Open Access, Digital Libraries, E-Archives: Virtual Classics, Textbooks and Other Gems

This is the 300th post on the EBM & Clinical Support Librarians@UCHC blog.  Woot… please drop me a line and let me know how I’m doing!

Medical and dental students have one more exam to complete, and then will have a few well-deserved weeks of vacation.  They may even have time to read for pleasure.

A brief article entitled “Textbook Death Watch“ posted on Tech & Learning (May 1 2009) caught my eye, and that prompted a search-expedition for open access libraries of digital works available to anyone to use.  The list below is not meant to be inclusive… only representative.

A related article on the Wired section (free to all) from the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 13 2009) discusses the migration from ‘real’ books to digital archives at University of Oklahoma: at this link.  An article published in the Washington Post (May 19 2009) about the scope, reach and legal considerations of Google Books is worth a read.

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Digital Collections from Non-Academic Sources

• Many hours could be spent browsing through the collections from the Internet Archive website.  Here are a few links: Text Collection (1.4 million e-books),  Moving Images (links to 180,000 films, videos or movies), Maps of the States via the United States Geological Surveys, an archive of game videos and of course, the Wayback Machine which now contains “2 petabytes” of data!

• The Library of Congress has one of the largest archives in the world, and was an early adapter of digitization ~ here is a link to their Digital Collection & Programs website.

• A classic and long-lived source for E-Books: the Project Guttenberg website where 28,000 online books are available at no cost.

• WOWIO is a site for free texts, comics and graphics novels.  Their About page states that it is  “…the only source where readers can legally access high-quality copyrighted ebooks from leading publishers for free. Readers have access to a wide range of offerings, including works of classic literature, college textbooks, comic books, and popular fiction and non-fiction titles. “
  

• The Internet Public Library (IPL): Online Texts
• ReadPrint.com
• Planet E-Book provides online access to over 60 classic books.
• Bartleby.com is a true E-reference site, stocking many diverse works from writing guides, fiction, non-fiction, encyclopedias, verse and poetry, quotations – even Emily Post’s Etiquette.
• iBiblio.org
• Free E-Books.net
• Page by Page Books
• Online Books4Free

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A Collection of Digital or E-Text Collections hosted by Academic Institutions

• Librarians at the University of Texas Libraries have assembled an impressive list of online E-texts.

• University of Virginia EText Center: Collections provides access to 2,100 works.  There is also a Subject Collections page, such as a collection of Early American Fiction or the works of Shakespeare.

• The Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania.

• Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University have played an integral part in the creation of the Universal Digital Library which provides access to over 1,000,000 open-access books in a dozen languages, with mirror sites in China, Egypt and India.

• University of Michigan Libraries have recently put their 1,000,000 E-book online, a massive digitization project, in coordination with Google. For more information, link here.

• Duke University Libraries provides access to their digital collections here.

• Columbia University Libraries provides access to E-Books List (currently 617 titles available) and also through their larger Digital Collections page.

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A Few Audio Book-Sources

• Listen to Audio-Books in the public domain from LibriVox
• Open Culture: Audible Books and Podcasts
• The Spoken Alexandria Project
  

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Recommendations by Readers or Bloggers

• A list of “Life Changing Books” recommended by readers came from OpenCulture (published Aug 19 2007).  Note:  The titles are linked to Amazon but some of these titles on the  list are in the public domain and available through several of the E-book sites shown above (i.e., open access).

• Good Reads is a valuable website – type in a book title or author, and the site will “suggest” similar works.  For example, here is a list of novels about “Magical Realism” novels suggested by readers.

• Online Libraries: 25 Places to Read Books for Free

• ArtsLab: Nice E-Book Sites

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Hard to Describe Sites

• Dreaming Methods describes itself as “a fusion of writing and atmospheric new media that explores digital storytelling, imaginary memories and dream-inspired states“.  And their List of Links to other literary sites is worth visiting.

• We Tell Stories (digital fiction from Penguin Books UK) is part novel, part Google Maps.

• Yearning to write your own novel?  Visit National Novel Writing Month if you think you can write 50,000 words in 30 days.

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Finally, two sites not for enjoying literature as much as for savoring historical images.

• An archive of photographs cataloging Life in Western Pennsylvania (1840-1970) which contains 800 photographs and 12 films about the region.  Here is a glorious image of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – taken in 1932 – f0und on this site:

Image Credit:  http://www.lifeinwesternpa.org – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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• Calisphere (a digital library project for the State of California, hosted by the University of California-Berkeley), which is where I found this beautiful image (circa 1945):

Image courtesy of http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/ – All rights reserved – Copyright 2009

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