Get researching on-line • Lynne Garner

Last month I shared the on-line resources in my post 'I used to go to the library' which enabled me to research for my latest book ‘Hedgehog of Moon Meadow Farm’ without visiting a physical library. A few of those who left a comment (thank you folks) also suggested useful resources they’d used. So, this month I’ve decided to share those suggested links plus add a couple of my own.

Encyclopedia Mythica (thank you for the suggestion Fran B) holds 7,000 plus articles. It contains a mythology sections that is divided into six geographical regions. These being Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Oceania. I’ve already bookmarked their folktales section.

Scribd. (thank you for the suggestion AliB) has built a library of books, audiobooks, documents, magazines and sheet music. At the time of writing this they were running a read free for 30 days special. Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down how much the charge is once that 30 days expires but I understand it’s a “single small payment.”

Academia.edu (AliB – thank you again) is a platform for academics to share research papers. It claims to be the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free. To use you must create an account but once you do you have access to over 18 million papers. Another bookmarked site!

LibriVox has the mission statement of “to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.” This site is a non-commercial, non-profit and is run by volunteers. The volunteers record public domain books (mostly sourced from the Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive) and makes them available to download free. They are always in need of volunteers to read and record books in all languages.

Google Books is a searchable data base of books in print and in the public domain. A good starting point for any research. You can search by term, title or author. When clicking on the link for a book it will tell you if a book is available in eBook format and supply links to places you can purchase the physical format of the book.

Enjoy that research.

Regards