...

“Ready, Set, Wonderopolis!” Vimeo, Wonderopolis, 16 Apr. 2018, vimeo.com/127645552.

Estonian Reference Resources

Database of Estonian articles: Index Scriptorum Estoniae (ISE) This database, the result of cooperation between12 libraries in the ELNET Consortium, contains articles, from newspapers, magazines and journals, serial publications and anthologies and collections from the 1990s on allowing the full-text to be accessed in free digital archives and Web publications.

Department of Literature in Foreign Languages of Tallinn Central Library holds approximately 151 000 items, including a vast choice of textbooks and fiction in Russian, English, German, French and other languages. Just around the corner at Liivalaia 40, behind the little church opposite Olympia Hotel. 

ESTER in Estonian

ESTER in English E-catalog ESTER gives access to public libraries' collections in Estonia.

Estonica is a comprehensive encyclopedia about Estonia. Topics include history, society, culture, state, economy, education and science, naturs.

Estonian Institute's tasks are spreading information about Estonian society, culture and education both at home and abroad, introducing Estonian culture to other countries and promoting cultural communication between Estonia and other countries, and supporting the teaching of Estonian language and culture-related subjects in the universities abroad.

Fact Check Websites

Full Fact (UK) are a team of independent fact checkers and campaigners who find, expose and counter the harm done by false information.

Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Gapminder is a fact tank, not a think tank fighting devastating misconceptions about global development. Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics and promotes a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.  Check out the subsection of their page Dollar Street to see how people really live. The book "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling available from ISE library goes with the theme. 

The International Fact-Checking Network (INT) is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies; its code of principles maybe of interest.

Snopes.com (US) is one of the best online resources that debunks Urban Legends and Rumors on a huge number of topics. It’s run by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson, who established this website in 1995. Since that time they have continually updated the database with new facts about, why something that is considered “scary” or “sinister” is just a legend created by the common folk. The number of topics they cover is just astounding, and they present enough evidence about every topic so that the visitors can make up their mind, whether the topic being discussed it true or just a rumor.

Image and Media Resources-Free

Flickr: the Commons is a catalog of the world's public photo archives. 

NASA Image and Video Library NASA has made their entire collection of images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. It’s 140,000 photos and other resources available for you to see, or even download and use it any way you like.

Pexels free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators.

Pixabay over 1 million+ free high quality stock images and videos shared by our talented community.

Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education.

What is Public Domain? 

Pond5 is a Public Domain Project that allows downloading thousands of historic media files for creative projects completely free.

“Public Domain 101.” YouTube, Pond5, 20 Jan. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3Dnh2JCMI.

Dictionaries, Thesauri

Snappy Words is a free visual dictionary and thesaurus. Enter any word or phrase into the Snappy Words search box and it will create a web of related words, phrases, and definitions. Hover your cursor over any word or phrase in the web to read its definition. Click and drag any node to explore other branches of the web. Double click on a node and it will generate new web branches.

Oxford English Dictionary The historical English dictionary, an unsurpassed guide for researchers in any discipline to the meaning, history, and usage of over 500,000 words and phrases across the English-speaking world.