Best free Digital Libraries - Australia
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Adelaide University Electronic Texts Collection
This growing collection of e-texts - currently more than 700 - includes
classic works of Literature, Philosophy, Science, and Medicine. Their
own web editions, in HTML.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au
ANU E-Print Repository
From the Australian National University in Canberra, ACT (Australian
Capital Territory). Holding over 43,000 items as of January 2007.
Material from 1967 on, mostly, is included. User registration (there is
no charge) is required for some parts of the site.
http://dspace.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/39729
Looking for ANU PhD theses? Go to: http://thesis.anu.edu.au
Australian e-Humanities Gateway
is an initiative of the Australian e-Humanities Network, a group funded
by the Australian Research Council.The network includes representatives
from the Australian Academy of the
Humanities, the University of Sydney and the University of Newcastle. A
portal for digital resources in humanities disciplines in Australia.
http://www.ehum.edu.au
Cochrane Library
Contains helpful, authoritative information on the effectiveness of
different health care treatments and interventions. This scientific
medical site has limited free access for Australians through a national
subscription, and may be readily accessed by anyone surfing the Web from
the 'au" domain. A good place to start your research.
http://www.nicsl.com.au/cochrane/index.asp
Curtin University of Technology Institutional Repository
espace@Curtin provides access to research produced by Curtin University
of Technology staff and postgraduate students. More than 900 items were
available as at January 2007 covering material from 1978 onwards.
http://espace.lis.curtin.edu.au/
eprints unimelb The University of Melbourne eprint collection. More than 1,500 items available.The oldest item dates back to 1945. In order to access some areas of the archive, you'll need a user registration (no charge).
http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au
eprints @UQ The
University of Queensland's digital repository. Set up in 2002, it covers
material created since 1983, although most dates from 1998 on.
Includes e-books, e-chapters, online journals, various articles, working
papers, conference papers and proceedings, posters, miscellaneous
research output, and pre-publication (draft) material. OAI-compliant,
the repository includes research output of UQ academic staff and
postgraduate students, both before and after peer-reviewed publication.
Formats used are HTML, ASCII text, PDF & Postscript.
http://eprint.uq.edu.au
Monash University ePrint Repository The
Monash University ePrint Repository showcases and archives quality
research output of Monash University staff. This site has been under
redevelopment.
http://eprint.monash.edu.au/
OZLIT Electronic Texts
Not
a library as such, rather an Australian portal to an array of free
e-book resources. Includes a limited number of Australian e-texts.
Courtesy of the leading state portal VicNet.
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/chapt4.html
Project Gutenberg of Australia
produces books in electronic form and makes them freely available to
the public in accordance with Australian copyright law. NB: Under
Australian copyright law, literary, dramatic, & musical work
published, performed, communicated, or recorded and offered for sale in
an author's lifetime are protected for the life of the author plus fifty
years from the end of the year of the author's death. After this time
they enter into the public domain. Some e-books available here may still
be under copyright in the United States (where local laws have several
times extended copyright to levels not accepted within Australian
jurisdiction). Such works are therefore not available from the US site
of Project Gutenberg.
http://gutenberg.net.au/
QUT ePrints An
institutional archive of research papers produced at Queensland
University of Technology by QUT staff and postgraduate students. Items
now deposited span from 1984 to date, and this fast-growing new
collection already offers over a thousand of them. Since 2004 it has
been QUT policy that publicly available research and scholarly output of
the University should be deposited here.
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/
SETIS (The Scholarly Electronic Text and Image Service at the University of Sydney Library)
Regarded as the leading University digital collection in Australia.
Plans are under way to further enlarge the size & scope of SETIS.
Includes also the University of Sydney digital theses collection
(currently around two hundred theses available).
NB:
While you may access many texts from the Web, a large number are
commercially licensed and available only to users at the University of
Sydney.
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/
UTasER
The University of Tasmania ePrint Repository. Research materials
covering as far back as 1968 have now been deposited here. There were
approaching 2 thousand items by January 2007.
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/
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Best free Digital Libraries - NZ
Early New Zealand Books .
Works about traditional Maori society and culture and the earliest
British settlements. In chapters online, includes enlargeable images.
Please note conditions of use. Provided by the University of Auckland.
http://www.enzb.auckland.ac.nz/
New Zealand Digital Library
Collections available include historical documents, humanitarian and
development information, computer science technical reports and
bibliographies, literary works, and magazines. A project of the
University of Waikato, variously in HTML and PDF.
http://www.nzdl.org/cgi-bin/library
New Zealand Electronic Text Centre Online
archive of New Zealand and Pacific Islands texts and heritage materials
- full-text books, manuscripts and journals, plus images. You may
download and print text and images for your own personal and
non-commercial use only. XML-based; a variety of formats may be
available.
http://www.nzetc.org/
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Best free Digital Libraries - World
***** Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is the original free digital library of books no longer in
copyright. So you'll find a great many classic literary texts here. The full Gutenberg collection nowexceeds 5,000 books. The whole collection represents a monumental effort in unpaid, unselfish, labour since 1971.
The Project Gutenberg philosophy
is to make information, books and other materials available to the
general public in forms a vast majority of computers, programs and
people can easily read, use, quote, and search.
Their books
are usually in plain text (ASCII) format. However to improve the online
reading experience you can also use other reader software (check out
our Software Page).
http://www.gutenberg.net
lex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
is a collection of public domain documents from American and English
literature as well as Western philosophy. You can search for and display
texts from the collection & also search their content, & even create on-the-fly PDFs for offline reading or printing.
http://www.infomotions.com/alex
arXiv e-Prints Includes
e-Print "preprints" in physics, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, and
computer sciences. From Cornell University with assistance from the
National Science Foundation (USA), the National Institute for
Theoretical Physics (USA) and the University of Adelaide (Australia).
Formats include PDF, PostScript, and DVI.
http://www.arxiv.org
NB:
There are mirror sites in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany,
UK, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, &
USA.
Athena Thousands of mainly French and Swiss-authored e-texts, across a broad range of especially
Literature, Science & the Arts. In .html &. rtf versions. Also
many links to famous works in German, Dutch & English too. Prepared
or linked for the Web by the University of Geneva. Expand your mind
& education here.
http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html
Bartleby.com The
Encyclopedia of World History and The Harvard Classics are among many
free texts offered at this award-winning site. Many classic reference
works are available here.
http://www.bartleby.com/index.html
Bibliomania Offers more than 2,000 free classic texts, plus research works. In HTML format, readable by your web browser.
http://www.bibliomania.com
Bibliotheca Augustana
A Latin e-library. Includes Bibliothecae Latina, Graeca, Anglica,
Gallica, Germanica, Hispanica, Italica, Iiddica, Lusitana, Polonica et
Russica. Collectio textuum electronicorum. Hae paginae proponent Musa
adiuvante in lingua Latina - facta et ficta.
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/a_index.html
CELT (Corpus of
Electronic Texts). Irish literary, historical & cultural texts, in
Irish, Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and English. Presented in HTML, with a
searchable online database. An initiative of University College, Cork,
Republic of Ireland.
http://www.ucc.ie/celt
CogPrints
Cognitive Sciences Eprint* Archive - Includes a wide variety of papers
in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, biology, medicine,
anthropology and computer science. Material
dates back as far as 1950, although most of it dates since 1990. Some
areas of the archive require registration, to obtain a username and
password. *Eprints here are defined as the
digital texts of peer-reviewed research articles, before and after
refereeing. Before refereeing and publication, the draft is called a
"preprint." The refereed, published final draft is called a "postprint."
Eprints may include both preprints and postprints, as well as any
significant drafts in between, and any post publication updates.
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
but minus his poetry at present. The plays can be read either as a
continuous text or by individual scenes. For reading online, in HTML.
http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html
New Cornell University Library Historical Monographs
Comprises 441 general monographs made available for online viewing as
TIFF images, for personal or research use only. Languages include
English, Dutch, French, German, Latin, Portuguese & Spanish. A
fascinating mishmash of topics, including some science.
http://dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/c/cdl/
The Digital Library of the Commons (DLC) An archive of international literature on "the commons" (i.e. that
which is held in common or by a community). Many useful features for
both readers and contributing authors. A full-text Digital Library, a
Working Paper Archive of author-submitted papers, and links to relevant
references are included. Thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the
International Association for the Study of Common Property (IASCP) &
the Indiana University Graduate School. As Adobe PDF files.
http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu
Digital Library for Earth System Education: DLESE
Over 5,000 searchable educational resources. Items are also organized
into themes or collections, broadly as environmental, geographical,
geological, oceanographical and other physical sciences; space science
and technology; policy and educational issues and the philosophy of
science. Resources are not archived on site but in a variety of
collaborating collections. Funded by the National Science Foundation
(USA).
http://www.dlese.org/dds/index.jsp
Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: dLIST
A repository of electronic resources in Library and Information Science
(LIS) and Information Technology (IT). Contains published and
unpublished papers, data sets instructional and help materials,
pathfinder , reports & bibliographies. So far in English only. User
registration required to access some areas. In HTML or PDF.
http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/
Ebooks Online Library
Around a dozen authors ranging from Aesop to Sun Tzu, with huge
representation of Charles Dickens & Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, plus a
goodly measure of Jules Verne & Mark Twain. In very clear HTML for
online reading, this collection has been sourced from Project Gutenberg
and prepared with special attention to the needs for visually impaired
and older readers. You can set the font size & colour, or background
colour, with just a click in the Settings panel. http://www.readasily.com/
Elfwood Elfwood
is a huge, non-profit home to amateur Fantasy/Sci-Fi literature and art,
plus some How -To Guides. The site holds over twenty thousand works of
art & literature by over fifteen hundred Science Fiction/Fantasy
artists and writers.
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se
The E Server Bit
of a mind flip might be an exaggeration, but there is certainly nothing
stodgy about this large & contemporary collection of online
intellectual texts & resources. Based at the University of
Washington.
http://eserver.org
Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature
Links site for literary texts in Western European languages other than
English. Languages include Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French,
Galician, German, Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish
& Swedish.
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html
Electronic Texts On The Internet A useful links page with over eighty entries.
http://www.refdesk.com/factelec.html
EuroDocs Primary historical documents from Western Europe. Selected Transcriptions, Facsimiles and Translations.
http://eurodocs.lib.byu.edu
Great Books Index
From Aeschylus to Virginia Woolf - links to online works, in English
translation, by more than 130 classic authors. Please check for any
copyright restrictions (which may in a few cases apply for other than
reading online). A redoubtable effort from Ken Roberts of Ontario,
Canada. http://books.mirror.org/gb.home.html
Great Books and Classics
Provides free HTML online versions of many famous authors from before
200 BC to the 20th Century. Linked with Amazon.com for commercial print
offerings of the titles.
http://www.grtbooks.com
Internet Classics Archive
More than 440 mainly Greco-Roman texts, with some Chinese and Persian.
By 59 different authors. In English translation. For online reading,
some downloads available.
http://classics.mit.edu
Internet Public Library Over
20,000 free books available online. The Internet Public Library's
Mission Statement says: " The Internet Public Library (IPL), is a public
service organization and learning/teaching environment at the
University of Michigan School of Information. The IPL Online Texts
Collection contains over 20,000 titles that can be browsed by author, by
title, or by Dewey Decimal Classification". For questions about the
online texts collection, or how to search, please see their help page.
http://www.ipl.org/reading/books
Kurt Stüber's Online Library - historic and modern biology books
Large library of books on biological subjects, many currently out of
print and hard to obtain. Mostly German authors, but luminaries such as
Charles Darwin are also present. In German, with some English and French
(a few works are old enough to be in Latin). Online in text chapters or
as individual scanned pages. Browse the collection by author, title,
category or publication date.
http://www.zum.de/stueber/
MIT OpenCourseWare The
first stage of an ambitious & generous plan to make all
Massachusetts Institute of Technology course materials available on the
Internet, for free download. Materials for 500 courses have been
accessible since the end of September 2003. Materials are in English,
but a number are also available in Spanish & Portuguese. Presented
in HTML. However courses may include Adobe Acrobat PDF files, Java
Applets, Shockwave, Real Player, Java, and MATLAB files (software for
all of these may be downloaded from the site's Technical Requirements
page). This so far unique gift is made possible by MIT with support from
the William and Flora Hewlett & Andrew W. Mellon Foundations.
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Course list at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/all-courses.htm
National Academy Press
Read over 3,000 National Academy science, engineering, and health texts
free online. You can also purchase print copies if you wish. These
e-books represent the cream of U.S. research & policy opinion in
these fields. Texts are presented in a fully-searchable "Open Book"
format, which also allows for page browsing & internal links. Open
Book" is HTML, & moreover the format is prepared so that you can
send people an individual page reference as an URL. PDFs are also
available. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences provides this site.
http://www.nap.edu
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
Links to digital theses/dissertations available in Australia, Canada,
many European nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan & the USA.
http://www.ndltd.org/
Online Books Page
This University of Pennsylvania site offers access to more than 16,000
books online. Plain presentation but well worth the browse.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books
Online Medieval and Classical Library From The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to Yvain, or The Knight With the Lion,
& including such works as: The Lay of the Cid, The Song of Roland,
the Nibelungenlied, Orlando Furioso, the High History of the Holy Graal,
many Icelandic sagas, some Chaucer & much else besides. In HTML for
reading online, or download in PKZIP v.2.04g compressed format. Thanks
to Douglas B. Killings, Sun Systems & the University of California
at Berkeley.
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL
Oxford Text Archive
From Oxford University, this archive was founded in 1976. High-quality,
well-documented electronic texts for research and teaching. More than
2,500 resources in over 25 different languages. A premium academic
resource. Public domain texts are freely available from the on-line
catalogue and may be downloaded in a number of different formats. Some
texts require the user to obtain the written permission of the original
depositor.
http://ota.ahds.ac.uk
Pennsylvania State University Electronic Classics Site: " The Labyrinth" PSU's
e-books are presented as .pdf files (Adobe's Portable Document Format).
Read them with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Established in 1997, the site
offers many classical works of literature in English, plus original
works published by Penn. State Uni.
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htm
Perseus Project A
great classical digital library site, with Greek & Latin texts,
commentaries, an atlas, coin images, art, archaeology and more.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
Project Libellus The
University of Washington, Seattle, provides this library of Latin
texts, readable in your web browser. In HTML & TeX (a subset of
ASCII). Thirteen classical Latin authors represented.
http://www.hhhh.org/perseant/libellus
Project Madurai
Tamil Digital Library under preparation by voluntary effort. So far over
240 works in Tamil script are available, in TSCII (Tamil Script Code
for Information Interchange) format. Old Tamil classic works predominate
so far.
http://www.tamil.net/projectmadurai/
Project Runeberg
Project Runeberg publishes free electronic editions of old Nordic
literature on the Internet. Since 1992. More than 300 titles, mostly in
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish & Icelandic.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg
SAIL-eprints
Find scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, in
Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, Materials Sciences, Nanotechnologies,
Microelectronics, Computer Sciences, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Earth
Sciences, Meteorology, Oceanography Agriculture and related application
activities. SAIL enables searching over 70 institutional open access
archives around the world. NB: Downloading of e-documents is possible
only if it is permitted on the original archive. http://eprints.bo.cnr.it/
Soil And Health Library Free public library offering books on holistic agriculture, holistic health, self-sufficient living, and personal development.
http://www.soilandhealth.org
Universal Library (under development)
"The principal benefit of the Universal Library will be to supplement
the formal education system by making knowledge available to anyone who
can read and has access." A project of Carnegie Mellon University &
the governments of China & India - much of the scanning will be done
in the latter two countries. The million books project will have
considerable content in many Indian and Chinese languages, as well as
English. For more information about this far-reaching initiative see:
http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu
University of Virginia Electronic Text Center has
more than 10,000 publicly accessible texts in thirteen languages (&
over 164,000 publicly available images). These texts are available to
web browsers, but in addition there are 2,000 + e-books available (in
English) for MS Reader & Palm Reader.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu
Virtual Library
"The Virtual Library is the oldest catalog of the web, started by Tim
Berners-Lee, the creator of html and the Web itself. Unlike commercial
catalogs, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile
pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert…"
Fourteen primary categories to check out, or use the search engine.
http://www.vlib.org/
World eBook Library
Opportunities to read or download thousands of HTML books online.
Provides free, unlimited public access to a comprehensive collection of
public domain texts & references, and links to thousand of on-line
libraries around the world via the World Wide Web and/or Telnet. For a
small annual fee, also offers access to over 60,000 PDF e-books and
e-documents, plus 7,000 mp3 audio books. From the World Electronic Text
Library Foundation, based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
http://netlibrary.net/WorldHome.html
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Other Free Australian Books
![](http://www.e-book.com.au/KANGARO2.GIF)
New Australian Accommodation guides Information/reviews
for choicer accommodation in the various regions of each Australian
state. Includes holiday houses, B&Bs, small hotels, cottages, beach
houses, apartments, eco retreats, island getaways, boating experiences
and day spas. Sent by email, in pdf format.
http://www.beautifulaccommodation.com/accommodation/
Australian Institute of Marine Science Reference library This collection may be read in either HTML and/or PDF.
http://www.aims.gov.au/pages/reflib/reflib-00.html
Desert Wave Publishing
Based in the Alice (Alice Springs, Northern Territory of Australia for
our overseas readers). Provides a number of free PDF e-books in areas
such as job search, training, online learning, how to e-publish
yourself.
http://www.dwave.com.au
Dictionary of Sydney
Take a look at the first outline stage of this ambitious project
(reader contributions welcome). There'll be stories about every suburb
from Abbotsford to Zetland (not to forget spelling challenges like
Woolloomooloo). Sydney's geography, history, and politics, architecture,
biographies, great achievements and disasters, urban myths, wildlife
both animal and human, humour, sport, crime - every aspect of the
leading harbourside city of our Great Southern Land will hopefully be
presented as the dictionary grows. A joint project of the University of
Sydney and the City of Sydney Council, funded by a five year Australian
Research Council grant. Take a look now at:
http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org
Gay Australian freebooks
This new site is an reincarnation of Blackwattle Press, a 1990's print
endeavour. Organised by Gary Dunne & associates, it features a few
downloads in .pdf format, including novels, verse & short story
collections.
http://www.gay-ebooks.com.au/
Home Finance
Free First Home Buyers Guide,
from a financial services company. This e-book stresses the need for
financial prudence in home purchase and points to some pitfalls.
Available as an .exe file download for reading offline. Warning: may
conflict with some security settings. "Exercise caution in your business
affairs…" the Desiderata. That goes for home loans too.
http://www.rpi.com.au
Finance and Property Guide
A
free Australian book about finance and home buying and what to look for
in Australian property purchases, by Padraic McCrudden. This book is
prepared as an .exe file, which will download from the Web. To read,
save the file to your computer and run it (start it) while online.
http://www.rpi.com.au/fpg.htm
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