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World-Wide Web Resources
Electronic Texts

Please Note: This site is being transferred to the Libraries' Subject Guides site and has therefore not been updated recently. It is being reviewed, and appropriate resources will be moved to the Subject Guides site. This page will be removed July 1, 2007.

If you have questions about these changes or about finding the information you need, please use the Ask-a-Librarian service.

  • ABU, the Association des Bibliophiles Universels tries to offer as many French public domain texts as possible.

  • Alex, catalogue of electronic texts on the Internet.

  • American History, Documents for the Study of, from the University of Kansas.

  • American Literary Classics

  • Documenting the American South: The Southern Experience in 19th-Century America. From the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Academic Affairs Library. First stage of a larger project to document the cultural history of the American South. The primary sources offered include diaries, autobiographies, travel accounts, titles on slavery, and regional literature drawn from the Southern holdings of the UNC-CH library. Materials are encoded using SGML and HTML formats.

  • Archiving Early America, contains selected facsimiles (in .jpg format) from the Keigwin and Mathews Collection of early American documents. Most of these facsimiles are taken from early American newspapers and magazines and include the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance, and Jay's Treaty, among others.

  • ARTFL (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
    (University of Chicago)
    (13th - 20th centuries)
    Full-text resource of 2,000 works. Coverage ranges from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing. Includes text collections in French, English & Italian; guides and bibliographies; and dictionaries and other ref. works, including Diderot. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. A Provençal poetry database was recently (2004) added that includes 38 texts in their original spellings. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. Other texts include French Women Writers and pamphlets and periodicals from the French Revolution of 1848. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions. A cooperative enterprise of Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago.
    Accessible via campus computers. Also available off-campus for UK faculty, students and staff; follow these proxy server access instructions.

  • ATHENA, from the University of Geneva. Large database of science, art, and general academic texts; French literature; Swiss authors; and mineralogical information.

  • The Atlantic Monthly Poetry Pages, multimedia feature devoted to poets and poetry, both classic and contemporary.

  • Augustine Texts, from the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Avalon Project, at the Yale Law School. On-going collection of documents "relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government," categorized by century, although there is also an Alphabetic Author/Title List of all the Project Documents. International in nature and go back to Ancient Greece. Footnotes and references to other texts are linked whenever possible.

  • BCMSV, searchable database of 17th/18th-Century English Verse. [login=bcmsv; pw=bcmsv]

  • Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE, sponsored by The Library of the University of California, Berkeley and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Provides information and support for those building digital libraries, museums, and archives.

  • Bibliomania, "The Network Library." Includes Reference (Literature and Language), Fiction (classic novels, in HTML and some in PDF editions, Non-Fiction (Biographical and academic works and ancient texts), and Poetry.

  • Bobst Library E-Text Center, New York University.

  • Books On-line, Listed by Subject. Lists selected on-line books by their Library of Congress call number category.

  • British Columbia Digital Library, includes a guide to digital library collections in BC and around the world.

  • A Celebration of Women Writers

  • Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CHASS), at the University of Toronto.

  • CETH, The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (at Rutgers University).

  • Cogprints: Cognitive Sciences Electronic Archive offers hundreds of full-text scholarly papers related to the study of cognition, including works in such fields as Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics, Biology, and Computer Science. Contents culled from current academic journals, conference proceedings, recent and forthcoming books and personal collections and are available in several formats (.pdf, HTML, plaint text, and postscript). An internal search engine is provided as is information on depositing work in the archive.

  • COMET, Corpus Of Modern English Texts (from the University of Glasgow).

  • The Computers in Teaching Initiative Centre for Textual Studies, Oxford University. Promotes and supports the use of computers in university teaching.

  • Current Research @, access to the fulltext (in pdf format) of all dissertations completed at the University of Kentucky from 1996 forward. Searchable by title/abstract keyword, author and adviser. Accessible via campus computers. Also available off-campus for UK faculty, students and staff; follow these proxy server access instructions.

  • Digital Book Index, provides access to more than 65,000 records (as of 12/11/02) from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers and private publishing organizations.

  • Digital Libraries

  • Digital Library Resources, from Academic Info.

  • Digital Text Projects, from the Institute for Learning Technologies, Columbia University. Includes Digital Classics (classic works of philosophy and literature) and original multimedia translations of classic and contemporary texts. Also includes hyperlink annotations to a variety of collateral text and multimedia resources, both classic and contemporary, that can help contextualize and orient the material for study.

  • DigLibns Electronic Discussion, for the discussion of issues relating to digital librarianship.

  • Directory of Electronic Text Centers, maintained by CETH, The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (at Rutgers University).

  • The Electronic Archive of Early American Fiction, from the University of Virginia.

  • Ecola's Newsstand, Technical Books.

  • 18th Century E-Texts Catalog

  • EIRC, the Electronic Information Resource Center at Georgetown University's Lauinger Library.

  • Electronic Journals & Texts, compiled by New Mexico State University's Library. Provides links to major directories of electronic publications on the Internet. Includes scholarly and popular materials, free and subscription sites, newspapers, magazines, and some electronic conference archives. Most sites are searchable.

  • The Electric Library, a database containing more than 1,000 publications, including images, reference books, and major literary works.

  • Electronic Text Center, from the University of Virginia.

  • Electronic Texts, Journals, Newsletters, Magazines and Collections, from North Carolina State University.

  • The English Server, large collection of full-text resources.

  • The Etext Archives

  • European Texts and Documents, Ancient - Modern.

  • Western European Literature Online Text Collections, annotated directory of Internet sources for literary texts in Western European languages other than English. Some of the literature archives listed contain texts with restricted access, but all sites have at least some texts freely available. Lists literature collections in order of size, and includes texts in Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. From the Western European Specialists Section, Association of College and Research Libraries.

  • Federal Depository Lirary Program Electronic Collection

  • Five College Archives Digital Access Project, provides access to digitized versions of archival records and manuscript collections relating primarily to women's history -- particularly women's education at the Five Colleges.

  • FreeBooks4Doctors

  • Great Books Home Page, from Malaspina University College, British Columbia. Books and authors are arranged chronologically by author, in seven major categories from Antiquity to Modern. The author list is taken largely, but not exclusively, from Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren's recommended reading list from How to Read a Book. Each author listing contains some or all of the following: author information, available copies of the full text or bibliographies, relevant lectures from Malaspina, and relevant links. Nearly 150 authors, from Aeschylus to Wordsworth, and several hundred works can be found. There are also rudimentary sections on great art, theatre, music, and science.

  • The Great Works of Western Civilization, presents several lists of works along with links to the texts available on the Web.

  • Guide to Selected Manuscripts, housed in The Division of Special Collections and Digital Programs, University of Kentucky.

  • Guide to the Russian Academy of Sciences, a PDF "book" that requires Adobe Acrobat to view. This guide will give the interested reader a better idea of the scope of scientific activity in Russia and some notion of how important this system is and may prove to be for the future survival of Russia itself. By Jack L. Cross.

  • The Historical Text Archive, from Mississippi State University. A large collection of historical texts, photos, and maps with hyperlinks to resources on other servers.

  • Humanities Computing at Oxford University's Computing Services.

  • Humanities Text Initiative, from the University of Michigan.

  • Hypertexts, American Studies materials from the University of Virginia.

  • The Information Arcade at the University of Iowa Libraries.

  • Innovative Internet Applications in Libraries, provides guide to explore how libraries are using the Internet to improve service.

  • Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, at the University of Virginia.

  • Internet-on-a-Disk, from The B&R Samizdat Express. Newsletter of public domain and freely available electronic texts.

  • Internet Public Library Online Text Enhancements, available for searching and browsing by author, title, and Dewey Classification. Each entry is accompanied by bibliographic information, including title, author, date, Dewey Classification(s), and hypertext URL(s).

  • Internet Wiretap Electronic Text Archive, electronic text resources via Gopher and FTP.

  • Japanese Oldtales: A Multilingual E-text Collection. From the University of Library and Information Science in Ibaraki.

  • Karpeles Manuscript Library, wide variety of manuscript selections.

  • Kentuckiana Digital Library, part of the Kentucky Virtual Library; provides online finding aids and digitized material from archival collections across the state of Kentucky.

  • LETRS, Library Electronic Text Resource Service at Indiana University's Libraries. Provides access to electronic editions of scholarly texts and assistance in creating and using such texts.

  • LION Complete (Literature Online), searchable library of over 300,000 works of English and American literature. From Chadwyck-Healey. Accessible from campus computers and off-campus via the proxy server.

  • Literary Resources on the WWW, from the University of Pennsylvania English Dept.

  • Literature @ Sunsite, "a collection of digital texts that can be read online, printed, or downloaded for further study."

  • The Literature Network, searchable fulltext online literature. Includes an author index. As of March 2002, contains over 200 full books and over 800 short stories and poems by over 70 authors. Also includes over 8,500 quotations.

  • Making of America, from the University of Michigan Digital Library Initiative. 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. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.

  • Master Works of Western Civilization, several publishers, writers, and thinkers have drawn lists of the quintessential works of Western Civilization. The Great Works of Western Civilization page presents several such lists along with links to the texts available on the Web.

  • The National Library of Canada Electronic Collection incorporates formally published Canadian online books and journals. These publications are being acquired, catalogued, and permanently stored at the NLC.

  • National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC), from the Library of Congress.

  • netLibrary, full-text electronic books. UK faculty, students, and staff must be on-campus to set up their individual account. Once established, the account can then be used both on- and off-campus. Links to individual books in netLibrary available through InfoKat, the Libraries' online catalog.

  • Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography, by Charles Bailey.

  • Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

  • NewsBank's Access World News. In addition to serving sources from almost 500 U.S. newspapers, including the Lexington Herald-Leader (1983 - ) and Courier-Journal (Louisville) (1999 - ), AWN serves almost 250 foreign titles. The sources are English-language newspapers, including the New York Times, the London Times, China Daily, Times of India and The Nation from Kenya. (Spanish-language editions of the newspapers are also included, such as the Miami Herald's El neuvo herald). (Newspapers include all articles except records lists (e.g., births, police reports) and PAID obituaries).
    Complete title list
    Accessible via campus computers. Also available off-campus for UK faculty, students and staff; follow these proxy server access instructions.

  • Online Book Initiative, a Gopher resource.

  • On-Line Books Page, from Carnegie Mellon.

  • OnLine Electronic Publishing Collection, publishing formats, text and publishing formats, text and image viewers, audio and video players, virtual reality, electronic books, computer and Internet related OnLine books, OnLine Errata and updates to printed computer books.

  • Online Literature Library

  • Past Masters fulltext databases include the following:

    Primary Sources Databases:

  • St. Anselm (Opera Omnia)
  • Aquinas (collected works)
  • Aristotle (complete works)
  • St. Augustine (works in translation)
  • St. Augustine (Opera Omnia)
  • Austen, Jane (Letters)
  • Austin, J. L. (John Langshaw): Works
  • Ayer, A. J. (Alfred Jules): Writings
  • Bentham, Jeremy (collected works)
  • Bentham, Jeremy (correspondence)
  • Berkeley, George (works)
  • Bluestocking Feminism: 1738-1785
  • Boyle, Robert (Works)
  • British Philosophy: 1600-1900 (includes Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume)
  • Brontë, Charlotte (Letters)
  • Burney, Fanny (Journals & Letters and Complete Plays)
  • Calvin, John (Works & Correspondence)
  • Chesterton, G. K. (Collected Works)
  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (Collected Letters)
  • Collingwood, R. G. (Philosophical Texts)
  • Continental Rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz)
  • Darwin, Charles (works)
  • Davidson, Donald (Inquiries and Essays)
  • Descartes (Oeuvres Complètes de René Descartes)
  • Dewey, John (Collected Works)
  • Dickens, Charles (Letters)
  • Dewey, John (Correspondence)
  • Eighteenth Century Correspondence (Contains 48 volumes of correspondence of important figures in eighteenth century England, all from Oxford University Press.)
  • Eliot, George (Notebooks and Library)
  • Emerging Tradition, 1500-1700
  • Ferguson, Adam (Correspondence)
  • Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (Sämmtliche Werke und Nachlass)
  • Gladstone, William (Diaries)
  • Hardy, Thomas (Collected Letters)
  • Hegel, G. W. F. (OUP translations)
  • Hegel, G. W. F. (Werke II)
  • Hobbes, Thomas (Correspondence)
  • Hume, David (Complete Works and Correspondence)
  • Kant, Immanuel (Hauptwerke and Philosophische Briefe und Vorlesungsnachschriften)
  • Kierkegaard, Søren (Journals and Papers and Samlede Værker)
  • Knox, John (Works)
  • The Latin Background, 1100-1550
  • Leibniz, G. W. (Philosophische Schriften)
  • Locke, John (Philosophical Works and Selected Correspondence)
  • Luther, Martin (Sermons)
  • Malthus, Thomas Robert (Works)
  • Mansfield, Katherine (Collected Letters)
  • Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (Collected Works)
  • Modern Era: 1800-1950 (Contains 40 volumes of correspondence from important figures in nineteenth and twentieth century England, all from Oxford University Press.)
  • Newman, John Henry (Letters and Diaries)
  • Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (Werke Historisch-kritische Ausgabe)
  • William of Ockham (The Work of Ninety Days)
  • Peirce, Charles Sanders (Collected Papers and Published Works, Vol. 1)
  • Plato (Collected Dialogues)
  • Poinsot, John [John of St. Thomas] (Tractatus de Signis)
  • Political Philosophy (Machiavelli to Mill)
  • Pope, Alexander (Correspondence)
  • Romantic Age, The (Correspondence)
  • Royce, Josiah (Works)
  • Santayana, George (Works)
  • Schopenhauer, Arthur (Hauptwerke)
  • Shelley, Mary (Novels and Selected Works)
  • Sidgwick, Henry (Complete Works & Select Correspondence)
  • Smith, Adam (Works and Correspondence)
  • Spencer, Herbert (Complete Works)
  • Swift, Jonathan (Correspondence)
  • Tennyson, Alfred Lord (Letters)
  • Utilitarians, The (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick)
  • Weber, Max (Gesammelte Werke und Schriften)
  • Wittgenstein, Ludwig (includes Collected Works, Letters, Lectures, Conversations, Memoirs, Nachlass, Published Works, Tagebücher und Briefe & Texts and Contexts)
  • Wordsworth, Dorothy & William (Collected Letters)
  • Yeats, William Butler (Collected Letters)

    Reference Databases:

  • Motif-Index of Folk Literature (revised & enlarged edition)
  • Oxford Classical Dictionary
  • Oxford Duden German-English Dictionary

    Accessible via campus computers. Also available off-campus for UK faculty, students and staff; follow these proxy server access instructions.


  • Patrologia Latina Database (PLD), electronic version of the first edition of Jacques-Paul Migne's Patrologia Latina, published between 1844 and 1855, and the four volumes of indexes published between 1862 and 1865. The Patrologia Latina comprises the works of the Church Fathers from Tertullian in 200 AD to the death of Pope Innocent III in 1216. From Chadwyck Healey. Accessible from campus computers and off-campus via the proxy server.

  • Perseus, interactive database on Archaic and Classical Greece.

  • Project Bartleby, from Columbia University. Includes works by authors such as Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, John Bartlett, George Chapman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and others.

  • Project Gutenberg, aiming to create a huge library of electronically stored books, mostly classics, that can be downloaded for free and viewed off-line.

  • Project Open Book, from Yale University.

  • Resources for American Literature, interactive sites with online texts, student comments and analysis, transcripts of discussions, and student projects.

  • Scandinavian Cultures, providing access to Viking Culture and Norse civilization resources, the Project Runeberg database for classic Scandinavian literature, and OLDNORSENET. A service of Labyrinth.

  • Scholarly Communications Project, from the University Libraries at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Efforts of the Project have included publishing electronic journals, article abstracts, and raw research data.

  • Scrolls from the Dead Sea, the Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Scholarship.

  • Sixteenth Century Renaissance English Literature: 1485-1603.

  • St. Pachomius Library, offers the literature of the early Christian Church in electronic form. The Library's archives contain non-copyrighted English translations of the Church Fathers, the acts of the Christian martyrs, the proceedings of the Councils, and the lives of the early saints. Includes Greek sources to A.D.1200, Byzantine writers A.D.1200+, Western sources to A.D. 1100, Syriac writers, lives of saints, liturgical documents, and African Orthodoxy. Provides a global index.

  • Stanford Digital Libraries Project

  • Text Archives on the Internet, from the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Texts & Contexts, a collection of full-text works.

  • Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (Online TLG), provides fulltext of Greek texts from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in A.D. 1453. All Online TLG users must create a personal account. Links are available for loading Greek fonts onto your personal computer. Available on campus machines and off-campus to UK-affiliates via the proxy server.

  • UMLibText, online texts from the University of Michigan Libraries.

  • University Library, hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. Access to fulltext journals and books, images, lectures, music, and multimedia.

  • University of Michigan Digital Library Project

  • University of Sussex Manuscript Collection

  • Library of Virginia Archives' Digital Collections.

  • Women Studies Reading Room, from InforM, University of Maryland.

  • Women Writers Online, available from the Women Writers Project at Brown University. Fulltext, searchable access to works written by women authors, covering a period from 1400 to 1850. Covers a broad range of subject areas, in English or in English translation.
    Online Documentation
    Available from campus machines or off-campus for affiliated faculty, staff and students via the proxy server.

  • Wright American Fiction 1851-1875, collection of 19th century American fiction as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. From the Indiana University Digital Library Program.

    • Specific Works and Authors

  • Aesop's Fables
  • Beowulf
  • William Blake Archive, hypermedia archive sponsored by the Library of Congress and supported by the Getty Grant Program, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia, Sun Microsystems, and Inso Corporation.
  • Bulfinch's Mythology, compiled by Bob Fisher from "The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes," by Thomas Bulfinch, 1796-1867.
  • A Coleridge Companion: An Introduction to the Major Poems and the Biographia Literaria, by John Spencer Hill.
  • Dickinson, Emily
  • Frederick Douglass Papers, from the American Memory Project.
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • Great Expectations, from Bibliomania.
  • James Joyce, Ulysses, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
  • Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth & Coleridge.
  • Plato's Apology, from Carnegie Mellon University. Hypertext edition written for students taking a philosophy course at Carnegie Mellon.
  • Complete Works of Shakespeare, from MIT.
  • Shakespeare's Sonnets, from MIT.
  • Thomas Middleton's Plays
  • Treasure Island

    • This page was last updated 3 March 2006. To suggest additions or corrections to this list, send mail to Eric Weig at eweig@email.uky.edu.

    URL: http://www.uky.edu/Subject/e-texts.html
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