St. Mary's University College Library

Do you have a reading assignment to finish for tomorrow? Is it late and all the libraries are closed? Don't start worrying yet. If all you need to do is finish reading a text but not make citations, then an excellent resource Project Gutenberg. Other online libraries listed here are also excellent alternatives.

DISCLAIMER: Some of these online collections provide excellent bibliographic information and will allow you to make detailed citations. In other collections, such as Project Gutenberg (PG), items may be text files without page numbering and other features that make online books comparable to their print based counterparts when making citations.

Project Gutenberg (PG) is a library of over 20,000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired in the USA Book listings.

Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library. Items in its collection are the full texts of public-domain books. And these can be accessed and downloaded in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer.

NOTE: Once you arrive at Open Library, click on the link Help us build Open Library! to access the catalogue.

To date, Open Library has about 20 million records, of which 7.5 million are currently available. This includes more than 230,000 scanned public-domain full-text books, available in an easily browsable and printable format. Examples of the quality of some items in the collection include scanned rare books and early editions, such as Mary Shelley's 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. Open Library is a project sponsored by the Internet Archive as a member of the Open Content Alliance.

A principal mandate of Universal Digital Library (UDL) is to supplement the formal education system by making knowledge available to anyone who can read and has access. With a growing online collection UDL facilitates free access to human knowledge with a free-to-read, searchable collection of 1 million books, available to everyone over the Internet.

UDL is also known as the Million Book Project, led by Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science and University Libraries. Working with government and research partners in India and China, the project is scanning books in many languages, using OCR to enable full text searching, and providing free-to-read access to the books on the web. It's growth objective is to make 10 million books accessible online over the next 10 years.

The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available online and free of charge significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Use to the WDL to access and study cultural materials and artifacts from around the world. The WDL holdings include manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Browse by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution. Open ended searches are also possible and include features such as interactive geographic clusters, timelines, and Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items.

The WDL was developed by the U.S. Library of Congress with the support of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and contributions and financial support from partner institutions and private companies and foundations.