Culture/Literature 101

Librarians and archivists have done a tremendous amount of work to make available (freely and legally) many items that have great cultural and entertainment value.

Far more items are available now than just a few years ago. We are using this post as an opportunity to share links to these archives.

As in the case of the Political Documents 101 post commenters are encouraged to post links that they feel should be included in this post. As long as the links are to archives that are free and legal TBAT will add them to original post.


Books/plays/pamphlets and other documents that can be read online. Primarily in English but with some documents in other languages:
• Accessible Book (Open Library) - click the symbol to read online.
• Virtual Books (British Library) [Warning, this site may require some tinkering since it doesn't work equally well with all browsers.]
• Online Exhibitions (British Libary) [Warning, this site may require some tinkering since it doesn't work equally well with all browsers.]


General/Universal Sites

• Project Gutenberg: via the Internet Archive or the Project Gutenberg Website
• Universal Library (via the Internet Archive)
• The Hathi Trust
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• International Children's Digital Library


American sites / sites that specialize in American material:

• Making of America digital library
• Smithsonian Scholarly Press
• The Online Book Page (University of Pennsylvania)
• Latino History and Culture (Smithsonian Institutional Libraries)
• The Library of Congress American Memory Project. The project includes sections on:

• Advertising
• African American History
• Architecture, Landscape
• Cities, Towns
• Culture, Folklife
• Environment, Conservation
• Government, Law
• Immigration, American Expansion
• Literature
• Maps
• Native American History
• Performing Arts, Music
• Presidents
• Religion
• Sports, Recreation
• Technology, Industry
• War, Military
• Women's History

Canadian sites / sites that specialize in Canadian material:

• Internet Archive Canada
• Gutenberg Canada
• Gaslight
• Early Canadiana Online
• Women Writers of Early Canada


United Kingdom sites / sites that specialize in material from/about the United Kingdom:

• The University of Oxford Text Archive
• British History Online
• Chawton House Library: Library and Early Women's Writing Novels-On-Line
• United Kingdom Bookshelf (Project Gutenberg)


Other:

• The Free Digital Humanities Resource for Irish history, literature and politics
• The Australian Cooperative Digitisation Project
• Books from Peking University Library, 北京大學圖書館
• Image Collections Created at the University of Sydney Library. This includes sections on:

• Rare Books Treasures
• Australian Materials
• Botanical Images
• Science Fiction
• Archaeology Resources

• Online Text Collections in Western European Literature
• Europeana single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe.
• EuroDocs: Online Sources for European History
• Project Runeberg free electronic editions of old books from Sweden and the Nordic countries.
• Project Madurai an open and voluntary initiative to collect and publish free electronic editions of ancient tamil literary classics.


Do you have any suggestions for further links?

--Co-authored by the Slacktiverse Community

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Steve Morrison]

From my bookmarks:

Internet Sacred Text Archive Home

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online -- Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Thesaurus and hundreds more

Perseus Digital Library

Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature

Welcome to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library! | Christian Classics Ethereal Library

The Online Medieval & Classical Library

The Ex-Classics Web Site

[Sorbus]

I was about to mention Sacred-Texts.

Pubmed Central has lots of free full-text biochem and medicine articles, for those who are total science nerds like me. The Arxiv is similar for math and physics.

[ZMiles]

Another translation of the Ramayana: http://ramayana.tigercoder.com/index.php

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Well, there goes the rest of the week.

Thanks for this. Must have been a lot of work to compile.

TRiG.

[Mike Timonin]

The 1940 US census: http://1940census.archives.gov/ - only searchable by street address there, but a free membership here (http://www.ancestry.com/) will allow you access to a version with partial name search (not all states are name searchable yet).

The Library of Congress Chronicling America newspaper collection online - only through 1922, though. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

[lonespark]

Yeah, what Trig said. I am afraid to follow links. I will fall in!

[Caretaker of Cats]

gutenberg.spiegel.de

German literature version, run by Spiegel Online. DVD/USB Stick archive editions are available for purchase but as far as I can tell the material is all free online as well.