Related Guides
What is affordable course content?
Affordable course content are course materials that are provided to students freely or at a low cost. These include open educational resources, but can also include library-licensed materials or scholarly material provided at-cost to students.
Image: "Dollar" by Colleen Wilson from the Noun Project
BU Libraries Search - Finding Course Content
Use the Advanced Search feature of the BU Libraries search to find course content including ebooks, book chapters, articles, videos and more. Limit results by material type to narrow search results. For more information, see the Search Help guide.
Course Content thru BU Libraries
BU Ebook Collections - (Note: this is not a comprehensive list - use the BU Libraries search for more complete results)
- ACLS Humanities Ebook This link opens in a new window A collection of major scholarly works from all areas of the humanities, including online versions of printed works as well as original electronic publications.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window This database provides full text access to the back issues of core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Book reviews are included as well as journal articles. Abstracts are available for some of the articles. Date coverage: earliest issues of each journal up to the most current five years for most publications and to the present for some.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new window Project Muse provides digital access to scholarly journals and books in the humanities and social sciences. The scholarly content comes from non-profit scholarly publishers, including university presses and societies. The full text resources include journal articles, book reviews and book chapters.
- ProQuest Ebook Central (formerly ebrary) This link opens in a new window Ebook Central provides a wide variety of e-book titles from publishers across many disciplines.
- SpringerLink e-Books This link opens in a new window The SpringerLink eBooks database contains the full-text of over 45,000 e-books, the majority of them related to engineering and computer science. There are also books on other topics, including medicine, mathematics, life sciences, and the social sciences. Previews of hundreds of additional books are also available. Most books are in English but some books in other languages are also included. Date coverage: 1973 - present.
Find more BU eBook collections:
Search BULS for a specific journal article by using the Journals search feature:
BU audio & video collections:
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- HistoryMakers: African American Video Oral History Collection This link opens in a new window HistoryMakers is a collection of video oral history interviews with historically significant African Americans. Transcripts are included with the interviews.
- Music & Performing Arts (Audio & Video Collections) This link opens in a new window Music & Performing Arts' collections include American Music, Classical, Contemporary World, Jazz, Popular, Smithsonian's Global Sound, Ethnographic Sound Archives, American Film Scripts, Asian American Drama, Black Drama, North American Drama, and Theatre in Context. Search results include links to the full text of the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music Online (1997-2001), with additional audio examples.
- Naxos Music Library This link opens in a new window Usually known as just "Naxos," this is an audio streaming package of hundreds of classical music lables with very good indexing and search capabilities. It is a reliable destination for Early Music, lesser-known classics, and Contemporary Music. Folk, Blues, Jazz, Nostalgia, Chinese, and World in more limited quantities can be found here. The audio is streamed on demand, not downloaded.
- Vanderbilt Television News Archive This link opens in a new window Streaming video of news and commercials from NBC and CNN plus searchable archive of abstracts of news broadcasts from ABC, CBS, Fox News, and other channels . Date coverage: NBC video 1968 - present; CNN video 1995 - present.
Other Low-Cost Options
BU Bookstore
Librarian
Guide Author
Barbara Maratos
Literature & Languages Librarian
bkmarato@bu.edu