| 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 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
|
| 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 tif format; requires tif 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.
|
