Subject Guides: AU Libraries Alumni Services: Free Resources & Services

Utilizing Free Resources at the Libraries

The Libraries invite all Alumni members to visit our branch locations to browse our physical materials, including Special Collections and Archives at Ralph Brown Draughon Library. Visitors are additionally welcome to explore 14 freely available electronic and federal government resources.

Government Information Resources

As a federal depository library, Auburn University Libraries provide free, public access to information produced by the United States Government. Listed below are several freely-available resources that provide information through federal legislation and full-text publications.

For further information and assistance, please contact govdocs@auburn.edu.

Congress.gov This link opens in a new window The official website for U.S. federal legislative information. Contains information about legislation, Congressional committees, the Congressional Record, House and Senate member profiles, congressional nominations, and treaty documents.
ERIC This link opens in a new window Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, ERIC provides free access to bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text.

govinfo Provides free public access to official publications from all three branches of the Federal Government.
United States Census Bureau The Census Bureau's mission is to serve as the nation's leading provider of quality data about its people and economy. Use this website to learn more about this Federal Agency and explore data that is collected and made available.

Freely Available Electronic Resources

Alabama Virtual Library This link opens in a new window The Alabama Virtual Library provides all students, teachers, and citizens of the State of Alabama with online access to essential library and information resources. All Auburn University Students, Faculty, and Staff can access these databases through the AU Libraries Web site. All other citizens of the state should contact their local public library about receiving an AVL card.

arXiv arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,020,597 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.

AUrora This link opens in a new window An open-access repository of research and scholarly works by Auburn University faculty members, AUrora supports the outreach mission of Auburn University by making research by Auburn faculty accessible to citizens of the state of Alabama and to the general public.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) BASE is one of the world's most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library.
Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a discovery service for open access books. DOAB provides a searchable index to peer-reviewed monographs and edited collections published under an open access licence, with links to the full texts of the publications at the publisher’s website or repository.
Directory of Open Access Journals The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) offers users free access to more than 16,500 peer-reviewed journals, with research disciplines including science and humanities.

Encyclopedia of Alabama This link opens in a new window Covers the state's history, culture, geography, and natural environment. It also offers video, audio, and graphics that can be updated and expanded

OAPEN Library (Humanities and Social Sciences) OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books by providing open infrastructure services to stakeholders in scholarly communication. We work with publishers to build a quality-controlled collection of open access books and provide services for publishers, libraries, and research funders in the areas of hosting, deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
OER Commons OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.

PubMed This link opens in a new window PubMed comprises more than 22 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of biomedicine and health, covering portions of the life sciences, behavioral sciences, chemical sciences, and bioengineering. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Newspaper Reading Room

In addition to browsing the Libraries' collections, alumni visitors are welcome to use the Newspaper Reading Room at Ralph Brown Draughon Library. Below are additional links to free Alabama and Auburn University newspaper sources.

al.com al.com is the online home of The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and Mobile's Press-Register.
Alabama Newspapers at Auburn
The Auburn Plainsman
Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1777-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present. Sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress.
Orange and Blue Student Newspapers The Orange and Blue was the student newspaper for the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama/Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) from 1893 through 1922.
Plainsman Student Newspapers The Auburn Plainsman has been the student newspaper for Alabama Polytechnic Institute/Auburn University since 1922. This collection contains issues through 2015.