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Geography: Open Access/OER

What Are Open Educational Resources/OER?

generic oer logoAccording to UNESCO, Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. These materials can take any of the following formats: text books, curricula, videos, teaching notes, lecture notes, animation, tests, assignments, projects, or audio.

Open Geography Textbooks in Use at HCC

Individual Geography Textbooks Currently in Use at HCC

Open Geography Textbooks

Geography Textbook Collections

Open Geography Databases

Antarctic Digital Database [Antarctic Digital Database] 
This is an interactive map viewer

Atlapedia Online
"Atlapedia® Online contains full color physical maps, political maps as well as key facts and statistics on countries of the world."

BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
Search engine for academic open access web resources. Full text of about 70% of the indexed documents can be accessed."

British Library Photostream
Over 1,000,000 images released to the Public Domain by the British Library via Flickr. These images are free to use in your projects."

Center for Comparative Immigration Studies
The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) is a multidisciplinary research institute dedicated to comparative, cross-national and cross-regional research on international migration and immigration policy."

David Rumsey Map Collection
The Map Database has many viewers and the Blog has numerous categories. The physical map collection is housed in the David Rumsey Map Center at the Stanford University Library. The historical map collection has over 75,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World."

Geographic Names Information
Find locations and name variants of places and features in the United States.

GEOnet Names Server
Official repository of standard spellings of all foreign place names

Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online
Search standard and variant place-names

National Science Digital Library
The National Science Digital Library provides high quality online educational resources for teaching and learning, with current emphasis on the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines

PANGAEA
The information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the hosting institutions. Most of the data are freely available and can be used under the terms of the license mentioned on the data set description. A few password protected data sets are under moratorium from ongoing projects. The description of each data set is always visible and includes the principle investigator (PI) who may be asked for access.

Population Index
Population Index, published between 1937 and 1999, was the primary reference tool to the world's population literature. It presented an annotated bibliography of recently published books, journal articles, working papers, and other materials on population topics. This website provides a searchable and browsable database containing 46,035 abstracts of demographic literature published in Population Index in the period 1986-2000. The complete journal collection going back to the 1930s is available in JSTOR.

United States Census Bureau
"Find popular facts (population, income, etc.) and frequently requested data about your community."

World Digital Library
Over 15,000 digitized manuscripts, photos, books, and more covering World History and other subjects in the Social Sciences.

Open Geography Courses

Other Geography Resources

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