Discover

Online Library Resources

Note: this is a static sample of what is available at the NCBC Student Resources Blog. Please go to https://studentresources4ncbc.blogspot.com/p/free-resources.html for the full list, and to see the most up-to-date recommendations. 

We all love the word “free”

And there are some really awesome, dedicated people who work to provide quality information for public access. The trick is knowing where to look. Here are some places where you may find just what you need to complete that paper, sermon, or book.

Remember, these are free resources. Although these have been lightly combed through by a couple librarians, still use your critical thinking skills! For more information on how to do this, see the “Research & Writing Help” and “Can I Trust This?” pages of the NCBC Student Resources Blog.

Special thanks to Mr. Murl Winters, Evangel University Library Emeritus, for compiling a majority of this list (with the help of various colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and beyond).

Since this list is extensive, please report any broken or incorrect links to the NCBC librarian for correction. This help is greatly appreciated!

Biblical Texts and Study Tools (See Also, “Exegesis” Below)

Online Portals and LibGuides

  • Association of Christian Librarians: a Bible and Theology LibGuide (online library guide) of online resources relevant to biblical and theological studies. 
  • Association of Christian Librarians Biblical and Theological Studies LibGuide (Introduction): I’ve already listed the general resources for this guide above, but this introduction page has SO MUCH good information, I can’t recommend it enough! Take some time to browse and use these resources for all of your biblical study and research needs! 
  • Bible Commentaries (Bryan College): A list of free online commentaries, categorized to make it very user-friendly.  
  • Evangel University – Recommended Sites by Subject: a very impressive and useful list of free resources compiled by librarians. NCBC students should take special note of the Bible and Theology section. This is one of the better guides I have seen for free resources on the web, and includes a variety of subjects beyond Bible and theology. 
  • This Google Custom Search was created by librarian Sally Jo Shelton, PhD and is a FANTASTIC way to quickly search across several free online Bible study websites. Simply type in a keyword (“the lord’s prayer”, for example), chapter or verse, and you will get instant results from sites trusted by many librarians. 
  • Wesley Biblical Seminary Library: A portal of links, most of which are open access. 

Reference

Journals

  • Acta Theologica: Acta Theologica is a scholarly journal publishing articles in any applicable fields of scholarship within theology and religion. 
  • Biblica: Biblica is a research journal and appears four times a year. It is dedicated to biblical studies on the Old and New Testament, and intertestamentary literature, and covers fields of research, such as exegesis, philology, and history. 
  • Dimensions: search by keyword, and then when you get results there is a filter on the left side of the page for “Open Access Only”. This will allow you to view what is free to read online. 
  • Directory of Open Access Journals: this directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee content. 
  • Electronic Journals Library: Theology and Religious Studies: a fast, structured, interface to access free full-text articles. All areas of study are represented, but this is a link to the theology and religious studies portion. 
  • Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: “Faith and Philosophy is the journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers. It is provided by open-access by SCP so that the best of contemporary Christian philosophy and philosophy of religion is available to all.” 
  • HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies: an influential and frequently cited accredited peer reviewed journal that promotes multidisciplinary, religious, and biblical aspects of studies in the international arena. 
  • JURN: a search tool that helps you find articles (and books) from selected university repositories in the areas of arts, humanities, biomedical, business, law, and the natural world. 
  • Journal of Biblical Counseling
  • Listing of Open Access Databases: “The objective…is to create a web-enabled, linked, classified and categorized collection of Open Access Databases which one can access from a single portal. Although initial focus is on science and technology subjects, the ultimate aim is to include all subject areas.” 
  • NT Gateway Journals: New Testament Gateway’s list of online and open access journals that pertain to New Testament studies.
  • Paperity: an online aggregator of open access (free) journals, across several disciplines of study. 
  • Pentecostal Education: “A journal of the World Alliance for Pentecostal Theological Education.”
  • PneumAfrica Journal: “The online journal of African Pentecostal Christianity.”
  • Pneuma Review: “a journal of ministry resources and theology for pentecostal and charismatic ministries and leaders”. 
  • Theological Journals Search (ORU): “This Google custom search engine allows you to find full-text articles in hundreds of religious, open-access online journals and other periodicals.”
  • Theological Journals Search: From this lib guide – “This Google custom search engine created by Dr. Sally Jo Shelton allows you to search full text articles in hundreds of religion, open-access (free), online journals, magazines, and newsletters.” 
  • Wikipedia list of Open Access (free) journals

 

Opposing Viewpoints

  • ProCon.org is nonpartisan, academic platform for finding opposing viewpoints on current and hot topics, created with advisory boards and using an editorial process. It is a great free resource for finding information when writing opinion or persuasive essays. 

Online Libraries and Special Collections 

Textbooks

E-books and Databases (Academic)

  • Directory of Open Access Books: “The directory is open to all publishers who publish academic, peer reviewed books in Open Access and should contain as many books as possible, provided these publications are in Open Access and meet academic standards”
  • Listing of Open Access Databases: “the objective of Listing of Open Access DataBases (LOADB) is to create a web-enabled, linked, classified, and categorized collection of Open Access Databases which one can access from a single portal. Although initial focus is on science and technology subjects, the ultimate aim is to include all subject areas.”

Academic Search Engines

  • BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine): “BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 140 million documents from more than 6,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access).” 
  • CORE: “The world’s largest collection of open access research papers.” 
  • Google Dataset Search and Google Scholar
  • Internet Archive Scholar: “This full text search index includes over 25 million research article and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.”
  • Theological Journals Search:”This Google custom search engine allows you to find full-text articles in hundreds of religious, open-access online journals and other periodicals.”
  • Wikipedia list of Open Access databases and search engines

Free Images and Designs

  • Canva: a free resource for creating professional quality designs
  • Creative Commons: open access images and media, free for public use. 

Resources in Spanish, Math, Business, History, and Science

Resources in Spanish (Estudios Español)
  • Estudios Español: textbooks, journals, biblical studies and more resources for Spanish speakers can be found at this portal. 
Business Resources
Math Resources
  • WolframAlpha: a computational knowledge and answer engine, created on a platform with calculation, visualization, and statistic capabilities. 
  • arXiv.org: “2,086.431 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.”
History Resources (See Also Biblical Archeology, Biblical Backgrounds and History, Church Fathers and Church History sections below) 
Science Resources
Random Resources
  • Acronym Finder: find out what an acronym, abbreviation, or initials stands for. 
  • DuckDuckGo: tired of Google spying on your web searches? DuckDuckGo can help! 
  • FindLaw: help for legal needs.
  • FindSounds: this is exactly what it “sounds” like! Find almost any sound.
  • Free Sheet Music
  • Google Books Ngram Viewer: Don’t know what Ngram is? Read about it here.
  • GovInfo: US government information. 
  • OpenGrey: a custom search of “grey” literature in Europe. (Some examples of grey literature are technical or research reports, doctoral dissertations, conference papers and official publications. See also: http://www.greynet.org
  • Openly Licensed Images: don’t post copyrighted images in your work! Don’t steal the creative work of others! Instead, search here for free, openly licensed images! (FYI, all the images used in this blog were found this way.)
  • travel.state.gov: everything you need to know for international travel as a US citizen. 

    Biblically Related Topics

    Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

    Apologetics/Worldview 

    Archives (Denominational) See Also: Church Denominations

    Biblical Archeology

    Biblical Backgrounds and History

    Bibliographies

    Charismatic/Pentecostal Resources (See Also, “Pentecostalism”)

    Chronology

    Church and Culture

    Church Denominations

    Church Fathers

    Church Fathers – Patristics

    Church History

    Church History – American Indian

    Church History – Irish

    Church History – Medieval

    Church History – Primitive and Early Church

    Counseling Associations (See also, “Ministry – Counseling and Pastoral Counseling)

    Creeds

    Dead Sea Scrolls

    Economics 

    Egypt, Ancient

    Ethics

    Exegesis (See Also: “Biblical Texts and Study Tools”, Above)

    Fact Checkers

    • See the “Can I Trust This?” page on this blog. 

    Faith

    Gnostic

    Greece, Ancient

    Greek Orthodox Church

    Healing

    Islam – see World Religions, Islam

    Josephus

    Judaism

    Latin, Classical

    Lectionaries

    Mesopotamia

    Middle East (See also, Egypt, Ancient and Mesopotamia)

    Ministry – Campus

    Ministry – Child Evangelism

    Ministry – Church Business Administration

    Ministry – Church Growth and Health

    Ministry – Counseling and Pastoral Counseling (See Also: “Counseling Associations”)

    Ministry – Evangelism

    Ministry – Music

    Ministry – Pastoring and Sermon Preparation

    Ministry – Youth

    Missions

    Missions: Boards and Societies 

    Music, Religious (Africa)

    Music, Religious (Multicultural)

    Myths

    New Testament Research 

    Old Testament Research (See also Judaism above)

    Papyrus/Papyology

    Patristics

    Pentecostalism

    The following sources were compiled by Russ Langford, Global University. 

    Philosophy (See also, Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers above in the Journals section)

    Postmodernism

    Prayer

    Psychology of Religion

    Puritan Writings

    Reference

    Reference Works Online

    Reformation and Post-Reformation

    Religion

    Religious Education

    Research, Data and Statistics

    Rome, Ancient

    Sacred Texts

    • Internet Sacred Text Archive. “…freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. …” Includes texts ranging from African religions to Zoroastrianism. 

    Saints

    Science and Christianity

    Septuagint

    Sociology

    Spanish Language Bible/Religion Resources

    • Biblia Paralela. Online Spanish Bibles 
    • Spanish Language online resources: An online source, Libreria Cristiana Teologica Virtual, (An Online Referral Services Library Project Sponsored by Northwestern Theological Seminary.) is provided by The NTSLibrary 
    • Spanish Language aids. Click “En Español” in the bottom ribbon to see the aids in Spanish. 

    Sumarian

    Syriac

    Tables of Contents of Journals

    • Ingentaconnect.com. (Click Search by Publication) 
    • JournalTOCs. JournalTOCs is the biggest searchable collection of scholarly journal Tables of Contents (TOCs). 

    Theology

    World Religions

    World Religions – Asian

    World Religions – Cults

    World Religions – Islam (DISCLAIMER: These offer a variety of opinions and each should be checked against known authorities both for Islamic and Christian resources.)

    World Religions – Mormon Church

    World Religions, Theosophy

    World Religions, Zoroastrianism

    Other Free Stuff

    • ArchiveGrid: historical archives from throughout the world. 
    • Art: Artcyclopedia and Art History Resources on the Web will help you search for works of art by artist, title, museum or genre. Additionally, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has released 375,000 digital images to the public via Creative Commons. You can search for them here. 
    • Atlapedia Online: full color physical and political maps, along with country facts and statistics. 
    • CareerOneStop: career exploration, training, and jobs. 
    • Economics in One Lesson: this book by Henry Hazlitt is a classic, easy to read primer on the principles of economics. 
    • Fundamentals of Business: a free, open source textbook provided by Virginia Tech. 
    • Free E-Books: an alphabetical list of website where free ebooks can be downloaded, read online, or searched via directors or web portals. 
    • Free Images: Creative Commons is a place to find images and media you can legally use and share online. 
    • Google Scholar: Google’s search engine with filtered results to (hopefully) give you results that are scholarly in nature. Better than just doing a simple Google search. 
    • Internet Archive https://archive.org/ “attempting to archive everything on the Internet.” 
    • Local Public Library: unknown to many, your local public library probably has a lot of online resources for research. All you need is a library card to access! (These can be obtained for free, by going in person to your local library.) Check out what is available at the Pleasanton City Library, for example. 
    • Medical Books and Databases: a categorical list of free medical books and databases by subject. 
    • Research Outreach: RO states that they “distil complex research into professional and easily understood text, imagery and video. We share this content around the world with no payment required to access, download or share.” Emphasis on science, technology, health and education. 
    • Search Engine Guide – Biology: provides major and subject specific search engines focused on the biological sciences. 
    • Subject Tracers: these subject lists, although not aggregated by a specific academic organization, can be helpful when navigating the Web for content on a broad subject. Think of it as a “jumping off point” for your initial search on the Web. As always, make sure you can cite your sources. For more information, see the tab labeled “Can I Trust This?” on this blog.