Primary Texts
In general, primary sources are materials contemporaneous with the event or individual being studied and may include manuscripts, letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and other documentary items. Such materials in their physical forms are usually kept in rare book and archival collections, but with the advent of digitization more and more of it can be found online. The list below includes some of those online sources.
- Eight CenturiesFormerly known as 19th Century Masterfile. Searchable index to a variety of 19th century Anglo-American periodical articles, documents and other primary and secondary sources published before 1930. Many links to full text. Aggregates indexes to books, periodicals, newspapers, government documents and patents into a single resource.
- British PeriodicalsA fully searchable database that provides the full text of periodical articles published in Britain from the 1680s to the 1930s. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences, literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
- Nineteenth Century Collections OnlineProvides full-text, searchable content from a broad range of primary sources. Sections include: Asia and the West : diplomacy and cultural exchange; British politics and society; British theatre, music, and literature : high and popular culture; Children's literature and childhood; Europe and Africa : commerce; Christianity, civilization, and conquest; European literature, 1790-1840 : the Corvey collection; Mapping the World: maps and travel literature; Photography : the world through the lens; Religion, Society, Spirituality, and Reform; Science, technology, and medicine : 1780-1925; Women : transnational networks.
- Times of London Digital Archive, 1785-2006Full-text and full-image articles from the Times of London for the years 1785-2006. It is a digital reproduction, cover to cover, of the paper in PDF files.
- Sunday Times Digital Archive, 1822-2006Database coverage begins with the Sunday Times, issued October 20, 1822-December 24, 1903; The Sunday special, issued January 3, 1904-January 24, 1904; The Sunday Times and Sunday Special, issued January 31, 1904-January 4, 1931; and Sunday times, January 11, 1931-December 31, 2006. Includes the Sunday Times Magazine, issued February, 1962.
Rare Books & Mss.
That book you're reading doesn't end with the last page. It may have a long and fascinating history. The Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) includes 400,000 printed volumes, more than 70 million manuscripts, and another million photographs, paintings, prints, and other visual media that may be a part of that history. Deepen your appreciation of the text and take your research to the next level -- find out what RMC has to offer.
Digital Book Archives
- Google BooksFull text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database.
- HathiTrustCollection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world
- Internet ArchiveA digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts (print, film, etc.) in digital form. Freely accessible to the public. Contains raw OCR.
- Oxford Text ArchiveCatalogues, preserves and distributes high-quality digital resources for research and teaching. Currently holds thousands of texts in more than 25 different languages. Many texts are coded in TEI.
- Project GutenbergA source of free, downloadable ebooks. Fairly clean plain text.