I love databases like JSTOR and Academic Search Premier; however, they are quite expensive. With a growing number of online courses like those provided by the Global Online Academy, which hosts students from a variety of schools with varying levels of access, finding free scholarly sources is more important than ever. This month, Joyce Valenza wrote about this issue on her blog, NeverEndingSearch. In a post titled “New tricks for academics,” she discusses changes to Google Scholar, a rediscovery of Microsoft’s Academic Search, and the connective power of Mendeley. Today, a new academic source appeared in my inbox. According to the email,
Academic Room is an online platform that was conceived at Harvard as an independent initiative to facilitate multidisciplinary engagements among scholars and researchers around the world. Our mission is to democratize access to scholarly resources, which are organized in over 10,000 academic sub-disciplines. We share the conviction that easy and unimpeded access to quality educational resources should be a right and not a privilege. Our platform allows academics, researchers and students to create highly specialized portals for their subfields. These portals can be enriched with professional directories, scholar profiles, video lectures, bibliographies, journal articles, books, reviews, images, ancient manuscripts and audio recordings. Scholars can now promote their work to a much larger audience than allowed by traditional channels.
Even without registering, a user has access to a variety of multimedia. A quick look at the “History of North America” page reveals full text articles such as “Psychological Warfare in Vietnam” by James O. Whittaker and videos like “Malcolm X interview at UC Berkeley (Oct. 11, 1963).” A quick search for “civil war” finds 752 items including lectures, books, reviews, and bibliographies. Academic Room and other scholarly search portals are more than just repositories of information because they add the opportunity to create scholar profiles. As Valenza notes, there is great potential for them to “become an interesting source for discovering experts, for assessing authority, and for identifying relationships among research and researchers.” Not only are some of the walls coming down around scholarly sources, but these tools are also creating powerful paths for us to travel as we research.