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Language-learning app Bluebird aims to bring language instruction to everyone, regardless of mother tongue. Affordable, responsive, easy to set up, and simple to access, Bluebird is an excellent resource with an enormous amount of content.

The 30+ reference titles honored as the best of 2020 speak to today’s issues and range across arts, literature, health, science, history, and more.

Librarians and readers looking for reliable and useful free web resources will find these top picks from 2020 worth exploring. 

The best databases of 2020 address the medieval world, social change, literature, and more. 

Mindscape Commons provides interactive virtual reality mental health content for students learning clinical skills and empathy in fields like counseling, psychology, and social work. It exhibits normal growing pains as a new product, but it’s an intriguing resource with potential to shake up the library streaming media market.

Providing authoritative information on physical activity and sports, the Human Kinetics Library consists of 150 ebooks, as well as 200 videos of demonstrations of exercise movements, drills, and key physical activity concepts. Boasting easy navigation, multiple content links, an engaging interface, and numerous search features, this is an excellent resource for anyone with an interest in exercise science, fitness, health, nutrition, and sports.

Part of the growing Bloomsbury Fashion collection, the Bloomsbury Fashion Video Archive features more than 3,000 videos from the YOOX–NET-A-PORTER Runway Archive Collections. This selection is ideal for academic and professional institutions that support studies relevant to fashion (history, industry, and design) and the arts.

EBSCO’s Hispanic American Periodicals Index provides access to more than 335,000 citations, 170,000 links to full-text journals, and 700-plus journals, in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, dating back to the late 1960s. With regional publications in multiple languages, it stands out as a valuable resource for Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as international politics, cultural and area studies, and multidisciplinary studies.

This database clearly and powerfully chronicles the factors that gave rise to migration and resettlement, the logistics of the migrations and resettlements, and the political challenges faced by refugee populations, relief agencies, and national governments. It will be indispensable for migration and World War II scholars and students.

Screen Studies offers a range of works, from award-winning screenplays, to critical and practical works on film and filmmaking. A valuable resource for institutions that support cinema and film studies, screenwriting, and filmmaking.

Covering topics such as Black studies, business, history, nature, statistics, and technology, the following databases will help academic and public libraries meet the research needs of patrons—a task that's become even more difficult now that access to physical materials is more limited owing to the pandemic.

The focus of this user-friendly tool on women’s voices provides an important perspective for research, while the emphasis on female authored works makes it stand out from the crowd. An important addition to academic libraries. 

Author Emily Oster's latest project finds her teaming up with researchers and students to launch COVID Explained, a site that aims to provide unbiased, comprehensive information to help people make good decisions.

This outstanding one-stop gateway is invaluable, enabling users to find books, journals, videos, audios, dissertations, and more without having to switch platforms. Despite the overwhelming amount of content, this offering is intuitive.

Well organized and easy to search, it features a great breadth and depth of content from highly regarded contributors; high schoolers and general consumers of science information will be comfortable using this database.

This year's Best Reference articles are marked by stunning visuals, from the stirring Protest! A History of Social and Political Protest Graphics to the quirky Atlas of Poetic Zoology.

LJ's best databases of the year are a wide assortment, from a one-stop shop for fashion students to archives of sex and sexuality.

A roundup of the best free resources, from a way to identify bots on social media to an app geared at helping those with low vision. 

Whether you're looking to beef up your history, political science, literature, or religion reference section, here are the titles we'll be turning to this March.

Though relatively new, this database offers effective searching options and is full of content that education students and researchers will find extremely valuable, especially those interested in international perspectives and practices.

Ilona Bray, coauthor of How To Get a Green Card, offers a guide to help immigrants navigate the system.

Editor Peter Sokolowski on the challenges and rewards of editing the dictionary.

Academic Video Online has been a popular choice in libraries for many years, and with good reason. Its catalog is large and diverse, with strengths in many different subject areas. Overall, this is an excellent resource for libraries serving educational organizations at any level.

From more intuitive searching to digital circulation of formerly print-only reference materials and to more materials on marginalized populations, trends in reference reflect library users’ changing needs and expectations.

Digitizing, organizing, and contextualizing primary sources from libraries and archives presents unique challenges and rich opportunities.

Bloomsbury Fashion Central more than meets its promise to serve as the central source for interdisciplinary research on fashion and dress. The breadth of peer-reviewed and original content sets it apart, making it valuable for those interested in the history of fashion, industry, culture, and more.

This unique, extremely user-friendly collection of historical sources is highly recommended. Wiley’s dedication to the user experience, as demonstrated through promises of expanding the breadth of digitized materials from additional partnerships, improved features and search capabilities, and prominent invitations for feedback, make it an exciting platform to comb through, as well as one to keep an eye on as it expands and adapts to user needs.