Links to Online Text Repositories and Archives

The magic of the world-wide-web and digitization means that millions of texts are now available to the reader online and free at the point of use. This page lists links to online text repositories and archives. It is a work in progress that will be added to, and if you have any favourite sites that aren’t listed here please let me know.

General Sites

• The Internet Archive’s Digital Books Collection Browse and read over 5 million books and items from over 1,500-curated collections. You will find a wide range of literature, historical texts and research materials
• Project Gutenberg Offers over 42,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

Historical and other Archives

• Internet History Sourcebooks Project The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts that cover Ancient, Medieval, and Modern history.
• UCLA Library Digital Collections Access to UCLA’s digital collections

Ancient History

• Internet Ancient History Sourcebook
• Perseus Digital Library

Medieval History

• Bibliotheca Palatine Digital Heidelberg University’s project to reconstruct the complete Bibliotheca Palatine after its division between Heidelberg and the Vatican in the 17th Century.
• Carolingian Culture at Reichenau and St Gall  presents digital versions of two of the gems surviving from the monasteries of Reichenau and St. Gall. One is the unique architectural drawing known as the Plan of St. Gall. The other is the extensive ninth-century library collections of the two monasteries, identifiable by their distinctive script
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook
• UCLA – Index of Medieval Medical Images (IMMI)
• UCLA – Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts

Modern History

• Internet Modern History Sourcebook

United Kingdom

• The National Archives The official archive of the UK government.
• The Cabinet Papers 1915-1984 A fantastic resource from The National Archives that provides free access to downloadable copies of UK Cabinet papers
• The Margaret Thatcher Foundation Love her or hate her, the Thatcher archive is a must for anyone studying British politics, domestic and foreign policy, and history in the 1970’s and 1980’s
• Welsh Newspapers Online A brilliant archive of Welsh newspapers from 1804-1819 from the National Library of Wales

Religious Texts

• Project Wittenberg A gateway to many of Martin Luther’s original writings in German and in translation, together with commentary and analysis from out of copyright secondary works

Scientific Publishing

• Electronic Scholarly Publishing This site is dedicated to the electronic publishing of scientific and other scholarly materials. Of particular interest are the history of science, genetics, computational biology, and genome research.