A collection of resources that collect public domain texts, similar to those collected by Wikisource. Please consider viewing these sources when looking for works to add to our project.

Sources edit

With Pagescan edit

Database Proofing
quality
Pagescans Notes
American Memory excellent partial From Library of Congress
Anarchy Archives good partial Some works are under copyright
Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica) excellent Yes Mostly French-language works, with some English. Page image viewer with PDF downloads available.
Biodiversity Heritage Library excellent Yes BHL in flickr / BHL Blog
British History Online excellent no Core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles
British Library excellent yes Run search, then refine the access options to "online" and the format to "book", pdf though may need deriving to djvu at Internet Archive (announcement)
Cambridge Digital Library excellent yes Need to download image by image. Click on thumbnail and then you can get the link to the full image and build the download.
Christian Classics Ethereal Library excellent yes Many formats available
CrossAsia @ University of Heidelberg n/a yes Mostly Asian studies-related with PDF downloads
Digital Bodleian n/a excellent Over a million pages, including very old English manuscripts. Can download as PDF.
Digital Book Index variable variable This is really a meta-search, which links to texts in other locations
Distributed Proofreaders excellent some List of available sources
Family history books n/a yes Plus local histories. Predominantly PDF works; some have text layers (raw OCR), not all
Google Books poor yes Not all texts are in the public domain. Many texts are only partly available.
Hathi Trust variable yes PDF downloads only for members of certain institutions. Haiti Trust will mark PDF with your institution, the date accessed, and other information. You can download individual page images using the url scheme https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/image?id={ID};seq={N};size=10000;rotation=0.
Internet Archive poor yes Most texts are raw OCR without proofreading
Library of Liberty good yes Some works are under copyright
Modernist Journals Project n/a yes Images stored in the format https://repository.library.brown.edu/iiif/image/bdr:Image_Number/full/,Image_Size/0/default.jpg . There is no default upper limit although most images have a maximum value of 3500 (increment is by 50).
UK Government Statute Law database excellent some Many are Crown Copyright (expires after 50 years)
Universal Digital Library poor yes Some works are under copyright (copyright status is indicated), many non-English works
University of Bielefeld n/a yes
University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) n/a yes Image viewer with PDF downloads
University of Hong Kong Libraries n/a yes No evident main page for this repository so use a domain-scoped Google search. See also some Wikisource community notes about downloading from this repository.
University of Michigan library NA yes Pagescans only
Washington State Historical Records Project poor yes Many copyright expired historical works scanned at usable quality. Mostly northwestern US history, but not exclusively; some non-English.
Wilbourhall excellent yes Classical works in several languages and translations, including Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc.
World Digital Library n/a yes
Archaeological Survey of India n/a yes pdf files of good quality; covering many subjects and many countries; some works under copyright
Digital Library of India n/a yes Pages in TIFF format; requires TIFF reader for online page-by-page viewing and saving; requires DLI downloader for downloading PDF. Huge collection; variable scan quality; many copyrighted works
Digital Library of India ERNET Good yes PDF books. Claims all books copyright expired. (5,50,000 books)
Maine Music Box good yes collection of more than 22,000 musical works, consisting primarily of sheet music
Trinity's Access to Research Archive good yes contains many Irish works
State Library of Western Australia n/a yes mostly works concerning Australia, downloads as PDF
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Images (SCETI) n/a yes Mostly individual images. The advanced search is easier to use.
Northern Illinois University Dime Novels good yes Collection of w:dime novels. OCR not included in PDFs, but is available separately.

Without Pagescan edit

Database Proofing
quality
Pagescans Notes
Baldwin Project excellent no Children's books
Bartleby excellent No Texts not already imported are listed at User:Quadell/Bartleby.
Bibliomania good no Mostly reuses Gutenberg content
Dinsmore Documentation excellent no Professional proofreaders, showing off their work
History Sourcebooks good no Despite frequent © notices, texts are in the public domain
ibiblio excellent no 19th Century Works on Indian history written by British authors.
Literature Network good no Includes biographies and photos of authors
Project Gutenberg variable No Texts proofed by the Distributed Proofreaders are of excellent quality. Others are less reliable.
Sacred Texts excellent no includes original images
University of Virgina library excellent no Many texts are only available to UV students and staff
Wake Forest University library excellent no Many texts are annotated
Yale Law School's Avalon Project good no Some works are under copyright

Periodicals edit

Specific collections edit

Local interest edit

Nebraska edit

North Carolina edit

Oregon edit

Pennsylvania edit

Other resources edit

Although these sites don't provide source texts, they may be useful to Wikisourcerors in other ways.

  • LibriVox - public domain recordings of public domain works, in both mp3 and ogg.
    • Upload the ogg files to the Commons, tagging the files with {{LibriVox public domain}}, and then use {{listen|Soundfile.ogg}} in the notes field of the work here on Wikisource.
    • See also Help:LibriVox.
  • WebCite - may be used to preserve online or e-published text (example).

See also edit