As a student who may not be able to afford the prices for databases or research software or just don’t have the resources for them, it may seem like navigating for data and previous research is a pay-walled minefield. However, there are lots of super informative online databases that can become the basis for your own research that are open source. These open sources do an incredible job of circulating knowledge, promoting a collaborative environment for sharing research, and educating people who access the databases at no cost.
Geography
- London Datastore: https://data.london.gov.uk/
Data on almost anything to do with London including shapefiles which are useful for constructing maps.
- Openstreetmap: OpenStreetMap
Supplemented by user-inputted data that is entirely free to use and can be used in tandem with QGIS for mapping.
- Trase: https://trase.earth/
Tracks agricultural supply chains to assess their ethics and sustainability.
Environment
Data on London’s greenspaces, species, and habitats. Most data is free for students, but you have to ask permission to access it, which is recommended to do in advance of needing the information.
- Global Forest Watch: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/
Data on land cover, fires, and climate change as it relates to forests.
- NASA Giovanni: Giovanni
A visualisation tool with downloadable data on almost every part of the environmental system.
- UK Environmental Data: Results for "Environment" - data.gov.uk
Information from councils and the Environment Agency available for use.
History
- Resources compiled by the Bodleian Library from Oxford University: https://www.diigo.com (some of the links do not work directly from the website, but will if you copy and paste them)
This is an absolutely huge list of open resources that you can explore, but here are some of my favorites that I found:
- Women’s Movement Magazines:About the project – Liberating Histories
- Parliamentary Archives: https://archives.parliament.uk/online-resources/
- British Anti-Apartheid Movement: https://www.aamarchives.org/archive.html
- British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/
Sources of British history that include direct images, transcriptions, and digitisation.
- Library of Congress: Digital Collections | The Library of Congress
Though American-focused, the LOC has a wealth of images and digitisation that are in the public domain and can be used without much worry of copyright complications.