Resource Lists & Guides for Serious Researchers & the Idly Curious
(Post thumbnail image is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Collections: Library and Reading Posters Collection)
The More Resources for Writers page of my website has been updated: the Research as well as the Resources for Writers sections now include links to resources that hopefully will help researchers locate valuable information.
Resources for Writers
The Resources for Writers section provides links to directories for freelance editors and indexers (yes, I’m in those directories :)), as well as a (growing) list of publishers’ instruction pages for submitting a book proposal, and a directory of publishers. I also include some other links which might be helpful about copyright and author rights, OA publication, and ORCID.
The World Digital Library allows users to search or browse by topic. It is listed in my Digital Collections and Reference collections.
Research Resources
The Research section is a little more substantial. Aside from a small list of union catalogs, it includes several nascent resource lists that have been compiled using the free version of Raindrop, a bookmark management software that allows users to label links with tags, organize them in collections, and then share those collections with friends.
Lists include freely available reference resources (online dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.); resource guides compiled by other libraries and institutions; digital collections (usually meaning scanned materials); and databases (in addition to raw data, these include sites where researchers will find journal articles, dissertations, and more).
About the Tags
When I started this project around a week ago, I was tagging each resource/link with dozens of labels for subject (economics, history, politics, etc.), material type (documents, photos, books, etc.), and geographic scope. The project very quickly became a enormous and was threatening to take over everything, especially since I am hoping to include more information resources than what are presently included. As a result, I got rid of the subject tags, at least for now, so that the lists could be shared and the page updated in time for a Monday blog post.
Although subject tags did not survive temporary deletion, the Government tag does persist because, while it could indicate a subject area, in this case it suggests a document type — official publications (books, reports, maps, data, etc.) authored or made available by either a national government body (eg. National Archives) or international government (eg. United Nations).
Other document types are also reflected in tags such as RareBooks, Maps, Photographs, Manuscripts, etc. The Documents tag serves as a catch-all for anything with text that is not a book or periodical, to separate it from Manuscripts, Images, or Photographs. The Images tag indicates content that is born-digital, like captured webpages in the Internet Archive, as opposed to scanned photographs.