Social Sciences Gateways and Resources
The Social Sciences Gateways and Resources collection is comprised of web portals, web sites, and individual digital resources identified by National Science Digital Library staff as appropriate for inclusion in the Library. Many of the materials to be found here were suggested by NSDL users. The collection includes materials devoted to the interplay of science and the social realm, as well as social-science materials that draw heavily upon or are closely related to the life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, and/or technology: for example, archaeology, physical anthropology, economics, human geography, linguistics, and psychology. Here may be found materials for educators and learners (early childhood through graduate school), resources intended for the general public, and materials aimed at research communities at the nexus of the social, physical, and life sciences.
Details about NSDL selection criteria are provided in the NSDL Collection Development Policy. To recommend an addition or additions to this collection, please complete NSDL's Recommend a Resource form.
The collection provides access to third-party resources; individual items must be consulted for terms of use.
American Academy of Forensic Science: Choosing a Career
http://aafs.org/default.asp?section_id=resources&page_id=choosing_a_career
This guide provides information on careers in forensic science. Topics include what forensic science is and what forensic scientists do, educational requirements, and what graduates in this field might expect in terms of work loca... Full description
American Museum of Natural History Digital Research Library
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/
This digital library provides access to publications of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). These publications--American Museum Novitates (short papers in zoology, paleontology, and geology published 1921-present), Anth... Full description
American Museum of Natural History: Resources for Learning
http://amnh.org/education/resources/index.php
This collection of resources, published by the American Museum of Natural History, is intended for educators, parents, students, or anyone who is interested in teaching and learning about science. The resources include activities,... Full description
American Museum of Natural History: Science Bulletins
http://sciencebulletins.amnh.org/?src=h_h
These online bulletins, produced by the American Museum of Natural History, present the latest information about the natural world: developments in astronomy and astrophysics, Earth science, biology, ecology, and the environment, ... Full description
American Psychological Association: PsycARTICLES
http://www.apa.org/psycarticles/
PsycARTICLES is a database of full-text articles from journals published by the American Psychological Association (APA), the APA Educational Publishing Foundation, the Canadian Psychological Association, and other publishers, dat... Full description
Antiquities of Wisconsin (1855)
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Antiquities
An electronic edition of the noted work Antiquities of Wisconsin, by the nineteenth-century naturalist and engineer Increase A. Lapham. The book is a survey of Indian effigy mounds found in locations throughout Wisconsin, includin... Full description
Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS)
http://www.aina.ucalgary.ca/astis/
The Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS) database contains thousands of records describing publications and research projects on northern Canada. It covers all of Canada north of the southern limit of discontin... Full description
Association for Psychological Science
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/
The Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of scientific psychology and its representation at the national and international l... Full description
Boneyard Science: Investigating Forensics
http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/k12forensics/
In this NSDL Expert Voices blogosphere feature, a team of scientists and teachers talk about forensics--why it is interesting and what students want to know as they explore the field. The posting includes links to several online r... Full description
CalPhotos
http://calphotos.berkeley.edu/
This image collection features thousands of photographs of plants, animals, fossils, landscapes (fieldsites, habitats), and people (anthropological, historical). The collection is searchable by photo type, scientific name, common ... Full description
Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR)
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cssr/
The Columbia University's Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR) is a forum for the examination of issues at the boundary of these two complementary ways of comprehending the world and our place in it. The Center, whi... Full description
Centre for Science and Environment
http://www.cseindia.org/
The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is a public-interest research and advocacy organization based in New Delhi, India. CSE promotes environmentally sound and equitable development strategies, with an emphasis on Indian en... Full description
CogNet: Brain Sciences Connection
http://cognet.mit.edu/
This site, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), provides a location for the archiving and exchange of materials on the cognitive sciences and brain sciences. The CogNet library is a searchable collection of r... Full description
Communications Institute for Online Scholarship: Cios/Comserve Services
http://www.cios.org/
The Communications Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS) provides research and conference services, access to news and publications, and student-oriented resources for the field of communication. Research and conferencing servic... Full description
Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory
http://www.clal.cornell.edu/index.php
The Cornell Language Acquisition Lab (CLAL) is committed to interdisciplinary study of first-language acquisition, combining developmental psychology with linguistics in order to compare first-language acquisition across many lang... Full description
Demographic Loop Analysis
http://www2.truman.edu/~mjadams/loopanalysis.htm
This website provides access to a software package, DLA_GUI, that carries out the computations associated with demographic loop analysis, a technique employed by ecologists to determine the proportional contributions of various li... Full description
Digital Archive Network for Anthropology and World Heritage
http://www.dana-wh.net/
The Digital Archive Network for Anthropology and World Heritage (DANA-WH) is network of a interoperable databases housed at multiple institutions, providing access to and preservation of human cultural heritage materials. The netw... Full description
Discover
http://discovermagazine.com/
This online version of Discover, a popular science magazine covering such topics as health and medicine, the mind and brain, technology, space, human origins, the living world, environments, physics, and mathematics, includes news... Full description
Earth Institute
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sections/view/9
The mission of the Earth Institute at Columbia University is to help the world achieve sustainability by expanding understanding of the Earth as one integrated system. Through research, education, and the practical application of ... Full description
Economist.com
http://economist.com/index.html?m=1
The online edition of the magazine "The Economist," featuring analyses of world business and current affairs, insight and opinion on international news, world politics, business, finance, and science and technology. There are also... Full description
EconPort
http://www.econport.org/econport/request?page=web_home
EconPort is an economics digital library specializing in content that emphasizes the use of experiments in teaching and research. Content includes teaching modules, a handbook of economic and game theoretic principles and concepts... Full description
EH.Net
http://www.eh.net/
This site provides resources and promotes communication among scholars in economic history and related fields. Features include e-mail discussion lists, a collection of course syllabi, and a directory of scholars and researchers i... Full description
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
http://ecai.org
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI) is a global consortium with a shared vision of creating a distributed virtual library of cultural information with a timeline-and-map-based interface. The ECAI web site includes a Cu... Full description
ePsych: An Electronic Psychology Text
http://epsych.msstate.edu/index.html
This highly interactive, multimedia educational web site is designed to teach about psychological processes in a richly experiential setting. It uses characters, narratives, illustrations, animations, and interactive demos, experi... Full description
eSkeletons Project
http://www.eskeletons.org/
The eSkeletons web site feature a unique set of digitized versions of skeletons in 2D and 3D, animations, and supplemental information. It allows users to see and compare bones from the skeleta of humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, an... Full description
Ethnologue: Languages of the World
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
This reference work catalogues all of the world's known living languages. It has six major sections: 1) statistical summaries, offering numerical tabulations of languages and number of speakers by world area, number of speakers, l... Full description
Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception
http://www.exploratorium.edu/
The Exploratorium is a museum dedicated to general science, art, human perception, and promoting the role of museums as informal education centers. The museum's online version features thousands of web pages, including online exhi... Full description
Facing the Future (TM)
http://www.facingthefuture.org/
Facing the Future(TM) provides educational materials and professional development opportunities for educators that address environmental issues such as population growth, poverty and equity, consumption trends, peace and conflict,... Full description
Food Timeline
http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html
The Food Timeline was created as an independent research project on food history and period recipes. The timeline begins before 17,000 B.C. with gatherable foods (shellfish, eggs, mushrooms) and chronicles the appearance of cultiv... Full description
Game Theory .net
http://www.gametheory.net/
Game Theory .net focuses on making the lessons of game theory relevant to the educator, student, business professional, or layperson. The site provides resource materials demonstrating the application of game theory to computer sc... Full description
Gateway to 21st Century Skills
http://www.thegateway.org/
The Gateway to 21st Century Skills, or GEM (from the organization's former name, Gateway to Educational Materials) provides teachers with quality resource and tools from federal, state, university, nonprofit and commercial interne... Full description
GayData.org
http://www.gaydata.org/index.html
This site is a guide for those who seek information about lesbians, gays, and bisexuals (LBGs) grounded in scientific knowledge. It provides a listing of information systems and databases that contain sexual orientation data; arti... Full description
Hall of Illusions
http://psylux.psych.tu-dresden.de/i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/ha...
This collection of optical and sensory illusions provides interactive demonstrations, accompanied by scientific explanations of the phenomena being shown and histories of the illusions. The illusions are organized by type: impossi... Full description
Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory
http://www.hastac.org/
The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) is a consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists, and engineers from universities across the country, committed to new forms of cros... Full description
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/referenceworks/0080430767
The International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, comprised of 4,000 articles commissioned by 52 section editors, maps the social and behavioral sciences on a grand scale. All users may browse the online encycl... Full description
Internet Resources for Physical Anthropology
http://www2.lib.udel.edu/subj/anth/phys/internet.htm
This web site, developed by the University of Delaware Library, is a guide to online resources in physical anthropology. The links it suggests are organized by type: starting points (general information), archives and databases, m... Full description
Introduction to Human Geography
http://piru.alexandria.ucsb.edu/collections/sweeney/sweeney.html
This is the online version of an undergraduate course in human geography taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The course is organized into 22 lectures around six themes: history and fundamentals, cultural geograp... Full description
Intute: Virtual Training Suite
http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/
The Virtual Training Suite is a set of online tutorials, arranged by subject (engineering and technology, arts and humanities, social sciences, and health and life sciences), intended to help students, educators, and researchers i... Full description
Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
http://www.japss.org/
The Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences is published by the Guild of Independent Scholars and its affiliated organizations. The goal of the journal is to give voice to independent scholars and practitioners ... Full description
JSTOR
http://www.jstor.org/jstor/
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive of scholarly journals that provides access to thousands of articles dating back as far as 1665. The materials include journals in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as sele... Full description
Librarians' Internet Index: Science
http://search.lii.org/index.jsp?more=SubTopic13
The Librarians' Internet Index (LII) is a publicly funded online resource that provides a searchable, browseable index of web sites organized by topic. The science subtopics page features links to web sites organized into dozens o... Full description
MERLOT: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
http://www.merlot.org/
MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, is a resource for higher education centered around a collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials cataloged by registered members. The collecti... Full description
Museum of Science, Boston: Virtual Exhibits
http://www.mos.org/events_activities/virtual_exhibits
This collection of online exhibits introduces users to a variety of science topics, including the history, methods, and fundamental ideas behind the science of astronomy; how ice-core samples taken in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet ... Full description
National Geographic Xpeditions
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/
This collection of educational resources includes lesson plans, activities, maps, and related resources that are aligned to the U.S. National Geography Standards. The lesson plans and activities are organized by grade level and st... Full description
National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
http://securityandclimate.cna.org/
This report, prepared for the U.S. government by a private contractor, provides an overview of the national security consequences of climate change. Authored by an advisory board of retired military officers, it covers the conditi... Full description
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
http://www.nhm.org/
The web site of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which conserves, interprets, and holds in trust collections of objects from nature and human history for the purpose of advancing knowledge and enabling people to a... Full description
NOVA Online
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
Web site of the PBS television program NOVA. Site materials include synopses of recent and upcoming episodes, slide shows, and interactive features from recent broadcasts. There is a page especially for teachers and an extensive a... Full description
NSDL Reflections
http://nsdlreflections.wordpress.com/
The National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Reflections project is a collection of the stories and experiences of NSDL community participants. These essays are intended to create a knowledge collection of practices and lessons lea... Full description
OLogy
http://ology.amnh.org/?src=h_nc
OLogy is a science web site for kids ages 7 through 12, created by the American Museum of Natural History. It is based on the premise that "everyone wants to know something," and is designed as a place for kids to explore, ask que... Full description
Online Books Page
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html
This online index includes thousands of books in English that are available at no charge, free of copyright restrictions, and considered "significant," as judged by the fact that they are listed in the online catalog of a major li... Full description
Oxford University Press: Oxford Journals
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/
Oxford Journals features online versions of hundreds of academic and research journals published by the Oxford University Press, some in partnership with learned societies around the world. The collections are organized by subject... Full description
PBS Online NewsHour: Search for Ancestors
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/science/dna/
In-depth coverage of how researchers are using DNA to learn about the origins of humans and human diversity, together with instructional materials. Includes lesson plan on how to use DNA, interactive map of human migration, and Q-... Full description
PBS Science and Nature
http://www.pbs.org/science/
Information on programs and related content for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television shows on science and nature, including "Nature," "Nova," "I, Cringely," and "Scientific American Frontiers." The site's home page feature... Full description
PBS Teachers
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/
The PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) Teachers web site provides access to thousands of lesson plans, teaching activities, videos, and interactive games and simulations for all levels of instruction, Pre-K to 12. These resources a... Full description
PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
http://www.pnas.org/
This is the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a multidisciplinary publication that covers the the biological, medical, physical, and social sciences. The web site provides access to the ... Full description
PsychExperiments: Psychology Experiments on the Internet
http://psychexps.olemiss.edu/
PsychExperiments is a collection of online cognitive psychology and social psychology experiments, accompanied by a cumulative data archive and download utilities for both data and experiment source code. Students collect data usi... Full description
RAD Teach
http://radteach.com/index.html
This web site features the insights, publications, and calendar of presentations by Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist and middle-school teacher in Santa Barbara, California. Dr. Willis's work draws on her fifteen year... Full description
SciELO: Scientific Electronic Library Online
http://www.scielo.org
The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) is a model for cooperative electronic publishing of scientific journals online, especially conceived to meet the scientific communication needs of developing countries, particularl... Full description
Science Related Museums
http://www.museumstuff.com/museums/science.php
This page of the museums guide MuseumStuff.com provides information on and links to the web sites of a variety of science museums. The list is organized by topic: astronomy, anthropology, geology, health, mineralogy, oceanography,... Full description
Science: News
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/
This online news digest features daily news from ScienceNOW and weekly news articles and features from Science magazine. The site provides free access to daily news articles less than four weeks old; accessing other news content r... Full description
ScienceDirect
http://www.sciencedirect.com/
For users at institutions with a license, this digital library provides access to full text and bibliographic information for online books and book series, reference works, and thousands of journals in the life sciences, physical ... Full description
Scientific American Digital
http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewBrowseList
Scientific American Digital is a digital archive of every issue of Scientific American, the premier science magazine, from 1993 to the present. Tables of contents, abstracts ("Previews"), and Search available to all users at no ch... Full description
Secret in the Cellar
http://anthropology.si.edu/writteninbone/comic/
This interactive feature inroduces students to a forensic science case based on the actual discovery of a skeleton from the 17th century Tidewater Chesapeake area of Maryland. Using graphics and links to related materials, the fea... Full description
Seed Magazine Podcasts
http://www.seedmagazine.com/podcasts/
This collection of podcasts on general science topics is intended to increase public interest and understanding of science. The web site features links to the latest podcasts; older podcasts are searchable by keyword or term and a... Full description
Sheppard Software: Learning Games
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games_menu.htm
This collection of games, puzzles, and quizzes helps students learn world and U.S. geography, vocabulary, and trivia. There are also games for chemistry and math, and quizzes on animals, health, astronomy, and puzzles on endangere... Full description
Teaching Company: Science and Mathematics Courses
http://www.teach12.com/storex/courses.aspx?t=&sl=&s=910&sbj=Science%20and%20Mathematics&fM...
The Teaching Company offers courses on DVD, audio CD and other formats, taught by selected faculty from leading colleges and universities and crafted particularly for the lifelong learner. Their science and mathematics gateway pro... Full description
United States Census: K-4 Teaching Materials
http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/schtm01.html
This teachers' guide provides lessons for younger students that use information derived from the 2000 census of the United States. Topics include map literacy, community involvement, and managing data. Students work with maps, use... Full description
Vermont Landscape Change Program
http://www.uvm.edu/perkins/landscape/
This online archive of historic and modern landscape images documents changes in the landscape of Vermont from the 19th century to the present day. The collection is searchable by county, town, and by a controlled vocabulary of ke... Full description
Wiley InterScience
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/home
This gateway page provides access to thousands of journals, books, reference works, and other articles of scholarly and scientific research. There are also databases, laboratory manuals and the Cochrane Library, a collection of da... Full description
Will That Be on the Test?
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2425
Author Eric Jaffe describes the spacing effect and its ability to improve learning. He also examines the relationship of learning and study. Full description
Will That Be on the Test?
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2425
A popular press article about the psychological principles behind learning, studying, and testing. From the Association for Psychological Science's monthly magazine, the Observer. Full description