The British Columbia Digital Library

General Collections by Title

The focus of this set of links is on collections of electronic texts (not individual titles) preserved through libraries, archives, museums and corporate or private initiatives. Listings here are therefore primarily for the written word as expressed in manuscripts, books and periodicals, including newspapers. A few non-book digital library collections are included. Readers wishing further leads to non-book digital content should consult one of the directories or guides.

Unless indicated, access to these Web sites is free and open to the general public. See also Digital Collections by Subject, Directories, Guides, Portals and Search Engines to Digital Libraries and eBooks.

• Abacci Books. Based in Australia, this site combines free downloads  Project Gutenberg e-texts with Amazon.com book reviews. Links are provided to Amazon.com titles by or about Project Gutenberg authors in case the user wishes to purchase a commercial print version. There are also links to Wikipedia entries for biographical information for some authors. An RSS feed is available for monitoring updates to the site. Date created: 2002-01-01. Date accessed: 2002-12-31. Date added: 2002-12-31. Date updated: 2004-04-21.
• Accessible Book Collection (Fairfax, VA). This non-profit corporation provides " high interest/low reading level digital text to qualified persons with disabilities." Access to the collection is by an annual subscription fee. A list of titles is available, along with a single demonstration title. Date created: 2001-01-01. Date accessed: 2002-12-24. Date added: 2002-12-24.
• Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (Eric Lease Morgan, Infomotions, Inc.). Searchable/browsable collection of public domain American and British literary and Western philosophy electronic texts. A text can be turned into different e-book formats on the fly.
• The American Colonist's Library: A Treasury of Primary Documents: Primary Source Documents Pertaining to Early American History (Compiled by Rick Gardiner). Large set of links in chronological order to electronic versions of works considered influential in shaping the American worldview.
• ANU E Press. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University. Various titles available for free viewing online or as free Adobe Acrobat PDF or Palm handheld device e-book formats. Date accessed: 2003-12-19. Date added: 2003-12-19.
• ATHENA (Compiled by Pierre Perroud, Switzerland). Comprised of three main sections with links to ATHENA-edited and linked electronic works in the fields of Literature, Science, Arts. There is also a fourth section to Internet/Web tools, and special sub-categories of French and Swiss works. ATHENA is both searchable and browsable.
• Babelot, the Kingdom of Online Texts. Rome, Italy: Èulogos. A multilingual catalog (searchable by title or author) of online textual resources. See also IntraText. Date added: 2002-01-02.
• Bartleby.com: Great Books Online features public domain and licensed reference, novels, poetry and non-fiction books.
• Bibliomania (Bibliomania.com Ltd). Online literature, reference works and study resources in English or English translation can be searched and read in HTML form. Works can also be e-mailed.
• Biblioteca Digital de Obras Raras e Especiais. São Paulo, Brazil: Universidade de São Paulo. An extraordinary collection of digital facsimile rare books on a wide range of topics dating back to the 1400s. Many of these works pertain to early exploration of the Western Hemisphere by European adventurers and scientists. Date accessed: 2004-03-06. Date added: 2004-03-06.
• Blackmask Online, a Provider of Internet Literature. Texts can be read online in HTML or Adobe Acrobat PDF or downloaded in a variety of formats (Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat PDF, Rocket eBook,  Zipped format,  iSilo,  and Mobipocket). Date added: 2002-08-18.
• Books Online. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Libraries, Digital Collections. Summary: " Books Online are books that have been digitized, from the University of Toronto Libraries. They are freely available online and out-of-copyright. The collection currently contains 461 titles. The full text of these books can be searched, and they are also listed in our catalogue." Users are encouraged to submit titles for digitization. Titles must be held by the University of Toronto Libraries and published before 1920. Date accessed: 2004-12-21. Date added: 2004-12-21.
• BookShare.org. A " Benetech Initiative" (formerly Arkenstone) project to use volunteers to digitize books, including copyrighted ones, for use by those with visual impairments. Copyrighted digital books are available only to U.S. citizens or residents who have a disability that affects reading. Date added: 2002-01-03.
• Brookings Institution Press: Books Online. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Searchable/browsable full-text collection of books published by this organization. Topics include politics and government, economics, education, urban and international affairs, and U.S. defense policy. Date accessed: 2002-02-09. Date added: 2002-02-09.
• Classic Bookshelf. Ivybridge, Devon, UK: Classic Bookshelf Ltd., 2000-. Free HTML transcriptions of classic English language and translated literary works presented in HTML or in a Java-based interface that allows you to select various layout and display options. Date accessed: 2004-03-06. Date added: 2004-03-06.
• Concordances of Great Books see Great Books: Texts and Fully Searchable Concordances.
• DIEPER (Digitised European Periodicals). Central registry and database to digitized European periodicals available on multiple Web sites.
• Digital General Collection. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library. Part of: UMDL Texts (University of Michigan Digital Library Text Collections). Search or browse over 25,000 texts produced by the library's Digital Library Production Service. Date accessed: 2004-12-22. Date added: 2004-12-22.
• Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. Searchable/browsable collection of digital facsimiles of various arts and crafts works, chiefly from the 19th century. Date added: 2001-12-21.
• Digital Library of the Commons. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and Digital Library Program, Indiana University. A gateway to international literature on common pool resources (CPRs), site uses the eprints open source software to manage author-submitted papers. Date accessed: 2002-02-02. Date added: 2002-02-02.
• Early English Books Online (ProQuest Information and Learning Company). Browse through 200 electronic versions of the more than 125,000 titles listed in Pollard and Redgrave's A Short-Title Catalogue ... 1475-1640, Wing's Short-Title Catalogue ... 1641-1700, and the Thomason Tracts, 1640-1661. Works can be viewed and navigated as digital facsimiles each facsimile page can also be viewed as an Adobe PDF page. Illustrations can also be viewed independently of the work. A handful of works are also available as downloadable Adobe PDF files.
• Early Manuscripts at Oxford University. Digital facsimiles of complete manuscripts, including papyri, Celtic texts, and medieval manuscripts from six libraries within the university. Some of the other libraries, such as the Bodleian Library, also maintain separate Web sites with digital texts.
• eBook Mall. Adobe Systems Incorporated. This eBookstore contains full-text free eBooks in the proprietary Adobe Acrobat eBook format and is only accessible from within the Acrobat eBook Reader. Note: eBook Reader, while based on the Adobe Portable Document Format,  is independent of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the Adobe eBook Reader. Date added: 2002-01-11.
• eBooks@Adelaide. Adelaide, Australia: University of Adelaide Library. " The collection includes more than 500 classic works of Literature, Philosophy, Science, and History. Each work has been carefully formatted [in HTML] for maximum readability either on screen or when printed. Works can be read online, or downloaded for offline reading." Date accessed: 2003-07-07. Date added: 2003-07-07.
• ebrary. Mountain View, CA: ebrary, Inc. ebrary offers a library-oriented service and a consumer service. Install the free ebrary Reader via the ebrary Consumer Site to view free digital facsimiles of a wide variety of modern and historic texts which can be searched a number of ways. Date accessed: 2002-02-03. Date added: 2002-02-03.
• Electronic Classics Series (Created and maintained by Jim Manis, Pennsylvania State University). Established in August 1997, all titles, arranged by author, are viewable/downloadable as Adobe PDF files.
• The English Server (Eserver.org hosted by University of Washington). Over 30,000 publicly accessible digital texts pertaining to the humanities in a variety of file and display formats can be searched or browsed by category. Among the literary time periods and genres represented by electronic texts are the Eighteenth Century Drama Fiction Philosophy Poetry Rhetoric and the Thoreau Reader [19th century]. See also Digital Collections by Subject.
• The Etext Archives. Established in 1992 by Paul Southworth, most of the digital collections are in ASCII plain text or HTML formats.
• Ethics Updates. Edited by Lawrence M. Hinman. Hosted by the University of San Diego (California). Searchable/browsable collection of Web resources on ethics, both current and historic full-text works. Date added: 2002-01-06.
• 1st Books Library. A commercial publisher, the Web site also offers many free books. Registration is required to download titles. Date accessed: 2002-05-20. Date added: 2002-05-20.
• The Franklin Free Library. Burlington, NJ: Franklin Electronic Publishers. Free versions of thousands of books in Franklin's proprietary eBook format for its eBookMan handheld reader are available for downloading. Date added: 2001-12-16.
• The Free Library. Huntingdon Valley, PA: Farlex, 2003-. Summary: The Free Library offers " ... free, full-text versions of classic literary works from hundreds of celebrated authors, whose biographies, images, and famous quotations can also be found on the site. Recently, The Free Library has been expanded to include a massive collection of periodicals from hundreds of leading publications covering Business and Industry, Communications, Entertainment, Health, Humanities, Law, Government, Politics, Recreation and Leisure, Science and Technology, and Social Sciences. This collection includes millions of articles dating back to 1984 as well as newly-published articles that are added to the site daily." Users can register and personalize the home page to reflect their reading interests. Date accessed: 2007-10-28. Date added: 2007-10-28.
• The Global Library. Saint-Pascal, QC: The Global Library. " Acting as a global media and promoting local cultures and knowledge, the Global Library is a platform where societies are invited to express themselves through the publishing of electronic books, and the building one [sic] great multi-cultural and multi-lingual library." As of December 26, 2002, there is no online content in the form of electronic books. Date accessed: 2002-12-26. Date added: 2002-12-26.
• Great Books: Texts and Fully Searchable Concordances (Compiled by William A. Williams, Jr.). Variant title: Concordances of Great Books. Search for text (word or phrase) within multiple works or individual works by authors. Over 700 texts by English and non-English authors are represented, as well as fiction and non-fiction, including religious texts. Web site (http://www.concordance.com/)  inaccessible: 2003-12-23. Date updated: 2004-03-01.
• ibiblio: A Collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A library and archive of non-commercial, multimedia collections and software from around the world which are in the public domain or may be used of " fair use" provisions of copyright legislation.
• Internet Archive: Text Archive. San Francisco, CA: Internet Archive. A collection of digitized textual documents, including  books, contributed by institutions and digitization projects,  and accessible under an Open Access policy. Date accessed: 2005-10-22. Date added: 2005-10-22.
• Internet Library of Early Journals. Searchable/browsable collection of three 18th century journals (Gentleman's Magazine The Annual Register Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) and three 19th century journals (Notes and Queries The Builder Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine).
• The Internet Public Library (University of Michigan, School of Information sponsored by Bell & Howell Information and Learning) contains online texts.
• IntraText Digital Library. Rome, Italy: Èulogos. Describing itself as " the missing link between text and hypertext," the library consists of nearly 2,000 HTML texts and corpora in their original languages from religions, humanities, research, industry, all with built-in concordances and word lists. The texts  are rendered in a proprietary XML-based format called IntraText CT (Eulogos Text Markup Language or ETML). A few works are available for free download, most, however, must be read online. See also Babelot. Date updated: 2002-01-02.
• KnowledgeRush Book Directory. Hillsborough, CA: KnowledgeRush.com. Search or browse this directory  by title or author for  mostly public domain works available in either ASCII text or HTML. Date added: 2002-08-
• Litrix Reading Room. General collection of English language literature and non-English language literature in English translation presented in HTML format. A site-search engine is available, along with author, title and various genre and other category lists.
• ManyBooks.net. Matthew McClintock, 2004?-. A large collection of free books, each title available in an assortment of formats. You can browse and search by author, title, topic categories, languages and publication dates. Date accessed: 2008-01-18. Date added: 2008-01-18.
• netLibrary.com. Boulder, CO: netLibrary. Since its near-bankruptcy in 2001 and rescue by OCLC in January 2002, only a handful of the netLibrary stock of 40,000 titles is publicly accessible through the Reading Room link. Most of these Reading Room titles, some bearing copyright statements,  are sourced from public domain texts. Full access via netLibrary accounts is only through affiliated libraries and with an account  comes access to a few thousand more public domain titles. See also the netLibrary  eBook Tool Kit. Date accessed: 2002-07-02. Date updated: 2002-07-02.
• NYPL Digital Gallery. New York, NY: New York Public Library, 2005-. Opened on March 3, 2005 to Internet access, contains over 275,000 digital images, chiefly pictorial in nature, but including book-like materials such as illuminated manuscripts. The site can be searched or browsed through a variety of options, including Library of Congress subject headings and by names associated with a specific image. Date accessed: 2005-03-07. Date added: 2005-03-07.
• OAIster. Ann Arbor, MI: Digital Library Production Services,  University of Michigan, 2002-. Open Archives Initiative (OAI) harvester service whose " goal is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone." As of March 5, 2004, OAIster contained 3,045,063 records from 268 institutions. Date accessed: 2004-03-06. Date added: 2004-03-06.
• The Online Book Initiative (OBI) (Compiled by Barry Shein, Brookline, MA). Site provides access to ASCII (plain-text) files of literary and other works chiefly in English, including translations of non-English writers.
• The On-Line Books Page (Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom, University of Pennsylvania), established in 1993 at Carnegie-Mellon University, includes original transcriptions and links to thousands of digital books and serials in various formats on the Internet.
• An Online Library of Literature. English-language works and translations of various Graeco-Roman, European, British and American literary classics in HTML format.
• Orange Street Classics (Orange Street Press). A small selection of titles ranging from " Genesis" in the Bible to James Joyce's Dubliners presented in downloadable Adobe PDF files. Links to supporting research materials for some titles are also available.
• The Oxford Text Archive (Oxford University, UK). Established in 1976 as an electronic depository library, the OTA can searched for several thousand digital texts in a variety of languages and formats. The complete OTA catalogue for browsing by author is available only as an Adobe PDF file. The Oxford Text Archive is also a core component of the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
• Planet eBook. Pleasanton CA: Nitro PDF Software. Offers downloads of various free works of classic literature in the Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The company behind the site markets alternative PDF software. Date accessed: 2008-02-24. Date added: 2008-02-24.
• Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library is collection of public domain (under US copyright law) electronic texts chiefly available in ASCII (plain-text) format. This project was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart but was not widely available on the Internet until the early 1990s. Between 1971 and 1993, 100 electronic texts were prepared by volunteers, including the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. As of 2002, over 5,000 electronic texts are available from the US Project Gutenberg site. Date updated: 2002-08-18.
• Project Gutenberg of Australia includes a special section of works out of copyright in Australia. Date added: 2002-08-18.
• Public Domain Archive and Reprints Service. Baltimore, MD: Yakov Shafranovich, 2007-. Summary: " This is an experimental project, which is focused on archiving and republishing public domain works. At this time, this service can take a book from any of the supported sites such as the the Internet Archive (books in public domain ONLY) and reprint it via print on demand techology." . Date accessed: 2008-03-10. Date added: 2008-03-10.
• Public Domain Reader. Also known as: PD Reader. First established on October 18, 2000 as a subdomain of another site and known as the Project Gutenberg Reader, the former domain name pgreader.org was acquired on February 6, 2001. As of March 14, 2002, the site changed its name to Public Domain Reader and domain name to pdreader.org. This project marks up the Project Gutenburg Electronic Public Library ASCII text files and other public domain text sources as HTML. These works will continue to be available for free download. Last known URL (2004-11-22): http://pdreader.org. No longer active (?) as of 2004-11-22. Date added: 2002-01-03. Date updated: 2004-11-22.
• Rosetta Disk Project (The Long Now Foundation) is constructing a " near permanent archive" of 1,000 languages in online and hardcopy formats (micro-etched nickel disk and a book). Volunteer contributions to the language archive are welcome.
• Schoenberg Online Collection. Philadelphia, PA: Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image, University of Pennsylvania Library. Browse or search for high-resolution digital facsimiles of materials preserved by the university library. See also: English Renaissance in Context (ERIC). Date added: 2002-01-04.
• Secular Web Library includes a section of full-text electronic works written or published before 1970 and a section of modern works after 1970 on secularism.
• Web Book Publications. Also known as Web-Books.com. As of January 2001, links to over 900 electronic editions of various titles in its eLibrary and Classics (fiction, drama, poetry, and children's literature) sections, as well as links to Web sites on various topics. Titles are searchable and browsable by subject category. Some titles are in HTML format, while others in the eLibrary may be the Microsoft Reader format. Date updated: 2002-01-02.
• The Wiretap Elecronic Text Archive. Established in 1990, this is the oldest public collection of electronic texts. The collection includes technical documentation  relating to the computer industry and humor material. Date added: 2002-01-03.
• Worditude.com eBooks. Maintained by Lisa Yayla. Titles available in any or all of these online or downloadable formats: Adobe Acrobat PDF, Rocket eBook, Microsoft Reader, Palm Reader, ASCII text, and  HTML. Date added: 2002-08-18.
• The World War I Document Archive. Arizona: Great War Primary Document Archive, Inc. Hosted by Brigham Young University, Utah, USA. The GWPDA is a non-profit organization whose executive director is Dr. A.J. Plotke. Full-text documents and images (flags, medals, photographs, maps, and ephemera) are organized into topic categories and are keyword-searchable. The site includes a links page to other World War One sites. Date added: 2002-08-30.
• xRefer: The Web's Reference Engine. Keyword and subject category searches of electronic editions of current encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and quotations chiefly published in Great Britain. None of the titles are browsable on a page-by-page basis.

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