It is not surprising that colleges and universities produce high-quality research materials. You can find scholarly literature, collections of primary sources, and research guides on university websites. We'll go over how to recognize educational websites using the URL in a later section.
For instance, George Mason University's Center for History and New Media hosts a number of excellent research sites providing primary sources, original scholarship and multimedia exhibits. Click the image to the right to see what it looks like.
If you were doing a project related to copyright issues, you would want to visit Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use Center, which has a variety of resources on the topic.
For a paper on traffic problems, you could visit UC Berkeley's Traffic Safety Center, which provides a number of freely accessible reports.
The simple fact that a page is part of an educational website does not guarantee its quality. You will still need to evaluate the resource before you can use it for your research.
Sometimes, for instance, you will find materials on an edu domain that are simply class notes or personal material uploaded by professors or students (click the image to the right for an example). Often you will find a tilde (~) and/or somebody's last name in the URL for such a page. Resources that more clearly carry the stamp of the educational institution will not have tildes.
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