ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) is an online collection of around 5,000 books of high quality in the humanities, accessible through institutional or individual subscription. HEB is available to entire campus communities. Using any web browser, faculty, students, staff and library patrons of subscribing institutions can view and search the HEB collection from campus offices, libraries, dorms and remotely when off-campus.
American Archive of Public Broadcasting
The Library of Congress and WGBH in Boston have embarked on a project to preserve for posterity the most significant public television and radio programs of the past 60 years: The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The American people have made a huge investment in public radio and television over many decades, calculated at more than $10 billion. The American Archive will ensure that this rich source for American political, social, and cultural history and creativity will be saved and made available once again to future generations.
BiblioVault helps scholarly publishers preserve and extend the value of their books, providing long-term secure storage of digital book files for member presses, as well as a wide range of scanning, printing, transfer, conversion, and distribution services.
Launched in late 2001 by the University of Chicago Press, BiblioVault operates under the umbrella of Chicago Distribution Services, which also oversees a digital printing center, the Chicago Digital Distribution Center (CDDC). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the development of BiblioVault and the CDDC with three grants totaling $3.2 million.
BRILL Online Books and Journals
Brill Online Books and Journals is among the richest scholarly sources of its kind, with the full text of near 300,000 book chapters and journal articles, covering the Humanities, International Law and Biology.
Brill's MyBook program enables users to purchase a paperback copy of books of their choosing, provided they have access to the e-book version.
Chronicling America is a website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages. Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress. An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.
Columbia's digital library collection websites are a gateway to digital reproductions and descriptions of photographs, posters, drawings, objects, ephemera, and manuscripts as well as other archival material from Columbia's rare and special collections.
This site provides access to photographs, manuscripts, books, audio recordings, and other materials of historical interest that have been digitized and made available by members of Digital Commonwealth, a statewide consortium of libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies from across Massachusetts.
Digital Public Library of America
DPLA connects people to the riches held within America’s libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions. All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format. The cultural institutions participating in DPLA represent the richness and diversity of America itself, from the smallest local history museum to our nation’s largest cultural institutions.
Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is independent. All funding is via donations, 40% of which comes from sponsorsand 60% from members and publisher members. All DOAJ services are free of charge including being indexed in DOAJ. All data is freely available.
Europeana Collections provides access to over 50 million digitised items – books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.
Our dedicated thematic collections on art, fashion, music, photography and World War I contain galleries, blogs and exhibitions to inform and inspire.
HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The mission of HathiTrust is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge. There are more than 120 partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide.
The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 20+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 450+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.
As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:
This fulltext search index includes over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive. The collection spans from digitized copies of eighteenth century journals through the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is dedicated to the memory of our nation's thirty-fifth president and to all those who through the art of politics seek a new and better world.
Located on a ten-acre park, overlooking the sea that he loved and the city that launched him to greatness, the Library stands as a vibrant tribute to the life and times of John F. Kennedy.
Come tour our Museum which portrays the life, leadership, and legacy of President Kennedy, conveys his enthusiasm for politics and public service, and illustrates the nature of the office of the President.
Students and scholars can also arrange to conduct research using our collection of historical materials chronicling mid-20th century politics and the life and administration of John F. Kennedy.
JSTOR and ARTSTOR Open Content
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
We help you explore a wide range of scholarly content through a powerful research and teaching platform. We collaborate with the academic community to help libraries connect students and faculty to vital content while lowering costs and increasing shelf space, provide independent researchers with free and low-cost access to scholarship, and help publishers reach new audiences and preserve their content for future generations.
JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that also includes Ithaka S+R and Portico. ITHAKA also provides services for Artstor.
Legal Music for Videos from Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a system that allows you to legally use “some rights reserved” music, movies, images, and other content — all for free. CC offers free copyright licenses that anyone can use to mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. For instance, a musician might use a Creative Commons license to allow people to legally share her songs online, make copies for friends, or even use them in videos or make remixes.
The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, newspapers, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office.
The Library preserves and provides access to a rich, diverse and enduring source of knowledge to inform, inspire and engage you in your intellectual and creative endeavors. Whether you are new to the Library of Congress or an experienced researcher, we have a world-class staff ready to assist you online and in person.
Library of Congress Digital Collections
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish. Please note: Our readers are free to choose the books they wish to record. LibriVox sees itself as a library of audiobooks. Because the books we read are in the public domain, our readers and listeners should be aware that many of them are very old, and may contain language or express notions that are antiquated at best, offending at worst.
Making of America (MoA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. The collection currently contains approximately 10,000 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints. For more details about the project, see About MoA. Making of America is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
New Additions: We have recently added a new feature, subject browsing. 99 more volumes focusing on New York City were added to MoA in June 2007. Digital conversion of the volumes was made possible through a gift from UM alumnus Lawrence Portnoy.
The National Archives--other presidential libraries [in addition to JFK]
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States Federal government, only 1%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever.
Those valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has been a center of information innovation since its founding in 1836. The world’s largest biomedical library, NLM maintains and makes available a vast print collection and produces electronic information resources on a wide range of topics that are searched billions of times each year by millions of people around the globe. It also supports and conducts research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. In addition, the Library coordinates a 6,500-member National Network of Libraries of Medicine that promotes and provides access to health information in communities across the United States.
The Newberry has actively collected research and reference materials since its foundation in 1887. From the mid-1890s on, its collecting activities have focused on the humanities, with an emphasis on original sources for the study of European and Western Hemisphere history, literature, and culture since the late medieval period. The Newberry has also continued to build its collection of secondary books – including reference works, monographs, periodicals, and other serials – and more recently digitized reproductions to support the use of its original sources.
Today, the library's evolving collections include more than 1.5 million books, five million manuscript pages (15,000 cubic feet), and 500,000 historic maps. Look at Recent Acquisitions to see examples of what has been added to the collection during the last few years. Our History and Timeline pages offer further details on individual collections and people in the Newberry’s past.
The earliest historical evidence of the University of Michigan's Music Library can be found in a School of Music bulletin from 1940 that states, "A special branch Music Library is maintained in Burton Tower." From the seemingly inauspicious origins implied in this single brief sentence has grown an academic research music library ranked among the top five in the United States, and recently referred to by the National Association of Schools of Music as "one of the world's major music collections." The change from a small departmental collection with the sole purpose of supporting School of Music curricula, to one of the world's premier music libraries known and used by scholars and performers internationally was brought about by a fortunate combination of support and talented people.
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of humanities and social sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of open access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of deposit, quality assurance, dissemination, and digital preservation.
Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published.
Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Two decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.
Project Gutenberg offers over 57,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
Project MUSE is a trusted provider of authoritative humanities and social science books and journals from more than 200 of the world’s most distinguished university presses and scholarly societies
PubMed Central--Biomedical and Life Sciences Journal Literature
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM). In keeping with NLM’s legislative mandate to collect and preserve the biomedical literature, PMC serves as a digital counterpart to NLM’s extensive print journal collection. Launched in February 2000, PMC was developed and is managed by NLM’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI).
At the center of research across the Smithsonian are the specialized branches and librarians of the Smithsonian Libraries. The collections and staff of the Libraries play a key role in helping the Smithsonian’s research and curatorial staff make sense of the museums’ almost innumerable, often unique, objects and their cultural and historical contexts. The Smithsonian Libraries are a hidden national treasure, where experts come to test and expand knowledge and where America and the world can turn for authentic answers.
SpringerOpen is our portfolio of over 200 peer-reviewed, fully open access journals and over 500 open access books covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences. Publishing with SpringerOpen makes your work freely available online for everyone, immediately upon publication.
Springer’s high-level peer-review, publishing and production processes apply for our SpringerOpen journals and books in precisely the same way they do for titles with the subscription-based model, guaranteeing the quality and reliability of the work.
The Library of Congress Digital Collections, Primary Sources by State, State Resource Guides, and other digital initiatives provide free access through the Internet to the treasures of the Library’s collections that document America’s history, culture, and creativity. Across the country, the archives, cultural institutions, museums, and libraries of most states are collaborating to create similar projects. They provide unprecedented access to materials that document local and regional growth and development as well as a look at the cultures and traditions that have made individual states and communities unique. The following is a curated list of state and regional digital projects and collaborations. For each project, the primary institution or institutions overseeing the project are noted. The list will expand as new projects are reviewed.
UCL Library Services consists of 18 libraries and learning spaces located across London, covering a wide range of specialist subjects ranging from bio-medicine and science to arts, architecture and archaeology, plus learning spaces in Senate House and the Graduate Hub. Our digital library is one of the best in the world, and we manage UCL Discovery, the institutional repository which enables the world to access our researchers’ work for free. We’ve also started the UK’s first completely open access university press, UCL Press. Together, UCL Library Services is at the heart of providing the information to support UCL’s academic excellence and research that addresses real-world problems, as set out in the UCL Research Strategy, Delivering a Culture of Wisdom.
The Veterans History Project of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American war veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of war.
World Digital Library [can select by language--e.g. Filtering by Chinese, Filtering by Spanish, Filtering by German, Filtering by Latin]
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, carried out with the support of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), and in cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world.
The WDL makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
Yale University Digital Collections
We're transitioning to a new, more integrated search platform for our digital collections. In the meantime you can search both from this interface, using the guidelines below to determine in which system you should look. The old cross-search is still available during the transition.