Find the best library databases for your research.
The most frequently-used databases
The Houston Business Journal is a leading source of business news, analysis, and insights for the Houston metropolitan area, providing comprehensive coverage on local industries, companies, and economic trends.
Scopus is a user-friendly database that provides access to a vast collection of peer-reviewed research articles, conference papers, and books across various disciplines, helping students find reliable academic sources for their studies.
The following databases are newly acquired or being evaluated for a future subscription.
Art Images for College Teaching (AICT) began as a personal project dedicated to the principle of free exchange of image resources for and among members of the educational community.
The Studs Terkel Radio Archive (STRA), launched in May 2018 on Studs Terkel’s 106th birthday, is a digital platform whereon, eventually, will live the majority of the 5,600 radio programs Terkel created during his career at WFMT in Chicago between 1952 and 1997 live. This platform, augmented by curatorial commentary, re-use tools, educational resources, highlights of creative reuse, and an original podcast, along with other special features, opens up Terkel’s radio programs and allows for a deeper level of user engagement.
BMC has an evolving portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, sharing discoveries from research communities in science, technology, engineering and medicine. In 1999 we made high quality research open to everyone who needed to access it – and in making the open access model sustainable, we changed the world of academic publishing.
The CGP is the finding tool for federal publications that includes descriptive information for historical and current publications as well as direct links to the full document, when available.
Coverage: current year only
Child Welfare Information Gateway is your connection to trusted resources on the child welfare continuum. We provide publications, research, and learning tools selected by experts to support thriving children, youth, families, and communities.
The Cities and Buildings Database is a collection of digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world, available to students, researchers and educators on the web.
The Digital Public Library of America empowers people to learn, grow, and contribute to a diverse and better-functioning society by maximizing access to our shared history, culture, and knowledge. We work with a national network of partners to make millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the country available to all in a one-stop discovery experience.
This collection presents over 3,300 items relating to the early history of advertising in the United States. The materials, drawn from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, provide a significant and informative perspective on the early evolution of this most ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture.
The East View Global Press Archive® (GPA) is a groundbreaking program to create the most comprehensive collection of digital news sources from around the world. GPA is the result of a landmark initiative to digitally preserve and make more accessible thousands of original print newspaper publications collected by the Hoover Institution and now housed by Stanford Libraries.
Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.
GovInfo is free U.S. Government information for all. The website provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
The Handbook of Texas is a digital state encyclopedia that is freely accessible for students, teachers, scholars, and the general public. The Handbook consists of overview, general, and biographical entries focused on the entire history of Texas from the indigenous Native Americans and the Prehistoric Era to the state's diverse population and the Modern Age. These entries emphasize the role Texans played in state, national, and world history.
The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections are among the largest and most heavily used in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Since 2000, documentation from the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) has been added to the holdings. The collections document achievements in architecture, engineering, and landscape design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types, engineering technologies, and landscapes, including examples as diverse as the Pueblo of Acoma, houses, windmills, one-room schools, the Golden Gate Bridge, and buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Houston Business Journal is a leading source of business news, analysis, and insights for the Houston metropolitan area, providing comprehensive coverage on local industries, companies, and economic trends.
ILOSTAT has a wealth of information on labour statistics, from free access to almost 100 million data points to extensive statistical guidance.
Access to macroeconomic & financial data.
International Debt Statistics (IDS) is designed to respond to user demand for timely, comprehensive data on trends in external debt in low- and middle-income countries.
IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content, designed to help fans explore the world of movies and shows and decide what to watch.
IMSLP, also known as the International Music Score Library Project or Petrucci Music Library, was started in 2006. The logo on the main page is a capital letter A. It was taken from the beginning of the very first printed book of music, the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. It was published in Venice in 1501 by Ottaviano Petrucci, the library's namesake.
IBDB (Internet Broadway Database) archive is the official database for Broadway theatre information. IBDB provides records of productions from the beginnings of New York theatre until today.
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive is an ever-growing collection of dance videos filmed at Jacob’s Pillow from the 1930s to today.
Knowledge Unlatched believes that by working together libraries and publishers can create a sustainable route to Open Access for scholarly books and secure long-term cost savings for their own institutions by sharing the costs of making HSS monographs available on a Creative Commons license. By taking part in Knowledge Unlatched libraries can help to ensure that good books and journals continue to be published and that the core-outputs of the humanities and social sciences are not left behind in the shift to open access.
Showing a variety of digitized, primary source resources from American history & culture that are currently in the public domain.
LibriVox is a database containing free audio recordings of books in the public domain.
Luminos is University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. With the same high standards for selection, peer review, production and marketing as our traditional program, Luminos is a transformative model, built as a partnership where costs and benefits are shared.
A pioneer in scholarly, open access publishing, MDPI has supported academic communities since 1996. Based in Basel, Switzerland, MDPI has the mission to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. MDPI currently publishes 444 peer-reviewed journals, and 9 conference journals which are dedicated to publishing outputs from academic conferences.
Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets.
You can search, retrieve, and download EPA technical, scientific, and educational materials from this site – all free of charge!
Established in 1972, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is an Office of Justice Programs (OJP) resource offering support and information to further justice-related research, policy, and program development. The NCJRS Virtual Library hosts a collection of over 235,000 information resources on criminal justice subjects, including corrections, courts, drugs, law enforcement, juvenile justice, victims of crime, and related topics. The Virtual Library provides access to all known OJP works and sponsored research, as well as to thousands of government products, research reports, journal articles, and published and unpublished literature produced through 2014.
The NOAA Digital Library collections reflect NOAA’s broad mission of advancing science “from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sun.” Images within are contributed by NOAA staff and help depict NOAA’s work to explain and interpret our changing environment. The NOAA Digital Library started in 1998 as part of the NOAA Central Library. An update in 2019 organized approximately 70,000 images into broad collections, further arranged into specific galleries. In 2024, this Digital Library was relaunched on NOAA.gov to expand access and provide a more comprehensive search capability. New assets, including our vast heritage collection, are continually being digitized and added to enhance the library further.
The mission of the Old Time Radio Researchers Group is to accurately preserve classic old time radio series from the past in order for future generations to enjoy them.
OnTheMap is a web-based mapping and reporting application that shows where workers are employed and where they live. It also provides companion reports on age, earnings, industry distributions, race, ethnicity, educational attainment, and sex.
Open Book Publishers (OBP), founded in 2008, is a leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed, award-winning monographs, edited collections, textbooks, critical translations and more.
OATD.org aims to be the best possible resource for finding open access graduate theses and dissertations published around the world. Metadata (information about the theses) comes from over 1100 colleges, universities, and research institutions. OATD currently indexes 7,270,329 theses and dissertations.
The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is an award-winning publisher of humanities scholarship based at Birkbeck, University of London. We play a leading role within a growing ecosystem of scholar-led digital publishing, that combines cutting-edge technology with community governance and not-for-profit principles. This has become known as diamond open access.
OSTI.GOV is the primary search tool for DOE science, technology, and engineering research and development results and the organizational hub for information about the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information.
PubChem is the world's largest collection of freely accessible chemical information. Search chemicals by name, molecular formula, structure, and other identifiers. Find chemical and physical properties, biological activities, safety and toxicity information, patents, literature citations and more.
RAND is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.
Scopus is a user-friendly database that provides access to a vast collection of peer-reviewed research articles, conference papers, and books across various disciplines, helping students find reliable academic sources for their studies.
The Sherman Grinberg Film Library, located in Los Angeles, California, is the world’s oldest and biggest privately held film archive with over 40 moving image libraries, serving Hollywood and the world film community for more than 75 years. The archive includes thoroughly indexed (metafiled) footage in the classic genres: Entertainment and Celebrities including the Oscars; Sports including the Olympics, college, and professional games; World Leaders and Politics; the Great Wars (WWI, WW2 and more); Science and Technology; Natural Disasters and Civil Unrest; Fashion, Culture, Crime, and Everyday Life.
As part of Springer Nature, SpringerLink delivers fast access to the depth and breadth of our online collection of journals, eBooks, reference works and protocols across a vast range of scientific, technical, and medical disciplines.
TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online) makes descriptions of the rich archival, manuscript, and museum collections in repositories across the state available to the public. The site consists of the collection descriptions or "finding aids" that archives, libraries, and museums create to assist users in locating information in their collections. Consider these an extended table of contents which describe unique materials only available at the individual repositories. In most cases, the collections themselves are NOT available online.
The Torture Archive, an online repository of more than 16,000 documents, chronicles United States government policy on the detention and interrogation of individuals in the “global war on terror” since September 11, 2001. The Torture Archive contains more than 16,000 records that provide conclusive evidence of torture as U.S. policy in the global war on terrorism.
TRID is an integrated database that combines the records from TRB’s Transportation Research Information Services (TRIS) Database and the OECD’s Joint Transport Research Centre’s International Transport Research Documentation (ITRD) Database. TRID provides access to 1.4 million records of transportation research worldwide.
Explore Census Data: Learn about America's People, Places, and Economy.
Coverage: most current file.
Provides concise point of care drug information, including dosing, administration, warnings and precautions, as well as clinical content, such as clinical practice guidelines, IV compatibility from Trissel's 2 Clinical Pharmaceutics Database, and other tools.
VADS provides a national collection of over 140,000 images from over 300 art and design collections across the UK, which are freely available for non-commercial use in education. The images cover the broad range of the visual arts including applied arts, architecture, design, fashion, fine art, and media.
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European fine arts, decorative arts and architecture (3rd-19th centuries), currently containing over 52,800 reproductions. Artist biographies, commentaries, guided tours, period music, catalogue, free postcard and mobile services are provided.
The Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) is a digital publication and resource that advances research on the hundreds of women who worked behind the scenes during the silent film era. Always expanding, WFPP publishes original scholarship on women who worked all around the world as directors, producers, screenwriters, editors, and more.
DataBank is an analysis and visualisation tool that contains collections of time series data on a variety of topics. You can create your own queries; generate tables, charts, and maps; and easily save, embed, and share them.
The World Development Indicators (WDI) is the primary World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially-recognized international sources. It presents the most current and accurate global development data available, and includes national, regional and global estimates.
zbMATH Open (formerly known as Zentralblatt MATH) is the world's most comprehensive and longest-running abstracting and reviewing service in pure and applied mathematics.
