Alumni accessible databases

This list includes licensed, open access, and freely accessible databases that provide scholarly articles, consumer publications, business reports, and government documents that Virginia Tech alumni can access.

This list includes recommended databases in which you can begin many research topics. It includes databases catering to all levels of user, not just undergraduates. Content of these databases can include reference sources like encyclopedias or dictionaries; articles that give an overview of a topic, issue, controversy, or recent event; or that provide broad coverage to assist in narrowing or refining a research topic. After you have used these databases for background research on your topic, you can move on to more subject-specific databases. Many provide full-text sources, otherwise use the citations they provide to request copies via your local library's interlibrary loan service.

Background Notes (U.S. State Department reports)
Background Notes include facts about the land, people, history, government, political conditions, economy, and foreign relations of independent states, some dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty. Background Notes are updated/revised by the Office of Electronic Information and Publications of the Bureau of Public Affairs as they are received from the Department's regional bureaus.
Biodiversity Heritage Library
BHL contains scanned, historic, biological literature from major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions: books, journals, and more. Content can be downloaded as PDF, ASCII, or just the images contained within the object. 1480-present.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. Prior to digitization, the resources housed within each BHL institution have existed in isolation, available only to those with physical access to the collections. These collections are of exceptional value because the domain of systematic biology depends – more than any other science – upon historic literature. Consequently, the relative isolation of these collections presented an antiquated obstacle to further biodiversity investigation. This problem is particularly acute for the developing countries that are home to the majority of the world’s biodiversity.
CIA World Fact Book
The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. The Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as flags of the world, a physical map of the world, a political map of the world, and a standard time zones of the world map.
WorldCat Discovery
WorldCat Discovery is Virginia Tech's instance of WorldCat. It is a catalog and research tool that allows you to search across most of the University Libraries holdings at the same time: the books and other physical materials held in the Library and a significant proportion of our online resources (e.g. ebooks). You can also use it to search the collections of other libraries that use WorldCat by expanding your search to the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), other libraries in the Commonwealth of Virginia, or Libraries Worldwide. Access to items not owned by the University Libraries is through integrated links to ILLiad (Interlibrary Loan).
Wolfram MathWorld
Wolfram MathWorld provides full-text reference articles (with bibliographic citations), a glossary of mathematical terms, downloadable Mathematica notebooks, and a guide to Mathematica.
MathWorld has been assembled over more than a decade by Eric W. Weisstein with assistance from thousands of contributors. Since its contents first appeared online in 1995, MathWorld has emerged as a nexus of mathematical information in both the mathematics and educational communities. It not only reaches millions of readers from all continents of the globe, but also serves as a clearinghouse for new mathematical discoveries that are routinely contributed by researchers. Its entries are extensively referenced in journals and books spanning all educational levels, including those read by researchers, elementary school students and teachers, engineers, and hobbyists.

MathWorld continues to grow and evolve with the assistance of thousands of contributors. Careful oversight of all aspects of its content and interface by creator Eric Weisstein, and more recently with able assistance from MathWorld associate Ed Pegg, Jr., provides an exacting level of quality, accuracy, and consistency. As a result, MathWorld is considered not only the clearest and most readable online resource for mathematics, but also one of the most reliable.

MathWorld is actively developed and maintained. The site is updated daily, thus achieving extremely rapid communication of new and extended results--many of which are provided by outside contributors--while at the same time maintaining a degree of editorial oversight and consistency across (and among) the site's nearly 13,000 entries that is simply not possible for other sites.

MathWorld currently features a number of innovative interactive elements that enhance its usability for a variety of different readers. These features include:

The MathWorld Classroom, which provides a set of pop-up "capsule summaries" for more than 300 mathematical terms.
Extensive citations to books and journal articles, many of which are active hyperlinks (but no Get VText links or cues).
Thousands of downloadable Mathematica notebooks.
Several types of interactive entries, including LiveGraphics3D applets for interactive three-dimensional geometry.
A powerful full-text search engine with both basic and advanced searching capabilities.
Dublin Core and Mathematics Subject Classification metadata in the HTML headers of each page.
Special information for Mathematica users.

The technology behind MathWorld is heavily based on Mathematica. In addition to being indispensable in the derivation, validation, and visualization of MathWorld's content, Mathematica is used to build the website itself, taking advantage of its advanced mathematical typesetting and data-processing capabilities.