Research resources for students

The resources below have been suggested by The National Archives staff and students and may be helpful for your research. Please note that by listing these we are not endorsing any organisations or companies but rather compiling a list of resources which may be helpful.

Online Courses

  • COACH offers digital training for arts/heritage professionals
  • Coursera offers free courses, including many across the disciplines of Data Science, Arts and Humanities and Education
  • EdX offers free online courses from universities around the world
  • Elements of AI is a free online course created by Reaktor and the University of Helsinki
  • Google Digital Garage offers many free online courses, including machine learning and personal development
  • Open University offers free courses across many disciplines
  • The Carpentries runs courses and workshops on data science and coding to researchers worldwide

Impact resources

  • Arts and Humanities Research Impact Network – a nationwide community of researchers and impact officers working on the development of impact in the arts and humanities disciplines
  • Europeana Impact tools – resources to help you identify your impact step-by-step
  • LSE Impact Blog – a hub for researchers, administrative staff, librarians, students, think tanks, government and anyone else interested in maximising the impact of academic work in the social sciences and other disciplines
  • Research Fish – a Research Impact Assessment Tool for Research Council-funded projects

Tools and websites

  • ARMA – the website for Association of Research Managers and Administrators, the professional association for research management in the UK
  • BBC History – the official website for BBC History Magazine, BBC History Revealed and BBC World Histories magazine
  • GitHub – a development platform where users can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 50 million developers
  • GLAM workbench – a collection of tools, tutorials, examples, and hacks to help you work with data from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the GLAM sector)
  • Institute of Historical Research – open and free tools for research compiled by the Institute of Historical Research, including newspapers, maps, oral histories, digital collections and more
  • SAGE Publishing – resources for online research and teaching Research Methods remotely
  • SSHOC Training Toolkit – an inventory of teaching and train-the-trainer resources developed to be used by trainers in the Social Sciences and Humanities
  • Stories on Board – a user story-mapping software for delivering the right product right on time, e.g. to map out high level user needs and begin to break them down into lower level tasks and user stories
  • Trello – offers a visual way of organising lists and other items for yourself or a team

Publishing and career resources

Catalogues and digital collections

  • Archives Hub online resources – digital collections and archives including material from many institutions across the UK
  • Ashmolean Museum – the Ashmolean Museum’s digital collections
  • British Library – search their online resources, digital collections and more
  • British Newspaper Archive – access hundreds of historic newspapers from all over Britain and Ireland
  • Digital.Bodleian – the Bodleian Libraries’ digital collections
  • EThOS at British Library – free e-theses service allows you to access over 500,000 PhD thesis records online. An immediate full-text download is available for over 170,000 theses
  • Evidence-Based Justice Lab – a searchable registry containing details of miscarriages of justice in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
  • HathiTrust – a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving more than 17 million digitised items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by US copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection – the largest set of digitised books managed by academic and research libraries – under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests
  • JSTOR – JSTOR provides open and free and low-cost content
  • MEMSLib – a digital library created for researchers studying the Medieval and Early Modern periods
  • Trove – a variety of resources from Australian libraries, museums, universities, museums, galleries and archives

News

  • Broadsheet magazine – the quarterly e-magazine of the Scottish Council on Archives. The articles are written by the people working directly with records and archives, and each issue is eclectic, capturing the rich variety of the nation’s collections
  • That Museum Guy / Digital Things newsletter – news on digital culture in the heritage sector
  • The Conversation – an independent, not-for-profit media outlet whose content is sourced from academics and researchers
  • Times Higher Education – reports specifically on latest news and issues in higher education

The National Archives’ resources

The National Archives is part of the Independent Research Organisation Consortium (IROC).