Search software

The Biotech Commons and Education Commons offer free 3D printing for all members of the Penn Community. 3D printing is available for both academic and non-academic projects.

The Fisher Fine Arts Library has two ARTEC 3D scanners available for use in the Materials Library.

A document conversion platform with customized OCR (optical character recognition); can recognize non-standard fonts.

Ableton Live and Push are available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, Studio 424.3 and loaner MacBook Pro.

PDF reader and editor with built-in OCR (optical character recognition).

A digital audio workstation (for recording, editing and producing audio files) "featuring both a multitrack, non-destructive mix/edit environment and a destructive-approach waveform editing view" [Wikipedia].

Flash-based software for web conferencing, desktop sharing, and online training. 

Versatile modular project management tool. Display results in multiple formats. Easily editable. As of March 2020, Airtable is offering free two year memberships to students as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

3D anatomy visualization through life-size digital dissection.

MacOS built-in voice recognition application.

MacOS built-in text-to-speech application allows you to listen to documents and easily create audio files from text.

MacOS built-in screen reader application.

An extensive proprietary package of geospatial software.

Audacity is a free, cross-platform audio editing program available online or via free download. Audacity facilitates audio imports, recording, editing, working with multiple tracks, and exporting. 

A powerful, free and open source 3D animation suite you can use for 3D models.

BlueJeans is a cloud based cross platform video conferencing service licensed by the University of Pennsylvania. It can be started and joined via a PC, Mac, smartphone, or regular landline (audio only). Each meeting can accommodate up to 100 participants and supports recording of the meeting and screen/media sharing.

Real-time online note taking for teams

Provides an easy browsing option for discovering Penn Libraries scholarly journal content. BrowZine pulls together articles from library subscription databases, joins them into complete issues, and displays them in a “newsstand” view.

Video editing tool. Create tutorials and presentations via screencast.

Canvas is the centrally-provided and supported learning management system at Penn.

CARTO Builder is cloud-based mapping software that does not require knowledge of code. Georectified historical maps may be used as basemaps.

You can sign up for this platform using the Github school pack or just sign up on their website. If you use your '.edu' email to gain access, it allows extra functionalities.

CARTO is transitioning to a new platform, CARTO Builder.

ChemDraw is the most common program used by individuals to draw chemical structures, glassware, and biological entities for inclusion in documents and presentations.  Drawings can be copied and pasted into Word and PowerPoint on the PC and are editable from within the document, provided you are using a computer that has ChemDraw installed.  On the Mac, ChemDraw entities are converted to image form when inserted and should therefore be saved separately for editing purposes.  It is also possible to launch a SciFinder or a Reaxys search from within newer versions of ChemDraw.  ChemDraw is available on the computers in the Chemistry Library Computer Lab.

An open source platform useful for visualizing networks, including co-authorship networks and biological data networks.

Tool that helps you create a data management plan.

Draft a data management plans that meet funding agency requirements.  DMPTool is formatted as a template to address specific aspects of managing research data including data types, ownership, description, preservation and sharing.  The tool prompts you with guidelines and questions specific to your funding agency.

A dictation application that can be trained to recognize your voice and specialized vocabularies.

Citation management tool.

Note-taking app that runs on all major operating systems.

Connect to Penn resources through the Penn Proxy bookmark tool. Add a button to your browser's bookmark toolbar, then when you want to view an article off-campus but are prompted for a subscription log-in, simply click the bookmark and enter your Pennkey and Password.

On a desktop? Check Lean Library Access.

Perelman School of Medicine Faculty Expertise Database. Faculty can enter CVs, grants and other information.

Mac software for video editing and output to a variety of formats.

Music composition software available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, on desktop workstations and on the loaner MacBook Pro. 

GarageBand enables music creators to record, edit, mix, and share audio tracks. Create your own songs from scratch, or make combinations using GarageBand's digital samples.

Available for MacOS and iOS devices.

Web-based, collaborative service for version control with git, source code management (SCM), and hosting software projects.

GraphPad Prism is a statistical and scientific graphing software used for organizing, analyzing, interpreting, and visualizing data in a professional manner.

The tool performs automatic syntax-based intra-language alignment or alignment between parallel texts in the same language (paraphrased from the site).

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor especially useful for typesetting, logo design, and line art. 

Page layout application used for hard-copy publication.

A powerful screen reader application designed to allow Blind and low-vision users to use electronic resources (for Microsoft Windows). 

Kahoot is a game-based classroom response for administering quizzes, facilitating discussions, or collecting survey data.

Video hosting platform.

Cloud-based electronic lab notebooks (ELNs). LabArchives is an Internet2 approved ELN.

Latex is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for technical or scientific documents but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. Latex is not a particular editing program but there are programs written specifically to make using Latex easy.

A browser extension that provides seamless access to Penn Libraries subscriptions from anywhere on the web.

The Lean Library Access extension provides quick and simple access to digital content provided by Penn Libraries.

Download the extension and it will automatically detect when you are on a website that contains content the library subscribes to.

The gray extension icon will turn green if the library provides access. If you are off campus or using wireless access, you may be prompted to log in with your PennKey credentials.

If the content you’d like to use doesn’t seem accessible, the extension will automatically check for open-access versions of the article or provide a link to interlibrary loan.

Download Lean Library Access

For mobile devices, see the Libraries' EZproxy browser bookmarklet

Digital audio software available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, in Studio 424.3 and loaner MacBook Pro

MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit) is a collection of tools that facilitate document classification, sequence tagging, and topic modeling. There is also an add-on toolkit (Graphical Models in MALLET) for visualization.

Web mapping tools that requires no knowledge of code. What makes this platform unique is that it allows easy manipulation of the background or base map in terms of colors that are assigned to each layer.

MarcEdit is used to create and edit MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records

MATLAB is a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming. Using MATLAB, you can analyze data, develop algorithms, and create models and applications. The language, tools, and built-in math functions enable you to explore multiple approaches and reach a solution faster than with spreadsheets or traditional programming languages, such as C/C++ or Java

Digital audio software. Max 8 is available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, in Studio 424.3 and loaner MacBook Pro.

Mendeley assists at every stage of the research process, from gathering research and annotating PDFs to organizing citations and creating bibliographies.

Open source software for processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. It also has an extremely fast slide function.

A free program for 3D printing to view, edit, analyze and repair STL files

Graphics tool for telling stories with maps and timelines.

Software to help organize research, manage citations, track progress, get and give feedback.

Qualitative data analysis software. Runs visualizations and queries, and incorporates categorical data.

Omeka is a content management system designed for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It makes top-shelf design easy with a simple and flexible templating system. Its robust open-source developer and user communities underwrite Omeka’s stability and sustainability. Omeka allows users to publish cultural heritage objects, extend its functionality with themes and plugins, and curate online exhibits with digital objects [ DIRT Directory ].

Web-based, collaborative software for gathering notes,, drawings, screen clips, and audio.

Clean and transform data.

A free software for creating solid 3D CAD models

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized [orcid.org].

Overleaf is the online collaborative LaTeX editing platform.

Penn Libraries offers institutional access to Overleaf, With an institutional account, Penn users have access to the full suite of Overleaf Professional account functionality.

For documents that are associated with an XML schema, Oxygen offers tag completion. It is particularly powerful for editing XSLT.

Palladio is a web-based platform for the visualization of complex, multi-dimensional data. You can use it to plot and analyze point data.

Penn+Box is a cloud-based collaboration service for securely managing and sharing files and folders within the Penn community and externally.

Adobe Photoshop is an industry standard piece of software for image editing.  It is used by photographers, graphic designers, web designers, videographers, 3D artists, typographers, students, and others. It is primarily a pixel-based (raster) image editing program, but it does contain some vector graphics editing, text layout, and video capabilities as well.

Web-based polling tool that uses web and mobile-device responses instead of clickers.

PowerNotes is a web app that helps with online research -- gathering and keeping track of source materials, staying organized, and creating a research outline.

Music theory and ear training software. Practica Musica is available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, in the Glossberg Recording Room.

Prezi is a web-based tool that outshines PowerPoint in many ways. It allows you to create and present presentations with motion and organic structure, and keeps your audience engaged.

Digital audio software available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, in Studio 424.3 and loaner MacBook Pro

Python is an important coding/programming language because it is simple and basic to learn.

Qualtrics is a web-based survey creation, collection, and analysis software tool. Can be used for the creation of open surveys, targeted (panel) surveys, and open polling.

QGIS (or Quantum GIS) is an open source geographic information system. It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. There are also numerous plug-ins that extend the functionality of QGIS.

An open source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It has both the flexibility and steep learning curve of a programming language.

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It provides a user-friendly interface for R. 

RefWorks is a web-based bibliography and database manager that allows you to create your own personal database by importing references from text files, online databases and other sources. You can use these references in writing papers and automatically format the paper and the bibliography.

SAS, produced by the SAS Institute, is widely used in business applications. It's known for its steep learning curve and facility with complex data sets.

The Scaife Viewer is a project of the Perseus Digital Library. It's a reading environment for pre-modern text collections, both in their original languages and in translation. Greek and Latin texts are emphasized but texts in additional pre-modern languages are also accommodated. Contributed material is published almost immediately and Scaife's widgets widgets can integrate texts with annotations and external APIs.

Scalar makes it easy to import media items such as images and videos from a variety of online archives.

ScholarlyCommons is the University of Pennsylvania's institutional repository for gathering, indexing, storing, and making widely available the scholarly output of the Penn community.

SciENcv is a tool managed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that allows researchers to create a biographical sketch (biosketch) to submit with their grant proposals for funding from NIH, and it can now also be used when seeking funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

As of June 1, 2020 the National Science Foundation (NSF) will require researchers to submit a biosketch that meets specific format requirements as part of their grant proposal. Researchers are encouraged to use SciENcv to create biosketches, as SciENcv offers a NSF-approved tool that is integrated with ORCID. Researchers can connect their ORCID iD with their SciENcv profile in order to transfer data from their ORCID record into SciENcv by clicking a button, rather than having to manually retype all of their information” [lyrasisnow.org/].

See also: Penn libraries guide on ORCID.

An easy-to-use OCR (optical character recognition) tool that allows users to transform documents into many formats, including MP3, DAISY, EPUB, and digital Braille.

Penn now has a subscription for all university students, faculty, and staff.

Music composition software available in the Ormandy Music and Media Center, on desktop workstations and on the loaner MacBook Pro. 

SketchUp is a great way to create 3D interactive landscapes. You can create buildings, objects, fantasy worlds - anything you can imagine effortlessly. You can also download and adapt 3D objects created by others. SketchUp also has functionality to create walking-tour video to create a tour of your creation as a standard YouTube video. 

Get the Sketchup STL from the Extension Warehouse

A statistical package produced by IBM, is known for its easy-to-use point-and-click interface.

Stata has both command line and point-and-click interfaces, with an intuitive syntax.

It comes in different flavors based on capabilities: Stata/SE (up to 32,767 variables) and Stata/IC (up to 2,047 variables).

A popular, web-based application for creating survey forms:

• Create surveys with different questions types
• Apply themes and use templates
• Collect responses
• Analyze results

Text Encoding Initiative is a community of practice in the field of digital humanities designed to work with manuscripts and other texts.  The TEI Guidelines define an XML format that is primarily semantic. Check the libraries' workshop calendar to join the TEI Collective to learn more about this coding practice.

A browser-based 3D design platform, now part of Autodesk.

Web-based project management software.

Turnitin may be used to check the originality of student work and to detect possible plagiarism.

Web-based application for performing text analysis. Provides data and visualizations for word frequency and word location in texts. Compares two texts side by side.

WordPress is a free web-based tool that was originally designed for blogging but now offers a full set of features for website creation.

Zoom is used for video conferencing, breakout classrooms, and huddle spaces.

A text magnification and text-to-speech application designed for low-vision readers (for Microsoft Windows).

Open-source citation management tool that lives in the Firefox browser.