For many late antique and medieval works, the best editions remain those done by scholars during the heyday of manuscript studies and philology during the mid- to late-1800s and the early 1900s. This means that they are all comfortably outside of copyright restrictions, and we're all fortunate that a number of people have invested significant time and resources into making them publicly accessible. My work as a medievalist was a barren wasteland until I discovered these resources:

• J.-P. Migne's Patrologia Latina. Latin texts by the Fathers of the Church, the sine qua non of late antique studies. See the table of contents.

• J.-P. Migne's Patrologia Graeca. Same as above, but it's all Greek to me. Table of contents.

• The Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Any Latin texts that could be ascribed to Germanic writers, including the Visigoths but omitting the Anglo-Saxons. Navigation in German. I've found that dmgh.de is much easier to use—and more useful overall—than mgh.de.

• The Internet Archive. An amazing resource for innumerable books that are out of print and out of copyright. Not only does this include a lot of early editions of medieval texts, but a lot of stuff that's absolutely indispensable for modernists (aka post-medievalists) as well, and even some remarkable tools for studying the development of the internet. If you've got a Kindle or a Nook, you can get your classics here. Check this out, whoever you are.

Some other resources that I've found pretty darn useful:

• The Latin Library. A hodgepodge of Classical and medieval Latin texts. These aren't really citable, but the site much more readable than scrolling through scans of the old PL or MGH texts above, and it's word-searchable, which opens these texts up to all sorts of digital analysis that the scanned pages won't allow. As a very positive note, I should mention that the site manager remains very responsive, and that not too long ago s/he added some materials that I had transcribed.

• The Medieval Sourcebook. A superb collection of texts in translation, generally carefully curated from sources like the Internet Archive. There's also source books for Ancient History, Modern History, Byzantine Studies, Africa, East Asia, World History, India, Islam, Judaism, LGBTQ, Science and Tech, and Women's History. If you can't find something interesting there, you should probably exempt yourself from visiting /r/AskHistorians in the future.

• The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In Anglo-Saxon, of course.

• Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England. An unbelievable who's who of Anglo-Saxon England, cataloging and cross-referencing pretty much every person whom we've got a name for up through the Norman Conquest in 1066. Here's my favorite fella Guthlac. This is digital humanities done right.

These resources are, however, a mixed blessing for an American medievalist such as myself. On the one hand, they open up avenues to research that simply would not have been possible on this side of the Atlantic a generation ago. On the other hand, they make it difficult to justify travel to Europe to research the sources, to talk with leading scholars in medieval studies, or to do original research referencing the manuscripts themselves—which sometimes vary wildly from the idealized versions that scholars in the 1800s cobbled together.

As far as online sources go, can anyone beat jstor? There's been 3 instances in the past week where I've found a book I need in order to write a paper, and its been uploaded to jstor where I can access for free through my university. While the increased access to information is undoubtedly beneficial to everyone (with access), there's one aspect that I think could create some good discussion. Without giving away free advertising--or breaking any rules--I'd like to talk about the websites that remove paywalls from articles or provide pirated copies of books for free. What effects do you all think these types of 'tools' will have on internet based research? What are the ethical implications to using these websites?

One of my concerns is that if these websites and piracy methods become more widely practiced, what will be the effect on the quality standards that journals and publishers adhere to?

For my own specialty, I discussed online museum collections and their pitfalls) here.

But here's the meat and potatoes of that post, the links and my blurbs: Here are some museums with fabulous online collections that include armour.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is one of America’s greatest art museums. It houses Van Goghs, a fine renaissance and medieval art collection (including a breathtaking diptych by Van der Weyden) and more. It also has one of the two best armour collections in the Western Hemisphere. While the Metropolitan Mueum of Art has more, Philly has arguably more interesting pieces - multiple armours from the very early 16th century, including a recently acquired Equestrian armour and associated armour for a man, and pieces from some of the greatest armourers in Europe.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s great Art museums. It has a truly enormous collection that includes a large amount of art from East and South Asia, as well as art from most other regions and traditions you can think of. The Met’s armour collection is spectacular but tends towards the end of the age of armour - this is true of most museums, but the Met does not have any genuine full armours from before 1525 or so - the armours in the knight’s hall are all from around 1550. For those of us interested in earlier armour their collection of helmets and other fragmentary bits of armour is quite good. That said the breadth of their collection is extraordinary, and it includes Indian and Japanese arms and armour as well as European.

The Wallace Collection is a medium-sized museum in London with a large collection of arms and armour, including a number of spectacular 15th century pollaxes and swords and some magnificent armours. The notes on the online collection, where they are available, are very good.

The Royal Armouries, of London/Leeds/Ft Nelson, just got a new online catalog. The collection here is magnificent (I hope to see the Leeds collection in person this fall), and includes what is probably the largest collection of Greenwich-made 16th century English armour anywhere (not surprising, since the core of the collection is the old Tower Armoury). The collection also includes a number of incredible Inidian armours, including a full bard for an elephant. The notes on the piecess in the online catalog are haphazard but sometimes quite extensive.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a smaller collection than the above museums, but they have a number of interesting pieces.

The Art Institute of Chicago doesn’t have many masterpieces, but it does have sizable collection including some intereting items.

Sadly Continental Europe is well behind Anglo-American museums in putting their collections online in searchable form. So the Arsenal of Graz, the Kunsthistorichesmuseum of Vienna, the Real Armeria of Madrid and the Musee de L’armee do not have these kinds of wonderful resources.

Relatedly, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made their publications from 1961 onwards freely available as PDFs online. This is fantastic news for anyone interested in art history or Material culture (including arms and armour, fashion, etc). So currently I am reading the (out-of-print) 'The Armoured Horse in Europe' before moving on to 'The Respleandance of the Spanish Monarchy'.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/titles-with-full-text-online

www.Archive.org is a priceless free resource, especially as my area hasn't been actively researched in decades.

www.academia.edu for researchs papers and publications. Can be tedious at time but some great papers available.

I'll also point out the National Archives and www.Familysearch.org, which has been digitizing NARA records and has many of ancestry.com's records available for free. See www.NARA.gov and above. They also make lesson plans based on primary sources for you teachers out there. Oh, and like most history oriented federal agencies (like the National Park Service...) NARA accepts volunteers and interns - you can help!

If you are not looking at the Library of Congress you're missing out on a growing digital resource. Also many professional developmemt classes are offered digitally. One of my favorite collections are the former slave narratives taken during in 1936-38. They also have some voice recordings and photographs in the collection. https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/

Oh, yea, the Smithsonian is digitizing stuff too. AND they're crowdsourcing transcription. And hey, here at the National Park Service we're celebrating our Centennial. So why don't you help transcribe some field notes taken at Yellowstone in the 1890s? https://transcription.si.edu/project/8522

Mystic Seaport maintains a tremendous research library, but online also has crew lists and ship records in a searchable database. Oroginals can be ordered through them or NARA. Www.Mysticseaport.org

The American Antiquarian Society has been slowly expanding their offerings. Www.AmericanAntiquarian.com

Because it's still October, check out www.salem.lib.virginia.edu for your Puritan Salem and witch trials fix. Probate records, court records, images, and transcripts of trial documents. Just so you know, Salem was doing a hell of a lot more then murdering innocent people in the 1600s, we had a booming maritime industry too.

Oh, and check out the NPS Heritage Documentation Programs, which include the Historic American Buildings Survey conplete with photos and in some cases architectural drawings. https://www.nps.gov/hdp/

With that, I have a fever, sick kids, and class tomorrow. If I think of more I'll add to this later. Forgive my formatting errors, on mobile.

Oh, and mods, can we put together a wiki page on free and paid online resources? Would be a pretty fantastic resource for students, non-historians, and even some of the older historians who lack google-fu.

Has anyone cited combinedfleet.com professionally? As far as I can tell, Parshall is pretty well respected, but years of HS and undergrad teachers and professors telling me not to use .coms is a strong urge to overcome.

The most useful for me are the National Museum of Japanese History Online Database and the National Diet Library Digital Collection.

If you can read Japanese then those have more resources than you can ever hope to go through.

There's an absolutely outstanding set of military uniform images at the New York Public Library Digital Collections website. For a long time I remember all the pictures here were quite low-resolution and described very vaguely but, looking at the site now, I see they're trying to make improvements in both regards (if you organise the images by "date digitised" you can see some of the Napoleonic French illustrations are now very high-resolution). Still, overall, to get proper use out of this site I think you'd need to have quite a strong knowledge of military uniforms to begin with -- beyond any captions as might happen to be on the actual images you're largely on your own as to working out what the pictures depict.

And this is extremely obscure but the University of Florida has very heroically scanned most of the back-catalogue of the journal of the Rossica Society, the most prominent English-language organisation of Russian philatelists. This is probably of no general appeal but as somebody who takes an interest in Russian postal history I've found this an utterly invaluable resource.

There's a few Islamic studies reference sources that I find to be extremely useful and as far as I know several are related projects (or in any event they link to each other.)

Quran.com, side by side English/Arabic text of the Quran in six different translations, which you can toggle to appear side by side with one another if you are so inclined. You can also listen to the oral recitation. My biggest gripe is that it used to have an Arabic-language tafsir that you could also look at for each verse and I think they removed that feature, though it does have explanatory notes from Abul Ala Maududi's The Meaning of the Quran. Useful I guess, but I'd rather have the tafsir of Tabari or ibn Kathir.

Quran Word by Word. A hypertextual and, as the name would suggest, word by word breakdown of the grammar and vocabulary of the Quran. Even better it's sorted by Arabic roots as well so you can compare not just identical instances of the same word but all of the derived variations which is critical for dealing with semitic languages.

Sunnah.com a comprehensive collection of the major Sunni hadith collections. The best part is probably the bi-lingual search function which also accounts for alternative meanings. I'm not entirely sure how it does this, but it works really well. So for instance a search for "Ghazwa" will turn up hadith that have been rendered un-translated to English as "Ghazwa" but also those that have translated as "military expeditions." I don't actually know how they did that, but it's brilliant. Biggest downsides are that for some of the collections they elide the chains of transmissions in the translation. Not an issue if you can read Arabic but misleading if you can't. They also don't have the major Shia hadith collections.

A great complement to this site is http://qaalarasulallah.com/, which has hyper-textual searching of every link in the chain of transmission for each hadith detailing their relations to one another and as well as their respective entries from the major biographical dictionaries like ibn Hajar. Downsides are that it's less slick than Sunnah.com and a lot of that content that I just described is in Arabic.

I also couldn't survive without Etjaal.net's "Arabic Almanac" which has root-word searchable images from the two best Arabic-English dictionaries (i.e. Wehr and Lane) as well as the most authoritative classical Arabic dictionary, Lisan al-Arab. No downside except that when dealing with Lane, specifically I prefer this site.

For my work, I am exceedingly fortunate that care and attention has been taken by Library and Archives Canada to digitise their holdings of WWI information. Anyone can freely search the War Diaries of the units of the Canadian Corps inclusive to the battalion level. This is dependent of how efficient a unit's adjutant (an administrative officer responsible for such records) was at his job (One record I saw recently was so sparse that an archivist had inserted a page with the note "Not much use to the Historian") though I find moving down through the chain of command (Corps, Division, Brigade, Battalion) for insight on a particular event can gain interesting perspective.

Library and Archives Canada is also in the process of digitising all of the service records from the First World War. This can allow me to tell more personal stories of the experience of WWI, but as it is a work in progress, and being done alphabetically, I am restricted (somewhere around "L" at this point) in who I can look up.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Veterans Affairs Canada have good tools for searching names of those who died during the war, which can help to disambiguate when searching for a specific individual with LAC who has a common surname.

I created a folder on my hard drive some years ago to hold downloaded .pdf's of open source material, and have a wealth of good texts to pull from at a moment's notice, such as the Official History of the Canadian Army in WWI (Nicholson), Sir Douglas Haig's Dispatches, and the British Army's field service manuals (the "how to" books of the army.)

The free availability of these resources has not only made research much easier than it would be otherwise, the variety of sources I have and keep finding are essential in keeping my writing factual, in depth vibrant and at times, intensely personal.

The Irish Censuses of 1901 and 1911 are online: http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie

These are absolutely fascinating, and have been very useful to me both when engaging in 20th century history and in genealogy (in which I dabble occasionally). They're searchable by name and location, and each record lets you look at a scanned version of the original document.

I haven't updated it for awhile, but I made a page awhile ago about online resources for nuclear and Cold War history (both free and subscription). Web-based Primary Sources for Nuclear History. Nuclear history in particular is very well-represented on the Internet because much of the source material is a "work of the federal government" and thus exempt from copyright under US law. There were also several major efforts to pool online documents by government agencies in the 1990s as part of the "Openness Initiative" of the Department of Energy; unfortunately many of these systems are quite creaky at this point and some have been taken down because infrastructure maintenance of these legacy document dumps is not a high priority of the current DOE.