Free Resources Online for Entertainment and Enlightenment

With many people at home for the foreseeable future, we wanted to highlight a few resources that offer free entertainment options. We’d like to ask our readers to send us other resources and we will then update this post periodically. Send suggestions to Student Services Librarian Brian Cassidy at b.e.cassidy@csuohio.edu. For future postings on the topic, we will post new links with a link back to this blog post.

Cleveland Public Library – offers online magazines, MP3 downloads, ebooks, audiobooks, videos, movies, television, and a classical music library. All can be accessed with your CPL library card number and pin. (NOTE: many public libraries have online offerings, so check with your local library if you don’t have a CPL card)

Internet Archive – a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Librarians and others also use the archive for its “Wayback Machine,” which crawls the web periodically and captures websites as they existed on a certain date. So if you have a URL that no longer exists, you may be able to find a previous copy of the website here.

Open Culture – Free online courses, MOOCs, Textbooks, Language Lessons, ebooks, audio books, and movies.

Google Arts & Culture – view famous museum collections and landmarks from your computer/phone.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – Watch and listen; new performances posted daily.

Three Months of Free Guitar Lessons from Fender – Fender is world-famous as a guitar maker; currently Fender play is offering 3 months of free guitar lessons.

Neil Young Archives – Neil Young is world-renowned rock ‘n’ roll musician; free limited access to the Neil Young archives.

Austin City Limits – Famous PBS live music show from Austin, Texas; access to free episodes and some seasons.

Montreux Jazz Festival – Free access to 50 famous shows from the world famous Montreux Jazz Festival.