Instructify

Ibiblio. It’s the public’s library.

“Wait a minute,” you’re thinking. “Isn’t… uh… the public library the public’s library?”

Well, yes, of course it is. And while this librarian would never advocate replacing the brick-and-mortar library with anything, she will admit that ibiblio can do a lot of things the public library can’t.

Ibiblio is a gigantic collection of freely available information, compiling such disparate resources as the Internet Poetry Archive, the Internet Apiculture and Beekeeping archive, Asian classical music mp3s, a guide to learning Tamil, suggestions for how to incorporate art into math lessons, and something called “Phase transitions on Lattices” (which claims to be about physics, but I’ll never know) under one digital roof. And because there are many librarians behind this project, it’s all carefully indexed so you can easily find what you’re looking for.

The good folks at ibiblio are firm believers in the open source model, so the site also serves as a repository for open source software and recent research on open source communities. They also encourage users to become contributors, by adding critiques or creating their own content.

Bonus: unlike the public library, ibiblio is open 24 hours a day. (But they still haven’t found a way to make it smell pleasantly of old books.) –EMILY JACK

Ibiblio