Best free Digital Libraries - World

***** Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is the original free digital library of books no longer in
copyright. So you'll find a great many classic literary texts here. The full Gutenberg collection nowexceeds 5,000 books. The whole collection represents a monumental effort in unpaid, unselfish, labour since 1971.


The Project Gutenberg philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.
Their books are usually in plain text (ASCII) format. However to improve the online reading experience you can also use other reader software (check out our Software Page).
http://www.gutenberg.net

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of public domain documents from American and English literature as well as Western philosophy. You can search for and display texts from the collection & also search their content, & even create on-the-fly PDFs for offline reading or printing.
http://www.infomotions.com/alex

arXiv e-Prints Includes e-Print "preprints" in physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, and computer sciences. From Cornell University with assistance from the National Science Foundation (USA), the National Institute for Theoretical Physics (USA) and the University of Adelaide (Australia). Formats include PDF, PostScript, and DVI.
http://www.arxiv.org
NB: There are mirror sites in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, UK, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, & USA.

Athena Thousands of mainly French and Swiss-authored e-texts, across a broad range of especially Literature, Science & the Arts. In .html &. rtf versions. Also many links to famous works in German, Dutch & English too. Prepared or linked for the Web by the University of Geneva. Expand your mind & education here.
http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html

Bartleby.com The Encyclopedia of World History and The Harvard Classics are among many free texts offered at this award-winning site. Many classic reference works are available here.
http://www.bartleby.com/index.html

Bibliomania Offers more than 2,000 free classic texts, plus research works. In HTML format, readable by your web browser.
http://www.bibliomania.com

Bibliotheca Augustana A Latin e-library. Includes Bibliothecae Latina, Graeca, Anglica, Gallica, Germanica, Hispanica, Italica, Iiddica, Lusitana, Polonica et Russica. Collectio textuum electronicorum. Hae paginae proponent Musa adiuvante in lingua Latina - facta et ficta.
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/a_index.html

CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts). Irish literary, historical & cultural texts, in Irish, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and English. Presented in HTML, with a searchable online database. An initiative of University College, Cork, Republic of Ireland.
http://www.ucc.ie/celt

CogPrints Cognitive Sciences Eprint* Archive - Includes a wide variety of papers in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, biology, medicine, anthropology and computer science. Material dates back as far as 1950, although most of it dates since 1990. Some areas of the archive require registration, to obtain a username and password. *Eprints here are defined as the digital texts of peer-reviewed research articles, before and after refereeing. Before refereeing and publication, the draft is called a "preprint." The refereed, published final draft is called a "postprint." Eprints may include both preprints and postprints, as well as any significant drafts in between, and any post publication updates.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk

Complete Works of William Shakespeare but minus his poetry at present. The plays can be read either as a continuous text or by individual scenes. For reading online, in HTML.
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html

New Cornell University Library Historical Monographs Comprises 441 general monographs made available for online viewing as TIFF images, for personal or research use only. Languages include English, Dutch, French, German, Latin, Portuguese & Spanish. A fascinating mishmash of topics, including some science.
http://dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/c/cdl/

The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) An archive of international literature on "the commons" (i.e. that which is held in common or by a community). Many useful features for both readers and contributing authors. A full-text Digital Library, a Working Paper Archive of author-submitted papers, and links to relevant references are included. Thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) & the Indiana University Graduate School. As Adobe PDF files.
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu

Digital Library for Earth System Education: DLESE Over 5,000 searchable educational resources. Items are also organized into themes or collections, broadly as environmental, geographical, geological, oceanographical and other physical sciences; space science and technology; policy and educational issues and the philosophy of science. Resources are not archived on site but in a variety of collaborating collections. Funded by the National Science Foundation (USA).
http://www.dlese.org/dds/index.jsp

Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: dLIST A repository of electronic resources in Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Technology (IT). Contains published and unpublished papers, data sets instructional and help materials, pathfinder , reports & bibliographies. So far in English only. User registration required to access some areas. In HTML or PDF.
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/

Ebooks Online Library Around a dozen authors ranging from Aesop to Sun Tzu, with huge representation of Charles Dickens & Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus a goodly measure of Jules Verne & Mark Twain. In very clear HTML for online reading, this collection has been sourced from Project Gutenberg and prepared with special attention to the needs for visually impaired and older readers. You can set the font size & colour, or background colour, with just a click in the Settings panel. http://www.readasily.com/

Elfwood Elfwood is a huge, non-profit home to amateur Fantasy/Sci-Fi literature and art, plus some How -To Guides. The site holds over twenty thousand works of art & literature by over fifteen hundred Science Fiction/Fantasy artists and writers.
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se

The E Server Bit of a mind flip might be an exaggeration, but there is certainly nothing stodgy about this large & contemporary collection of online intellectual texts & resources. Based at the University of Washington.
http://eserver.org

Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature Links site for literary texts in Western European languages other than English. Languages include Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish & Swedish.
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html

Electronic Texts On The Internet A useful links page with over eighty entries.
http://www.refdesk.com/factelec.html

EuroDocs Primary historical documents from Western Europe. Selected Transcriptions, Facsimiles and Translations.
http://eurodocs.lib.byu.edu

Great Books Index From Aeschylus to Virginia Woolf - links to online works, in English translation, by more than 130 classic authors. Please check for any copyright restrictions (which may in a few cases apply for other than reading online). A redoubtable effort from Ken Roberts of Ontario, Canada. http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html

Great Books and Classics Provides free HTML online versions of many famous authors from before 200 BC to the 20th Century. Linked with Amazon.com for commercial print offerings of the titles.
http://www.grtbooks.com

Internet Classics Archive More than 440 mainly Greco-Roman texts, with some Chinese and Persian. By 59 different authors. In English translation. For online reading, some downloads available.
http://classics.mit.edu

Internet Public Library Over 20,000 free books available online. The Internet Public Library's Mission Statement says: " The Internet Public Library (IPL), is a public service organization and learning/teaching environment at the University of Michigan School of Information. The IPL Online Texts Collection contains over 20,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification". For questions about the online texts collection, or how to search, please see their help page.
http://www.ipl.org/reading/books

Kurt Stüber's Online Library - historic and modern biology books Large library of books on biological subjects, many currently out of print and hard to obtain. Mostly German authors, but luminaries such as Charles Darwin are also present. In German, with some English and French (a few works are old enough to be in Latin). Online in text chapters or as individual scanned pages. Browse the collection by author, title, category or publication date.
http://www.zum.de/stueber/

MIT OpenCourseWare The first stage of an ambitious & generous plan to make all Massachusetts Institute of Technology course materials available on the Internet, for free download. Materials for 500 courses have been accessible since the end of September 2003. Materials are in English, but a number are also available in Spanish & Portuguese. Presented in HTML. However courses may include Adobe Acrobat PDF files, Java Applets, Shockwave, Real Player, Java, and MATLAB files (software for all of these may be downloaded from the site's Technical Requirements page). This so far unique gift is made possible by MIT with support from the William and Flora Hewlett & Andrew W. Mellon Foundations.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Course list at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm

National Academy Press Read over 3,000 National Academy science, engineering, and health texts free online. You can also purchase print copies if you wish. These e-books represent the cream of U.S. research & policy opinion in these fields. Texts are presented in a fully-searchable "Open Book" format, which also allows for page browsing & internal links. Open Book" is HTML, & moreover the format is prepared so that you can send people an individual page reference as an URL. PDFs are also available. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences provides this site.
http://www.nap.edu

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) Links to digital theses/dissertations available in Australia, Canada, many European nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan & the USA.
http://www.ndltd.org/

Online Books Page This University of Pennsylvania site offers access to more than 16,000 books online. Plain presentation but well worth the browse.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books

Online Medieval and Classical Library From The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to Yvain, or The Knight With the Lion, & including such works as: The Lay of the Cid, The Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Orlando Furioso, the High History of the Holy Graal, many Icelandic sagas, some Chaucer & much else besides. In HTML for reading online, or download in PKZIP v.2.04g compressed format. Thanks to Douglas B. Killings, Sun Systems & the University of California at Berkeley.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL




Oxford Text Archive From Oxford University, this archive was founded in 1976. High-quality, well-documented electronic texts for research and teaching. More than 2,500 resources in over 25 different languages. A premium academic resource. Public domain texts are freely available from the on-line catalogue and may be downloaded in a number of different formats. Some texts require the user to obtain the written permission of the original depositor.
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk

Pennsylvania State University Electronic Classics Site: " The Labyrinth" PSU's e-books are presented as .pdf files (Adobe's Portable Document Format). Read them with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Established in 1997, the site offers many classical works of literature in English, plus original works published by Penn. State Uni.
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htm

Perseus Project A great classical digital library site, with Greek & Latin texts, commentaries, an atlas, coin images, art, archaeology and more.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

Project Libellus The University of Washington, Seattle, provides this library of Latin texts, readable in your web browser. In HTML & TeX (a subset of ASCII). Thirteen classical Latin authors represented.
http://www.hhhh.org/perseant/libellus

Project Madurai Tamil Digital Library under preparation by voluntary effort. So far over 240 works in Tamil script are available, in TSCII (Tamil Script Code for Information Interchange) format. Old Tamil classic works predominate so far.
http://www.tamil.net/projectmadurai/

Project Runeberg Project Runeberg publishes free electronic editions of old Nordic literature on the Internet. Since 1992. More than 300 titles, mostly in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish & Icelandic.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg

SAIL-eprints Find scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, in Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Materials Sciences, Nanotechnologies, Microelectronics, Computer Sciences, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Earth Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography Agriculture and related application activities. SAIL enables searching over 70 institutional open access archives around the world. NB: Downloading of e-documents is possible only if it is permitted on the original archive. http://eprints.bo.cnr.it/

Soil And Health Library Free public library offering books on holistic agriculture, holistic health, self-sufficient living, and personal development.
http://www.soilandhealth.org

Universal Library (under development) "The principal benefit of the Universal Library will be to supplement the formal education system by making knowledge available to anyone who can read and has access." A project of Carnegie Mellon University & the governments of China & India - much of the scanning will be done in the latter two countries. The million books project will have considerable content in many Indian and Chinese languages, as well as English. For more information about this far-reaching initiative see:
http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu

University of Virginia Electronic Text Center has more than 10,000 publicly accessible texts in thirteen languages (& over 164,000 publicly available images). These texts are available to web browsers, but in addition there are 2,000 + e-books available (in English) for MS Reader & Palm Reader.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu

Virtual Library "The Virtual Library is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the Web itself. Unlike commercial catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert…" Fourteen primary categories to check out, or use the search engine.
http://www.vlib.org/

World eBook Library Opportunities to read or download thousands of HTML books online. Provides free, unlimited public access to a comprehensive collection of public domain texts & references, and links to thousand of on-line libraries around the world via the World Wide Web and/or Telnet. For a small annual fee, also offers access to over 60,000 PDF e-books and e-documents, plus 7,000 mp3 audio books. From the World Electronic Text Library Foundation, based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
http://netlibrary.net/WorldHome.html