We encourage #RacerScholars add Kudos to their #MSULibraryBelt to promote the academic achievements and increase readership of Murray State University scholars.
Kudos is a free service for researchers to integrate a variety of tools to take control of their scholarly output and gain insight of different metrics that track the impact of their work. In additon, Kudos helps you generate simplified language to encourage people in your social networks to read your work.
In 2007, inventor and digital librarian Brewster Kahle gave a TED Talk about, “A Free Digital Library,” which would give “Universal access to all knowledge.” Today, you can use that library, which provides access to an archive of the World Wide Web, over 9 million eBooks and digital documents, 2.4 million videos, 2.8 million audio recordings, 120 thousand pieces of software, 1.1 million digitized images, and 162 thousand live concert recordings. Read below to learn about some of the different features and select collections.
The “Wayback Machine” has captured 469 billion pages on the Internet using web crawlers to give researchers the ability to access pages that are no longer live. Thus, you can potentially see a webpage that now reads “HTTP 404 Not Found” if you use the “Wayback Machine.” You can also use it to look at the history of a web page’s design, for example, see what the Murray State University Libraries’ page looked like in 2007–notice there is no Search. catalog, and no Twitter feed.
The Smithsonian Libraries collection is one of the largest library systems in the world and contains texts of all sorts, inculduding rare and old books that you can read online. These documents are very useful for understanding historical developments in human history. For example, here is a book published in 1671 that gives an account of early America and its inhabitants:
The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection contains recordings of public domain texts (works that may be used freely without the permission of the former copyright owner) in multiple languages that you can download and listen to freely. This way you can study and exercise at the same time.
The Internet Arcade gives you the ability to play vintage-era video games using an online emulator. If you were writing a paper on the history of video game development, you could experience what it was like to use these games, like this 1982 classic, “Q*Bert”:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Gallery Images collection gives you access to over 140 thousand images from their collection. If you need images for a presentation that you are giving, or you are an Art History major, this collection is an invaluable resource. Keep in mind that these collections include images of three-dimensional objects, like this early 19th century “Russian Bassoon”:
Are you doing a report on how media covers tragic events? The Internet Archive contains 3,000 hours of coverage of the events from 9/11 in the Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive. This collection is from the video collections held in the Internet Archive.
These are just few of the many collections contained in the Internet Archive. There are 198 thousand collections to choose from.
News agencies regularly refer to “the polls” as evidence of public opinion. Questions like, who should be the next president are asked to a sample of people and then news anchors report these results as a measurement of public opinion. But, what demographic of the US population is represented in these surveys? Do these polls accurately represent general public opinion? It is difficult to answer these questions if you do not know the demographic that was asked for this opinion. Wouldn’t it be great if you could look at the documentation of the polls and determine for yourself whether or not the demographic sampled on a particular topic really does represent the general public’s perspective on an issue?
Well, you can. The Roper Center: Public Opinion Archives is one of the world’s leading archives of social science data that specializes in public opinion surveys. Founded in 1947, the collection includes over 22,000 datasets and adds to it every year. It is the “largest public opinion library available anywhere in the world.”
According to the website, the Roper Center’s purpose is:
…to promote the intelligent, responsible, and imaginative use of public opinion in addressing the problems faced by Americans and citizens of other nations. In an increasingly complex and interdependent global environment, the Roper Center hopes to foster increased international understanding and to promote cross-national research. Through the maintenance of the world’s largest archive of survey data, and through its programs, presentations, and advanced research, the Roper Center strives to improve the practice of survey research and the use of survey data in the United States and abroad.
- Promoting the informed use of survey research and public opinion information.
- Maintaining, and constantly enlarging, a web-based library of survey research and public opinion data.
- Developing access tools for researchers to secure required information.
- Increasing international understanding and promoting cross-national research on political and social issues.
Many give theoretical acknowledgment to the idea that the public must be heard accurately, but the Roper Center alone is building a comprehensive research facility to ensure that the views of the public are recorded properly. The Center brings individual surveys together, enabling any researcher to better grasp what public opinion is. Survey data housed in the Center’s extensive archive are made accessible to academic and policy researchers, the press, business, and others who are interested in poll findings…the Roper Center provides for a “public audit” of polling data and reports of public opinion. As a non-profit, non-partisan public opinion data archive, the Center is in a unique position to help clarify the public’s voice.
To search through the surveys, click on the “Search Datasets” tab. Once
on the search page, you can do a keyword search and limit your results by country, organization (that conducted the survey), sample type, and date range. The search to your right used the keywords “world war 2” with a date range of 1940 to 1940, which resulted in “11 studies” (see below).
If we click on the “RoperExpress” dataset image (circled, above), we can read a summary of the study (see image below). If this is a study that interests you, or could be useful for research that you are conducting, look underneath the “Documentation” tab on the page to download the documentation on the study for free. If you want access to the actual “datasets” you will need to make arrangements with the Roper Center to get that data.
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