Free Open Content Libraries





Introduction


According to the Oxford Dictionaries a library is:


 * a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to.


 * a collection of books and periodicals held in a library.


 * a collection of films, recorded music, genetic material, etc., organized systematically and kept for research or borrowing.

The development of reading and writing more than 5,000 years ago made it possible and desirable to accumulate information in a form that could be preserved over many years and widely disseminated. Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * The Royal Library of Alexandria or Ancient Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. It was dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts.


 * It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, with collections of works, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and gardens. The library was part of a larger research institution called the Musaeum of Alexandria, where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied.
 * Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.
 * Most of the books were kept as papyrus scrolls. It is unknown precisely how many such scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.

For its time, this was a huge collection. If we think of a scroll as being a short book, then even the smaller estimate of the size of the Library of Alexandria puts it at a size rivaling the typical high school library of modern times.



The U.S. Library of Congress currently contains more than 160 million items. Quoting from the linked source:


 * The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 162 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 38 million books and other print materials, 3.6 million recordings, 14 million photographs, 5.5 million maps, 7.1 million pieces of sheet music and 70 million manuscripts.

Currently there are a number of ongoing projects to make books and other library types of materials available on the Web. Some of these provide free access, while others charge to access the materials. The amount of free materials available is steadily growing.

Click here for a 2007 NPR 35-minute radio broadcast featuring three of the pioneers in the development of eBooks.

Click here for an eight-minute video about the Digital Public Library of America project. The video presents a vision of making the collected holdings of libraries in America available online. (See also Digital Public Library of America entry later in this document.)

A huge numbers of books are both out of print and are no longer generating royalties for their authors, but many are still protected by copyright. Consider the legal situation involved in working to have these books made available free or at modest cost on the Web.

A very large amount of published materials now falls in the public domain. Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * Works in the public domain are those whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable. For example, the works of Shakespeare and Beethoven, and most of the early silent films, are all now in the public domain by either being created before copyrights existed or leaving the copyright term. Examples for works not covered by copyright which are therefore in the public domain, are the formulae of Newtonian physics, cooking recipes, and all software before 1974.

An Example: Flatland 
When I was a child, I greatly enjoyed reading Edwin A. Abbott’s book, Flatland. It is now out of copyright and the illustrated 1884 version is available free on the Web. Perhaps you remember this delightful book from your childhood.

Quoting from the beginning of the story:


 * I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.


 * Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard and with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

Today, this fascinating book is freely available to bring joy to children and perhaps to add a touch of humor to a geometry classroom. This is only one example of the wealth of free books and other materials you will find on the Web.

Free online access to library material is definitely changing the world. An interesting perspective is offered by Lev Gonick in his 2009 article, How Technology Will Reshape Academe After the Economic Crisis. Quoting from the article:


 * One area where I predict fundamental change is the impact of open educational resources on the textbook market. Traditional textbook publishers have held an iron lock on the industry’s model for too long, and universities have been tacitly complicit of the system. In the Web era, however, this oligopolistic business practice is imploding.


 * Indeed, the whole learning process is changing thanks to the Internet. First professors posted syllabi online and used e-mail to supplement their office hours. Then learning activities like classroom presentations were supplemented by student-published Web pages, searchable discussion forums, and collaborative wikis. In a curve that has only been accelerating these past 20 years, we now have an educational economy of information abundance confronting an educational delivery system that was built for a time of information scarcity. Colleges have shared some of their best teaching using new systems like Apple’s iTunes U, OpenCourseWare, and explosive content-creation activities underway in countries like India and China.

Now, some seven years later, we can see that Gonick's prediction was quite accurate.

The Heart of the Matter
On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The following is quoted from Article 26:


 * Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
 * Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

The U.N. document does not speak to the quality of the education that is to be made available. Nor does it attempt to deal with details of what might constitute a good education.

This IAE-pedia document is based on two assumptions:


 * That all people of the world are entitled to a free, good quality education. Good quality is to be determined by contemporary standards; however, it should prepare students to become and remain responsible citizens and lifelong learners who can adjust to life in a changing world.
 * This education should be designed to empower learners by helping them gain levels of expertise in diverse areas that meet their own specific needs and interests, the needs and interests of their community, and the needs and interests of the world.

Toward Universal Access to All Knowledge
The following is quoted from the Abstract of a keynote presentation given by Brewester Kale at a 2009 Educause Conference. He is Director and Cofounder of Digital Librarian, and Chairman of the Board of Internet Archive.


 * Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public web page ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By mostly using existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this collection as well as compensate authors within the current worldwide library budget.


 * Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world.


 * Thomas Jefferson’s statement that "All that is necessary for a student is access to a library" may be an exaggeration, but access to information is a key ingredient to education and an open society. Will we allow ourselves to reinvent our concept of libraries to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our governments’ spending priorities, and in law.

Now, seven years later, we can see that considerable progress has occurred. However, perhaps Brewester Kale did not take into consideration some of the other challenges to capturing the accumulated knowledge of the human race into a library available on the web.

A great many legal challenges have not been fully resolved. A library is much more than a collection of books, and huge amounts of information are represented in non-book formats. For example, consider the world's collection of video material. Finally, perhaps the greatest challenge is the increasingly rapid growth in the totality of collected information. But, in any event, the examples given in the remainder of this document provide evidence of how much real progress is being made.

Copyright and Fair Use
You know, of course, that copyrights and patents are designed to protect the rights of writers and inventors. Quoting from Association of Research Libraries:


 * According to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, "the Congress shall have power . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

Still earlier, England addressed the copyright issue. Quoting from the same source as above:


 * … in 1710 Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne to address the concerns of English booksellers and printers. The 1710 act established the principles of authors' ownership of copyright and a fixed term of protection of copyrighted works (fourteen years, and renewable for fourteen more if the author was alive upon expiration).

Jennifer Howard's article, What You Don't Know About Copyright, But Should, provides a good overview of copyright and fair use. It is based on the insights and work of Nancy Sims. Quoting from the article:


 * If Nancy Sims had to pick one word to describe how researchers, students, and librarians feel about copyright, it would probably be "confused."


 * A lawyer and a librarian, Ms. Sims is copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota Libraries. She's there to help people on campus and beyond—both users and owners of protected material—understand their rights.

The article contains links to a number of good sources. In addition, it offers sound advice. Here is an example, quoting again from the article:


 * Fair use is complicated—but you can also call on the principle of "classroom use." Ask Ms. Sims for a quick working definition of fair use—when it's OK to use copyrighted material without permission—and she just chuckles. "There is no such thing as a quick working definition of fair use," she says. The shorthand she sometimes uses is that fair use "is the breathing space for freedom of expression within copyright law."


 * What many faculty members don't realize, she explains, is that "fair use is not the only kind of noninfringing use" available to them. "The really important exemption that I talk to people about is the one called the classroom-use exemption." An instructor teaching students face-to-face in a nonprofit educational setting has a good deal of leeway to show them a lot of copyrighted material. For instance, "you can play a whole movie in class if you fit in the exemption category," Ms. Sims says. "And none of this is fair use." [Bold added for emphasis.]

NOTE: '''The following sections describe a number of free open content libraries. Readers are encouraged to email [moursund@oregon.edu] with suggestions for additions to this document. In many cases, the work in creating the collections listed below is being done by volunteers.'''

Assistive Computer Technology
The Assistive Computer Technology website provides information about and access to a wide variety of aids to people with various disabilities. Quoting from the website:


 * In human-computer interaction, computer accessibility (also known as accessible computing) refers to the accessibility of a computer system to all people, regardless of disability or severity of impairment, examples include web accessibility guidelines.


 * Assistive Computer Technology is any piece of equipment that is customized to make life easier for a person who has a disability.

Continuing to quote from the website, here are examples of assistive computer technology:


 * Optical character recognition (OCR) software systems are used to scan printed materials directly into the PC to accommodate many types of disabilities.


 * Screen readers are software programs that provide either speech or Braille output, and are commonly employed by persons who are blind or visually impaired.


 * Non-assistive computer programs like electronic mail and instant messaging empower individuals with hearing-related impairments to communicate over the Internet.


 * Magnification software enlarges text and graphics displayed on PC monitors. Magnification programs are widely used by persons with poor vision or who have difficulty reading.


 * Adapted keyboards.


 * On-screen keyboards.


 * Alternative communication programs.


 * Voice recognition.

Click here for California's High Tech Center Training Unit. This Unit provides assistance and support to 114 California community colleges and satellite centers.

Bookshare
Bookshare is an accessible online library for people with print disabilities. Quoting from the website:


 * Bookshare® is the world’s largest accessible online library for people with print disabilities. More than 400,000 people in nearly 50 countries have access to Bookshare's collection of over 450,000 titles. More than 500 U.S. and international publishers contribute to our social mission by donating their digital files, making it possible for Bookshare to serve users around the world and ensuring that content is available to people with print disabilities at the same time as their peers.


 * Bookshare is a Global Literacy initiative of Benetech, a leading Silicon Valley-based nonprofit technology company founded by Jim Fruchterman, a MacArthur Award-winning social entrepreneur and former rocket scientist. Benetech uses technology to address pressing social needs. Its four programs—Global Literacy, Human Rights, the Environment, and Benetech Labs—measure success in the number of lives changed for the better.

British Library Online Gallery
The British Library Online Gallery is a 30,000 item collection. Quoting from the website:


 * Virtual books
 * Use our award-winning 'Turning the Pages™' software to leaf through our great books and magnify the details. Just choose the volume you'd like to see from the lists below.

For example, this site contains 29 pages of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and 72 pages of India's great Sanskrit epic, The Mewar Ramayana.

Cambridge Digital Library
Quoting from Introducing the Cambridge Digital Library:


 * Cambridge University Library contains evidence of some of the greatest ideas and discoveries over two millennia. We want to make our collections accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with an internet connection and a thirst for knowledge." Anne Jarvis, University Librarian.
 * Over the course of six centuries Cambridge University Library's collections have grown from a few dozen volumes into one of the world's great libraries, with an extraordinary accumulation of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. These cover every conceivable aspect of human endeavor, spanning most of the world's cultural traditions. While parts of the Library's manuscript collections have already been published in print, microfilm and digital formats, we are now building a substantial online resource so that our collections can be much more accessible to students, researchers and the wider public.
 * Over the course of six centuries Cambridge University Library's collections have grown from a few dozen volumes into one of the world's great libraries, with an extraordinary accumulation of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. These cover every conceivable aspect of human endeavor, spanning most of the world's cultural traditions. While parts of the Library's manuscript collections have already been published in print, microfilm and digital formats, we are now building a substantial online resource so that our collections can be much more accessible to students, researchers and the wider public.


 * The first phase of our work on the Cambridge Digital Library, which ran from 2010 to 2014 was made possible through a lead gift of £1.5m from Dr Leonard Polonsky. This generous support has enabled the Library to develop its technical infrastructure and create significant content, particularly in the areas of faith and science - two areas of strength within our collections.

Digital Public Library of America
Megan Geuss describes the Digital Public Library of America project:


 * One year ago, a group of professors, librarians, and futurists gathered in San Francisco to discuss how they would go about building a Digital Public Library of America. There were still many questions about the project, which had millions of dollars in charitable funding but hadn’t yet meted out a complete vision of its incarnation. The directors cited Europeana and Wikipedia as examples, but they weren’t sure how a digital library would tackle the problems unique to using published content in America. Despite the hurdles ahead, the founders of the DPLA promised at that conference that a live website would launch in April 2013, come hell or high water.

Click here to access the DPLA collection. As of 8/13/2016 the site allows readers to explore 13,853,052 items from libraries, archives, and museums.

Encyclopedia of Life: World Species Project
Many people have been working on pieces of this Encyclopedia of Life project for many years. The current idea is to join forces and fill in the gaps. The goal is to create an encyclopedia of all earth’s 1.8 million known species. The information will be available free on the Web and organized to serve the needs of both researchers and students.

The Encyclopedia of Life project is representative of efforts to collect and organize the knowledge of entire disciplines. On a large project such as this, governmental funding combined with the cooperation of many organizations is a standard approach.

As of 8/13/2016 the Encyclopedia of Life included 1,328,884 pages of content, 9,870 collections, and 3,980,414 pictures.

Europeana Collections
Quoting on 8/13/2016 from the Europeana Collections website:


 * In Europeana, you will find over 53 million artworks, artefacts, books, videos and sounds from across Europe. But our collections cover more continents than just Europe.


 * So with athletes, media and spectators arriving in Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games, we’ve selected some historic photographs of the city, from when it was still the capital of Brazil (a title it held until 1960).

The total collection is divided into a number of topic-specific exhibits. For example click here for an exhibit on books from 1514 to 2014.] Quoting from that exhibit website:


 * Books have always belonged to someone, and still do. A book is at once a material and an intellectual possession, concealing a powerful force of influence. Books preserve and create knowledge, they allow the imagination to reach places where the body has never been. The printed book changed the world by first changing its readers. The period 500 years ago was significant, because back then, as today, when digital content is coming to replace printed material, the nature of the book was undergoing important changes. With the development of printing technology, books became cheaper, more convenient to read and accessible to a wider audience; books became the messengers of religious and social change. The distant year 1514 vividly characterises the age of great change: the end of the Renaissance and the blossoming of humanism, culminating in the Reformation. This exhibition provides an opportunity to examine the books published in that particular year across Europe, revealing the cultural richness and diversity of the age. The exhibition shows relationship between books and individuals 500 years ago.

Google Books Library Project
The Google Books Library Project is working to digitize many millions of books. Quoting from their website:


 * When you click on a search result for a book from the Library Project, you'll see basic bibliographic information about the book, and in many cases, a few snippets – a few sentences showing your search term in context. If the book is out of copyright, you’ll be able to view and download the entire book. In all cases, you'll see links directing you to online bookstores where you can buy the book and libraries where you can borrow it.

Click here to go to the Google Books search engine. There, the site states: "Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books." The About Google Books section says:


 * Book Search works just like web search. Try a search on Google Books or on Google.com. When we find a book with content that contains a match for your search terms, we'll link to it in your search results.


 * If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given us permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.


 * If you find a book you like, click on the "Buy this book" and "Borrow this book" links to see where you can buy or borrow the print book. You can now also buy the ebook from the Google Play Store.


 * We've created reference pages for every book so you can quickly find all kinds of relevant information: book reviews, web references, maps and more.

HathiTrust
This site provides full-text search of 11 million books.

Click here to do a search, browse the collection, and read books online.

Just for the fun of it, I did a search on the term Tarzan. In a few seconds I accessed six "full view" Tarzan books and began reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1918 book, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar.

Internet Archive
Quoting from the website: Internet Archive:


 * Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

As of 8/13/2016, here are some of their collections:


 * Community Audio: 2,245,182 items.
 * Community Video: 609,309 items.
 * Live Music Archive: 163,090 items.
 * American Libraries; 2,74,426 items.
 * Community Texts: 588,945 items.
 * … And many more.

Many of the items are visual. For example:


 * Animation Shorts: 1,115 items.
 * Comedy Films: 294 items.
 * FedFlix: 8,788 items.
 * NASA Images: 199,092 items.
 * Short Format Films: 3,085 items.
 * Silent Films: 964 items.

National Academies Press
As of 8/13/2016, 8,572 books were available free online. Quoting from the website:


 * The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and medicine, providing authoritative information on important matters in science and health policy. The institutions served by the NAP are unique in their ability to attract leading experts in many fields to join panels and committees charged with providing policy advice on some of the nation’s most pressing scientific, technical, and health-related issues.


 * Electronic (PDF) Editions


 * We offer many titles in electronic Adobe PDF format. Hundreds of these books can be downloaded for free by the chapter or the entire book, while others are available for purchase.

National Science Digital Library
The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) was created by the National Science Foundation to provide free organized access to high-quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.

Quoting from the website:


 * The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines—both formal and informal, institutional and individual, in local, state, national, and international educational settings. The NSDL collection contains structured descriptive information (metadata) about web-based educational resources held on other sites by their providers. These providers have contribute this metadata to NSDL for organized search and open access to educational resources via this website and its services.

Online Books Page
The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page contains an index of over two million books that are available free on the Web. Quoting from the website:


 * The Online Books Page is developed in collaboration with many people and projects. Here are some that haven't yet been mentioned.


 * The books on the extended shelves come primarily from HathiTrust, Project Gutenberg, and the University of Floria Baldwin Digital Collection of Historic Children's Literature who supply the cataloging information we use in those listings.


 * The editor has also worked with The Universal Library Project at Carnegie Mellon. They currently supply many of the copyright renewal scans that can be used to check the public domain status of a work.


 * The database has also been developed in collaboration with A Celebration of Women Writers, a sister site to this one that is edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom.

Open Access Peer-reviewed Journals

 * AERA maintains a list of education-related, peer-reviewed open access journals. Quoting from the website:


 * To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education.


 * The Directory of Open Access Journalsincluded the following materials from 130 countries as of 8/13/2016:


 * 9,179 Journals with 6,368 of them searchable at Article level
 * 2,258,666 Articles

Open Content Alliance
Quoting from the home page of the Open Content Alliance:

What is the Open Content Alliance?
 * The Open Content Alliance (OCA) is a collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that helps build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia material. An archive of contributed material is available on the Internet Archive website and through Yahoo! and other search engines and sites.

The Open Content Alliance materials include:


 * 1.6 million books posted under OCA principles or otherwise public domain hosted by the Internet Archive.


 * 23 million book records in OpenLibrary beta. Open Library has "one webpage for every book" and more than one million searchable, downloadable books.

Open eBooks Project
This project provides children from low-income families with free access to a large collection of children's books. As of February, 2016, these materials were available only on iOS and Android tablets. Quoting from the website:


 * Open eBooks is made possible thanks to a coalition of partners, including the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the New York Public Library (NYPL), and the White House ConnectED Initiative, and with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Baker and Taylor and the generous commitments of publishers.
 * The Open eBooks app will give kids from low-income families access to a digital library of thousands of popular and award-winning children’s and YA eBooks for free! Never before have educators and librarians had the ability to actively teach digital literacy, encourage family engagement, and share the love of reading through millions of mobile devices already in the hands of young people and their families. Open eBooks makes this possible.
 * The Open eBooks app will give kids from low-income families access to a digital library of thousands of popular and award-winning children’s and YA eBooks for free! Never before have educators and librarians had the ability to actively teach digital literacy, encourage family engagement, and share the love of reading through millions of mobile devices already in the hands of young people and their families. Open eBooks makes this possible.


 * The free app allows kids of all ages and their caregivers to instantly download up to 10 eBooks at a time to their mobile digital devices. Each eBook will be available for 56 days before it must be renewed. Students and their families can choose eBooks based on the topics that get them excited about reading and learning, and search for eBooks by title or author.

Open Educational Resources (OER)
Quoting from my IAE Blog, Openly Licensed Educational Resources:


 * My 10/21/2015 Google search of the expression Openly Licensed Educational Resources produced more than 640 thousand results. Openly Licensed Educational Resources (usually referred to as OER) are defined as:


 * Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. See the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.


 * Education is both a global and a local endeavor. OER materials are available globally and can be modified to be suitable to the language, cultural, and other local needs of learners.

The Open Education Group provides an extensive review of research on OER. Quoting from the site:


 * This review provides a summary of all known empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption (including our own). The version below will be periodically updated with new articles as we become aware of them. If you know of an empirical research study on the impacts of OER adoption that is not included in this review, please leave a comment below. An in-depth article focusing on empirical research relating to perceptions and efficacy at the college level was published by the journal Educational Technology Research and Development in February of 2016.

Here is a small example quoted from the document:


 * Research by Feldstein et al. (2012) took place at Virginia State University, where OER were implemented across nine different courses in the business department. 1,393 students took courses utilizing OER. Researchers found that students in courses that used OER more frequently had better grades and lower failure and withdrawal rates than their counterparts in courses that did not use OER. While their results had statistical significance, because of a new core curriculum employed at Virginia State University’s Business school, the two sets of courses were not identical. Thus while these data are highly interesting, we should not generalize them too far. 315 students completed a survey regarding their perspective on the shift to the OER, and almost 95% of responding students strongly agreed or agreed that the OER were “easy to use” and 78% of respondents felt that the OER “provided access to more up-to-date material that is available in my print textbooks.” Approximately two-thirds of students strongly agreed or agreed that the digital OER were more useful than traditional textbooks and that they preferred the OER digital content to traditional textbooks.

A July, 2016, report, Opening the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education 2015-2016, reports:


 * Most higher education faculty are unaware of open educational resources (OER) – but they are interested and some are willing to give it a try. Survey results, using responses of over 3,000 U.S. faculty, show that OER is not a driving force in the selection of materials – with the most significant barrier being the effort required to find and evaluate such materials. Use of open resources is low overall, but somewhat higher for large enrollment introductory-level courses.:

The U.S. Federal Government is promoting OER materials on a global basis. Quoting from Openly Licensed Educational Resources:


 * On September 28, 2015, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, U.S. Department of Education, and U.S. Department of State co-hosted an International Open Education Workshop, bringing together 40 civil society and foreign government participants from eight countries to examine existing open education efforts and identify opportunities for future collaboration between government and civil society. This workshop is one of several open education commitments made as part of the Second U.S. Open Government Partnership National Action Plan.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.

Quoting from the Project Gutenberg site:


 * Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.


 * We carry high quality ebooks: Our ebooks were previously published by bona fide publishers. We digitized and diligently proofread them with the help of thousands of volunteers.


 * No fee or registration is required, but if you find Project Gutenberg useful, we kindly ask you to donate a small amount so we can buy and digitize more books. Other ways to help include digitizing more books, recording audio books, or reporting errors.


 * Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates, and Resources.

Questia
Quoting from Questia's website:


 * With more than 83,000 academic books and more than 10 million articles from more than a thousand of the world's leading publishers, Questia offers quality sources selected by librarians and approved by professors, many of them peer-reviewed!


 * Questia provides time-saving research tools, like automatic bibliography creation, highlights, notes, citations and more, all designed with the research process in mind.

Smithsonian Institution
Quoting from Our History:
 * The Smithsonian Institution was established with funds from James Smithson (1765-1829), a British scientist who left his estate to the United States to found “at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”


 * … an Act of Congress signed by President James K. Polk on Aug. 10, 1846, established the Smithsonian Institution as a trust to be administered by a Board of Regents and a Secretary of the Smithsonian. Since its founding, more than 164 years ago, the Smithsonian has become the world's largest museum and research complex, with 19 museums, the National Zoo, and nine research facilities. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Educators will be particularly interested in the Smithsonian's Learning Lab. Quoting from this site:


 * The thrill of discovery awaits you in the Smithsonian Learning Lab. From the Discovery space shuttle to the Star Spangled Banner to dinosaur fossils, the Learning Lab gives everyone with a desire to learn the opportunity to explore the Smithsonian's rich resources anytime, anywhere. Start discovering what interests you today, and find your inspiration from more than a million multimedia resources. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Other Smithsonian resources include:


 * Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access. There you will find "great teaching materials, links to hundreds of online resources, and opportunities for professional development."


 * Smithsonian Science Education Center that is "transforming the learning and teaching of science for all students in the United States and throughout the world."

The Assayer
The Assayer is a good source of free books. Quoting from the website:


 * The Assayer is the web's largest catalog of books whose authors have made them available for free. Users can also submit reviews. The site has been around since 2000, and is a particularly good place to find free books about math, science, and computers. If you're looking for old books that have fallen into the public domain, you're more likely to find what you want at Project Gutenberg.


 * You can browse the catalog by clicking on a link in the bar above. You need to become a member if you want to post your own reviews, add books to the database, or participate in discussions of books. Click here to become a member. Membership is free, and the only personal information you need to give is your e-mail address. (We won't spam you, and other visitors will only be able to see your address if you say it's OK.)

The Open Library
The Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, discussed earlier in this list of library resources.

Its goal is to create "one Web page for every book ever published." Continuing to quote from the website:


 * To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.


 * Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Here is a little more information about the project:


 * … we also have over a million free eBooks available for reading online right now! [Bold added for emphasis.]


 * There's a growing, cooperative pool of eBooks contributed by 1,000 libraries participating in the In-Library Lending program.


 * Head to any of the libraries in the pool, log in to the WiFi, and you'll get access to a special set of over 100,000 eBooks. It's like an instant, hassle-free interlibrary eBook loan!

U.S. Library of Congress National Digital Library
Quoting from Library of Congress:


 * The Library of Congress is the nation’s first established cultural institution and the largest library in the world, with millions of items including books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.


 * The Library provides Congress, the federal government and the American people with a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform, inspire and engage them and support their intellectual and creative endeavors.
 * Approximately half of the Library’s book and serial collections are in languages other than English. The collections contain materials in some 470 languages.
 * The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill. The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building. (The Library began in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol.) The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981. Other facilities include the High Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va.
 * The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill. The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building. (The Library began in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol.) The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981. Other facilities include the High Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va.
 * The Library of Congress occupies three buildings on Capitol Hill. The Thomas Jefferson Building (1897) is the original separate Library of Congress building. (The Library began in 1800 inside the U.S. Capitol.) The John Adams Building was built in 1938 and the James Madison Memorial Building was completed in 1981. Other facilities include the High Density Storage Facility (2002) at Fort Meade, Md., and the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation (2007) in Culpeper, Va.

Here is some statistical data from September, 2015, that you may find interesting:


 * More than 162 million physical items for use within the library.


 * The Library's online primary-source files totaled 60.9 million.


 * In the year ending September 2015, recorded 86.1 million visits and 482.5 million page views on the Library's web properties.


 * Operated with a total fiscal 2015 appropriation of $630.8 million, including the authority to spend $39.9 million in receipts

World Digital Library
Quoting from the Wikipedia:


 * World Digital Library (WDL) is an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress.


 * The WDL has stated that its mission is to promote international and intercultural understanding, expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and to build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and among countries. It aims to expand non-English and non-western content on the Internet, and contribute to scholarly research. The library intends to make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

The World Digital Library is a visionary project with a goal of making available a significant fraction of the totality of human knowledge. As of 8/14/2016, the site allows users to search 14,416 items from about 193 countries dating between 8000 BCE and 2000 CE.

Quoting from its website:


 * The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

Final Remarks
The preceding sections provide evidence that the amount of free online library material is both huge and is growing rapidly. However, it does not explore some of the stories behind that growth, nor the educational implications of this digitization activity.

It is clear that the world now has the technology and resources to make a multi-million volume collection of books, journals, magazines, newspapers, videos, recordings, etc., available free to all people.

The world also has the technology and resources to provide quite powerful computerized tools to the world's population. Our yearly production of Smartphones is now about 1 per every seven people on earth. The GPS and mapping efforts such as Google Map are other good examples.

Progress in voice input and in artificial intelligence is making it possible for people to access the various digitized accumulations of the knowledge of the human race. In essence, we are making good progress on providing people with the ability to ask a question of one or more of these accumulated knowledge databases, and quickly receive either some relevant answers or an indication that the question is beyond the current capabilities of the information retrieval system.

Think about the educational implications of this. If a person has a problem or question that they can state clearly, they can increasingly get help in solving the problem or answering the question

Therefore, an increasingly important component of a good education is learning to clearly communicate questions and problems to a computer system, and understand its answers. And remember, the computer system and/or computerized tools may well be able to carry out the task of solving a problem that has been posed. So, it is important for people to learn the capabilities and limitations of computer systems.

Finally, the capabilities of computer systems are continuing to increase at a rapid pace. Thus, our lifelong educational systems are faced by a rapidly moving and constantly changing target. The goal is to provide students with a good education that is consistent with the times they are living in and prepares them for the future.

Lists of Free Online Resources 
Moursund, D. (2016). Fair use. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 7/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Fair_Use.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free educational videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Educational_Videos.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free IAE math education materials. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_IAE_Math_Education_Materials.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free math education videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 7/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Math_Education_Videos.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free math software. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Math_Software.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open content libraries. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 6/27/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Content_Libraries.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source and open content educational materials. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_and_Open_Content_Educational_Materials.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source online databases. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_Online_Databases.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free open source software packages. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Open_Source_Software_Packages.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free science education software. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Science_Education_Software.

Moursund, D. (2016). Free science education videos. IAE-pedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016 from http://iae-pedia.org/Free_Science_Education_Videos.

Popular Free Online IAE Books </Center>

 * Moursund, D. (February, 2016). Math Methods for Preservice Teachers. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/283-math-methods-for-preservice-elementary-teacher-1/file.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/282-math-methods-for-preservice-elementary-teacher/file.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Math_Methods_for_Preservice_Elementary_Teachers.


 * Moursund, D. (August, 2015). Brain Science for Educators and Parents. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/271-brain-science-for-educators-and-parents-1/file.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/270-brain-science-for-educators-and-parents/file.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Brain_Science.


 * Moursund, D. (2/28/2015). Technology and Problem Solving in PreK-12 Education for Adult Life, Careers, and Further Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/267-technology-and-problem-solving-in-prek-12-education-1.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund/266-technology-and-problem-solving-in-prek-12-education.html. HTML file: http://iae-pedia.org/Technology_and_Problem_Solving.


 * Sylwester, R., and Moursund, D., eds. (2012). Creating an Appropriate 21st Century Education. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/243-creating-an-appropriate-21st-century-education.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/242-creating-an-appropriate-21st-century-education.html.


 * Moursund, D., and Albrecht, R. (2011). Using Math Games and Word Problems to Increase Math Maturity. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. PDF file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/211-using-math-games-and-word-problems-to-increase-the-math-maturity-of-k-8-students.html. Microsoft Word file: http://i-a-e.org/downloads/doc_download/210-using-math-games-and-word-problems-to-increase-the-math-maturity-of-k-8-students.html.

All Free Online IAE Books </Center>

 * Free Books by Dave Moursund.
 * Free Books by Bob Albrecht.
 * Free Books Co-authored by Bob Sylwester & Dave Moursund.

Moursund's Collections of Quotations </Center>

 * Math Education Quotations.


 * Quotations Collected by David Moursund.

Digital Filing Cabinets </Center>

 * Digital Filing Cabinet: Overview.


 * Digital Filing Cabinet: Math Education.

Author
The original version of this page was created by David Moursund and edited by Ann Lathrop.