Topic: Free and legal Media and Educational materials

[Nemesis]

On various occasions links to free and legal media of different types have come up and the idea of making a permanent thread to collect them in was suggested.  This is that thread.  Hopefully it will get as much useful material as the Freely available and legal software thread has.

If you know of such materials feel free to add them here.

My thanks to all the contributors:

Capt. Mike, Stephen NCC -73070, NJAntman

I'm sure the contributors list will grow in time.  But its a start.

Before including a link here I verify it as accurate as of this time.  Any link whose media is not freely available (at the time of update) I remove.  Any whose link was invalid and an update not easily found I also do not include.  Some exceptions may be made, this is a guideline only.

If there are any errors, ommisions or corrections not covered by my comments above feel free to either post a correction/update here or PM it to me and I will edit it in at my earliest convience. 

[Nemesis]

Free Media and Educational materials

Books

Archive

Welcome to the Open-Access Text Archive. This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses. Please feel free to contribute your texts! (Uploaders, please try to set a Creative Commons license as part of the upload process, so people know what they can do with your texts - thanks!)

Baen Free Library

Introducing the Baen Free Library
by Eric Flint

Baen Books is now making available — for free — a number of its titles in electronic format. We're calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. (Later we may ask for  an extremely simple, name & email only, registration. ) Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Why are we doing this? Well, for two reasons.

The first is what you might call a "matter of principle." This all started as a byproduct of an online "virtual brawl" I got into with a number of people, some of them professional SF authors, over the issue of online piracy of copyrighted works and what to do about it.

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Blue Letter Bible

A Bible Quotation/Translation service that inludes 14 different interpretations/translations from the NKJV to the Vulgate (i.e. the people's language (Latin))

E-Books Directory

E-Books Directory is a daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.

literature.org

An Online Library of Literature

Read. Learn. Think.

Welcome to literature.org. This site is here to try to bring real books to people through the Internet.

On this site you will find the full and unabridged texts of classic works of English literature. Fiction from authors like Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters (Anne, Charlotte and Emily), Jack London, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and many others, and classic scientific works from Charles Darwin and Rene Descartes.

More books will be added soon, however as this site is maintained by enthusiasts rather than professional librarians this may be a very slow process. Our sponsor, the people behind the knowledge.com™ directory, is currently working on new technology that will make this updating easier and quicker in the near future.

Please let us know what you think, and what new books you want added. For those who may not be familiar with Copyright law, we are unable to make works available that are not in the public domain. This mean, basically, nothing where the author has not been dead for at least 75 to 90 years.

Many Books

Free eBooks for your PDA, iPod, or eBook reader.

Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviews from our visitors. Perhaps you'll find something interesting in the special collections. There are 19,351 eBooks available here and they're all free!

The Open Book Project

The Open Book Project is aimed at the educational community and seeks to encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics. The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web are making collaboration among educators on a global scale possible for the first time. We want to harness this exciting technology to promote learning and sharing.

Project Gutenberg

There are over 20,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog.

A grand total of over 100,000 titles is available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources.

Project Gutenberg - Australia

Apparently the branches of Project Gutenberg in different countries can have different books not available in the other branches due to varying copyright laws.

Read Print

A warm welcome to Read Print, your free online library. Our website offers thousands of free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast. To find the book you desire to read, start by looking through the author index. If you need help with something, feel free to drop us a line.

Educational Materials

MIT OpenCourseWare

Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds.

MIT is committed to advancing education and discovery through knowledge open to everyone.

OCW shares free lecture notes, exams, and other resources from more than 1800 courses spanning MIT's entire curriculum.

OER Commons

Welcome to a worldwide learning network

OER Commons is a teaching and learning network, from K-12 lesson plans to college courseware, from algebra to zoology, open to everyone to use and add to.

Browse by Categories or Collections. Filter searches by license to find resources you can modify. Join now to save and organize favorites to your own portfolio.

Add tags, ratings, and reviews. See how others are using open learning content and add your experiences.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 38,021 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

Movies

PublicDomainFlicks

Welcome to PublicDomainFlicks.com Here you can legally download full-length feature films that are in the public domain for free.

Archive

Welcome to the Archive's Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains thousands of digital movies which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to videos of every genre uploaded by Archive users. Most of these movies are available for download.

Music

Archive

Welcome to the Live Music Archive. etree.org is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format. The Internet Archive has teamed up with etree.org to preserve and archive as many live concerts as possible for current and future generations to enjoy. All music in this Collection is from trade-friendly artists and is strictly noncommercial, both for access here and for any further distribution. Artists' commercial releases are off-limits. This collection is maintained by the etree.org community.

Archive

Welcome to the Archive's audio and MP3 library. This library contains over a hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download.

The Sheet Music Consortium

The Sheet Music Consortium is a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative:Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Free Sheetmusic Library

Free Sheetmusic Library

All the files are derived from public domain music in editions that are in the public domain. So you may freely copy, print, distribute the files.

To view or print the PDF(Adobe Portable Document Format) files, please use Adobe Acrobat Reader or Ghostscript.

Note: DON'T download more than one file at the same time. DON'T use any multi-thread user agent such as FlashGet, NetAnts. Any such connections may be refused. Thank you.

Other

RadioLovers

Welcome to RadioLovers.com - Where Old Radio Shows Live Again!

Whether you want to discover the best radio shows from the past or remember what the best adventure, crime, pulp, sci-fi, noir and more! There was a time before the iPods, Video on Demand, 3D, the Internet and online video games; back in the day sitting around the living room radio was a family tradition. Every night, families and their neighbors would come together and listen to radio broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes, Groucho Marx, The Avenger, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Superman and more. Radio broadcasts were so much a part of everyday life they could influence mass movements, such as the night Orson Welles told millions about an impending alien invasion... a "War of the Worlds." Re-live those times with the largest online archive of vintage radio shows, available to you for FREE!

[NJAntman]

For the SF fans, Baens free library:

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

[Nemesis]

For the SF fans, Baens free library:

http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm

  I even knew of that one.

Added to the list.

[Sirgod]

Nemesis, Good work, and thanks for taking this project up. I owe you once again my Northern friend.


Stephen

[Nemesis]

The one thing that surprises me is that no one here thought of it before now, especially given how long the Free Software thread has been going on.  I E-Mailed off the free movie links to a movie nut friend of mine and have been trolling thought Project Gutenberg for old SciFi and it never occurred to me to put together a useful list.  So its about time I got my brain working and put it together.

If we all pool our knowledge of sources like this we all come ahead, no one loses, its an ideal situation.

[Nemesis]

Added the Many Books site suggested by Stephen now that the site is back up.  It seems that they have had a hard drive crash and are rebuilding the site.

[Nemesis]

A link for downloading some of Project Gutenberg via bit torrent.

Gutenberg:The CD and DVD Project

What the Discs Contain

    * The August 2003 CD contains 600 of our best Ebooks.
    * The December 2003 DVD contains 9400 of our first 10,000 books.
    * The July 2006 DVD contains over 17,000 books from our first 19,000 titles.
    * The March 2007 Science Fiction Bookshelf CD contains most of our science fiction titles.

All of the books found on the 2003 CD can also be found on both DVDs and most of the files on the December 2003 DVD can be found on the July 2006 DVD. There are very few images on the discs, and no audio books.

If these compilations are not to your liking, you can create your own CD or DVD image containing only the books you want.

[Nemesis]

Not totally free images but free for non commercial use.

FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet (link back and attribution required). See FREE USE RULES.

The comprehensive, yet easy to navigate site, offers images that are free for on-line use, with higher quality versions available for sale.

Also non-commercial users may download our web size images to use off-line in school projects, church services, cards, leaflets, etc. Basically if your off-line use is not commercial you can download our web size images for free.

FreeFoto.com features exclusive images found nowhere else on the web with new pictures being added every week.

Prices start from just $30US for the A7 72dpi versions with A5, A4 and A3 high res 300 dpi versions also available.

[Nemesis]

Legal Media Torrents

[Capt. Mike]

For those who like music...

Choral Public Domain Library   www.cpdl.org 

Library of Congress-Music for the Nation:  American Sheet Music  http://memory.loc.gov 

Wicker Icking Music Archive  http://icking-music-archive.org

Hymns of Martin Luther - The Online Library of Liberty  http://oll.libertyfund.org 

Free Christmas Carol Music  www.christmascarolmusic.org  and  http://christmassongbook.net 


Have fun,

Mike

[Nemesis]

Added Project Gutenberg - Australia  to the list courtesy of Stephen.

[Nemesis]

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

From the 1860s to 1970s

[Capt. Mike]

One I came accross today, the National Institute for Standards and Technology..Gawd have they got a bunch of stuff, enough to bring the geek out of anyone, at least long enough to put down their Dr. Pepper and Cheetos...

   http://www.nist.gov/   

And those into computer security, go to publications and follow the directions to the 800 series..

There is just about anything for everyone.

Mike

[Nemesis]

Just added Read Print courtesy of Stephen.

[Capt. Mike]

Didn't see this one listed, so I'll post it..if it's a duplicate, erase it..but the entire site looks interesting to explore..and I like Dickens

  http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dickens/charles/   

Mike

[Nemesis]

E-Books Directory

E-Books Directory is a daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.

[Nemesis]

Wikibooks

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July 10, 2003; since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 38,061 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers like you!

[Capt. Mike]

Found a new music site from Duke University..

 http://library.duke.edu/music/sheetmusic/collections.html 

Great stuff out there

Mike

[Nemesis]

The Open Book Project

The Open Book Project is aimed at the educational community and seeks to encourage and coordinate collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics. The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web are making collaboration among educators on a global scale possible for the first time. We want to harness this exciting technology to promote learning and sharing.

[Nemesis]

I just brought the list up to date and made a very belated addition of NJAntman to the contributors list.  Sorry NJAntman for the oversight, it was not on purpose.

[Nemesis]

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning. We invite teachers, students, and researchers to join us in creating open educational resources and collaborative learning communities.

[Nemesis]

The Online Books Page

[Nemesis]

Popular Science

We've partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. It's an amazing resource that beautifully encapsulates our ongoing fascination with the future, and science and technology's incredible potential to improve our lives. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

In the future, we'll be adding more advanced features for searching and browsing, but for now, enter any keyword into the box below and dive in.

[Nemesis]

WatchKnow

About WatchKnow

We at WatchKnow.org feel that potential geniuses are everywhere, from small, rural towns to giant, sophisticated cities. But their potential may go to waste if they are not given the right educational opportunities. We at WatchKnow.org want to help make these opportunities available to everyone.

We believe that everyone is created equal, and we take the American Dream seriously. One of the best ways to make these ideals a reality for everyone is to offer free online educational material to our youth.

This is the vision behind the non-profit WatchKnow.org. WatchKnow has indexed over 15,000 online educational videos for children, putting them into a directory of over 3,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom and to students at home 24/7. You can dive into our innovative directory or search by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. The site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers. We have had a tremendously positive response from educators to the website.

WatchKnow is a project of the non-profit 501(c)(3) Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi, and is directed by Dr. Larry Sanger, best known as co-founder of Wikipedia, and edited by a group of editors and assistants, all trained as educators.

WatchKnow plans to index over 50,000 educational videos by the end of 2010. Imagine, in the long run, cataloguing and creating millions of short videos, so that one can quickly and easily find a top-quality video on absolutely anything a child is studying. If we come together, we can great such a resource.

WatchKnow has additional plans. We want to give everyone a boost in learning, even from the earliest years. We are thus presently sponsoring early childhood reading in daycare centers in Memphis, Tennessee, and are helping to arrange a study of the effects of this program. Sanger is also drawing on his experience with online encyclopedias to plan an innovative multimedia encyclopedia for early childhood. Additionally, WatchKnow is in the start-up phase of a program to enlist top tier private and public schools to capture their classrooms on video. The videos will be hosted by WatchKnow.

Please sign up! WatchKnow needs everyone's help. We need you to find the best free videos and embed or link to them here, we need excellent schools to video their classrooms, we need governmental and school districts help to make these educational videos possible in the classrooms, we need the support of parents and teachers, and of course we need students to use our website.

[Sirgod]

http://www.radiolovers.com/

Welcome to RadioLovers.com - Where Old Radio Shows Live Again!

Whether you want to discover the best radio shows from the past or remember what the best adventure, crime, pulp, sci-fi, noir and more! There was a time before the iPods, Video on Demand, 3D, the Internet and online video games; back in the day sitting around the living room radio was a family tradition. Every night, families and their neighbors would come together and listen to radio broadcasts of Sherlock Holmes, Groucho Marx, The Avenger, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, Superman and more. Radio broadcasts were so much a part of everyday life they could influence mass movements, such as the night Orson Welles told millions about an impending alien invasion... a "War of the Worlds." Re-live those times with the largest online archive of vintage radio shows, available to you for FREE!

To listen/download:

Browse around our categories list and find the vintage radio show/episode you want to listen to. On the link, right-click and select "Save As" on the menu and your mp3 download will begin shortly. From there, listen to it from your iTunes, Windows Media Player or any other media program. You can also upload the shows to your iPod, iPhone, Nexus One, Zune, BlackBerry, or any other mp3 player device.

Stephen

[Nemesis]

http://www.radiolovers.com/

Stephen

Here I am just finishing up downloading all the interesting stuff from Archive.com and you just have to find this to get me going again. 

Thanks.  Added to the master list.

[Sirgod]

LOL, well I have to keep you on your toes man.

I just love some of that old stuff. America really doesn't do that much anymore, but I hear Britain still does, and to a lesser extent, Canada.

Stephen

[Nemesis]

LOL, well I have to keep you on your toes man.

I just love some of that old stuff. America really doesn't do that much anymore, but I hear Britain still does, and to a lesser extent, Canada.

Stephen

Using my netbook and the library high speed wireless I can download radio shows faster than I can create the individual directories.  With the new battery I bought yesterday I have a total battery life in excess of 9 hours so I can download a lot of radioshows now. 

[Nemesis]

The Khan Academy

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

We have 1400+ videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance which have been recorded by Salman Khan. Listen to a recent interview by Salman with NPR's All Things Considered

[Nemesis]

Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983

With this posting of the Bell System Technical Journal from volume 1 issue 1 in July 1922 to the final issue published in December 1983, we are pleased to be able to open the vault of this knowledge to our global technical colleagues.

[Nemesis]

Coursea

Learn from 338 courses, from 62 universities.

Online courses and Classes on the web

Over 500 courses from the world's leading universities - right at your fingertips.

[Don Karnage]

I was wondering what are they alternative to Microsh*t software?

I have something to replace Word, but I was looking for a software to replace Excel. I have only find a Excel reader, but I want something to wright like you can do with Excel.

I can't wait to try this Unbut software to replace Winsh*t. Not i want to replace all that is Microsh*t hackware.

[Nemesis]

Freely available and legal software Master List

[Nemesis]

OpenStax

About Us

OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University, and it’s our mission to improve student access to education. Our first openly licensed college textbook was published in 2012, and our library since scaled to more than 20 books for college and AP courses used by hundreds of thousands of students. Our adaptive learning technology, designed to improve learning outcomes through personalized educational paths, is being piloted in college courses across the country. Through our partnerships with philanthropic foundations and our alliance with other educational resource companies, OpenStax is breaking down the most common barriers to learning and empowering students and instructors to succeed.

Learn more about how state policy leaders can support initiatives like OpenStax here.

Visit our Support page for help using OpenStax textbooks, OpenStax CNX, OpenStax Tutor, or OpenStax Concept Coach.

Looking for more information about the OpenStax mission and organizational operations? Visit our FAQ page.

[Nemesis]

Galaxy Magazine Archive

Archive.org has made available 355 issues of Galaxy Magazine for free access. Galaxy Science Fiction was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published from 1950 to 1980 with stories from many sci-fi greats [including Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein]. At its peak, Galaxy greatly influenced the science fiction field. See also Open Culture and The Verge for more about the history of a magazine that help shape the imaginations of a generation of techies..