LibGuides: Multiculturalism: Search Tools

Resources for Locating Information on Countries and Cultures

Country Profiles from the BBC News - (The British Broadcasting Corporation)
Full profiles provide an instant guide to history, politics and economic background of countries and territories, and background on key institutions. Also included are audio and video clips from BBC archives.
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These profiles present a cursory overview, rather than detailed information, on the culture of a given country. Particularly useful are the timelines that present key dates in a country's history and that set the context for additional research.
World Culture Encyclopedia
This website provides extensive information about countries and their cultures in two sections: ‘Multicultural America’ and ‘World Cultures’.
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The information provided in 'Multicultural America' covers settlement patterns of a particular ethnicity and such processes as assimilation and acculturation. There is a wealth of information available to assist a researcher in gaining an understanding of immigrant communities in America.
Native Languages of the Americas
Includes alphabetical master list of Native American languages with links to specific information about each language and its native speakers. Also provides carefully collected and organized links to many different aspects of native life and culture, with an emphasis on First Nations Peoples (Native Americans) as a living people with a present tense.
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This is a database that is rich in cultural information as well as linguistic materials.
The World Fact Book (Central Intelligence Agency)
Produced for US policymakers and coordinated throughout the US Intelligence Community, The World Fact Book provides facts on every country, dependency, and geographic entity in the world and provides information on the history, people, government, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
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Make it a point to check out the tabs (References, Appendices, and particularly the FAQs).

What Are Open Educational Resources?

"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

They include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge." - Hewlett Foundation

Resources for Language Study and Related Cultural Components

Culture Talk on LangMedia - Created by the Five College Center for the Study of World Languages
Provides video interviews with native language speakers from different cultures from around the world. Video clips are arranged by country, then by topics such as family, food, education, religious and cultural customs, work, art, sport, travel, and more.
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The Five College Center for World Languages offers instruction in less-commonly taught languages for students of Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
* OER Commons - World Cultures *
The OER Commons is a single search source that pulls materials from multiple OER collections. Use the left-side menu to refine your world cultures resources search by education level, material type, media format, and conditions of use.
* OER for Ethnic Studies
An example of Open Courses listed here is Writing About Race (MIT OpenCourseWare), which will examine the "construction of race and racial identity as reflected from a number of vantage points and via a rich array of voices and genres." Readings will include literary works by such writers as Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz and Sherman Alexie.
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This course is one among several that is using OER material at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, a branch of the City University of New York.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.