On-line Electronic Texts and Resources
Increasing numbers of full-text works are being made available on the Internet and can be accessed with the appropriate assistive technologies, such as screen magnification software or screen readers. The works available are either in the public domain (i.e. no longer bound by copyright) or commercially available from the publishers. Please note that information on how to access works that are available in image form as .pdf documents through Adobe Acrobat, can be found at the access.adobe.com site.
- Public Domain electronic books
- Online Literature Library
- Subject Guides & Learning Materials
- Commercial On-line Sources of electronic books
- Journals in the Public Domain
- Journals from Commercial On-line Sources
Electronic Books
- CAST eText Spider allows you to do simultaneous searching of the following collections of publicly accessible works, which may also be individually searched from their own site:
- Project Gutenberg Web Site The first creator of etexts on the Internet, Project Gutenberg began in 1971 and is a fabulous source of out of copyright classics in the humanities that can be downloaded and read, but you may not be allowed to reproduce, modify or distribute them.
- The Internet Public Library (IPL) - Catalogues over 20,000 titles and makes them browsable by author, title or Dewey Decimal.
- University of Virginia's Ebook Library - As part of the University's Electronic Text Centre, this collection contains over 1,800 ebooks for Microsoft Readers and Palm-readable devices.
Directories
- Digital Book Index A very useful and comprehensive reference for online e-texts from a wide range of sources. Easy to use.
- RIT libraries A catalogue of databases that offer full text and other content.
Other sources of online books:
- On-line Books page, the digital library of U Penn - A directory of over 8,000 books that can be freely read from the Internet. Some books are in HTML and some are plain text and available for downloading. Check also their "Books in Progress" section, for latest additions and completed parts of works.
- Bartleby.com - In addition to reference works and other fiction and non-fiction titles, this site includes the complete 70 volume anthology of The Harvard Classics and Shelf of Fiction. This collection covers the major literary, philosophical and classical authors of Western civilisation from antiquity up to modern times.
- Bibliomania, Free World Literature Online - Voted one of the top 300 web sites in the World by Forbes magazine, this site has received a 4 star rating from The National Library for the Blind in the UK. In addition to literary works, you will find classic non-fiction, reference, biographical and religious texts.The books, short stories, plays, and articles are recommended by an Academic Board comprised of literature professors from Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Oxford. Bibliomania.com retains copyright on the HTML versions but most of the 2,000 or so works are in the public domain and can be downloaded for personal study. There are additional features.
- Classic Bookshelf - Readable electronic books. Adapt the presentation to suit your needs - change font size, background or text colour etc. About 2000 classic texts currently available.
- Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia - The Electronic Text Center's 70,000 plus some holdings of on-and off-line humanities texts in numerous languages contains 10,000 publicly accessible Modern English titles. It also includes over 1,800 ebooks designed for Microsoft Readers and Palm Pilots.
- The University of Michigan Humanities Text Initiative
- University of Adelaide e-book collection - contains classic texts in the fields of literature, philosophy, science and history.
- The World e-book Library - almost 27,000 e-books in HTML available to the public. Members can choose from 60,000 PDF format e-books and documents.
Online Literature Library
- The Oxford Text Archive - Collecting for twenty years, the OTA has one of the largest electronic collections in the world and caters specifically to the academic community.
- Literature online This site features English and American drama, prose and poetry; journals and articles, as well as general reference material.
- Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts - A collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy.
Subject Guides & Learning Materials
- The Perseus Digital Library nearly 1000 Greek & Latin texts and translations
- The Internet Ancient History Sourcebook Classical Greek and Roman texts, with links to larger online collections.
- Biz-ed : " A service for students and educators on business and economics related subjects."
- CELT - Corpus of Electronic Texts The online resource for Irish history, literature and politics.
- EEVL - the internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing.
- The History site - online resources covering the field of history. Includes reports, guides and research tools.
- SOSIG - The Social Science Information Gateway. "SOSIG can help you locate high quality sites on the Internet, which are relevant to social science education and research. The Internet Catalogue offers access to thousands of high quality Internet resources, each selected and described by academic librarians and subject specialists. The SOSIG service receives funding from the ESRC, JISC and the European Union."
- Sparknotes - e-texts and study guides, written by Harvard teachers and students.
- Free books for Doctors - 600 medical texts, including up-to-the-minute papers and reference books.
- Bookshelf - a collection of biomedical texts provided by the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, linked to PubMed Central.
- Details on some of the above subject gateways were provided by ROADS (Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based services), funded by JISC via the eLib programme.
Commercial On-line Sources for eBooks
- Safari Tech Books Online - A collection of technical books, a number of which are available on free trial.
- Questia - "The world's largest online library, containing books and papers on a range of subject." Includes some free texts.
Electronic Journals
- Free Full Text The site contains links to over 7,000 scholarly journals, all of which offer at least some free articles or issues.
- JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive - Established in America to "build a reliable and comprehensive archive of important scholarly journal literature", JSTOR has a broad selection of serials but is not fully accessible.
- A page entitled JSTOR and Accessibility discusses accessibility limitations and future improvements. Users of screen readers can make full use of the search interface, but the full-text articles have been saved as images, not text. Using the high quality printouts for scanning is likely more convenient than photocopying. All Irish universities are participants with full access to all the journals.
- The DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals - now contains 830 scientific and scholarly peer-reviewed publications. Maintained by Lund University Libraries in Norway. Again, not all journals will be fully accessible.
- The Talking Newspaper Society of the United Kingdom provides electronic subscriptions to major dailies such as the London Times, as well as popular magazines such as The Economist.
Last updated: April 22, 2004
