English literature electronic texts on the World Wide Web
The library has a rich collection of books on the shelves in the 800s and we also have access to electronic copies of many titles. Try searching the library's catalogue with keywords (e.g. shakespeare hamlet "electronic resource"; collins moonstone "electronic resource") You can also browse in these collections:
- SearcheBooks.com
- First up, this is a search engine that is very good for finding out if the particular title you need is available as an online resource.
- Electronic Literature Directory
- The Electronic Literature Directory provides an extensive database of listings for electronic works. The descriptive entries cover poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction that makes significant use of electronic techniques or enhancements.
The Directory provides easy access to one of the most exciting and fastest-growing bodies of cutting-edge literature. Among the new forms of writing represented here are hypertexts and other interactive pieces, kinetic or animated poems, multimedia works, generated texts, and works that allow reader collaboration. Directory users can also enjoy the enhancements that the new technology brings to traditional literature, such as streaming audio readings of poetry by masters ranging from e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas to contemporary Pulitzer Prize winners.
You can search the Directory using a built-in search engine, or browse a number of categories by genre, technique and length.
- Project Gutenberg
- The original, and still one of the best. This is where the whole idea of providing electronic versions of texts on the Internet started.
Project Gutenberg is the inspiration of Michael S Hart, who began the project in 1971. The Project's philosophy is to make texts accessible to the widest possibly audience; thus works are usually provided as a single, plain-text file, with the option to download a compressed (zip format) copy for faster downloading.
The archive contains nearly 3 000 full-text machine readable copies of books in the public domain, all of which are included in our Library Catalogue.
The Project Gutenberg site has full details of the project.
There is also an interesting Project Gutenberg of Australia site.
- eBooks@Adelaide
- Our own local e-texts website which is maintained by the Library's Senior Systems Analyst, Steve Thomas. In Steve's words: 'the purpose of this site is: to provide access to the "classic" works of civilisation; to promote reading of the same; and for the editor to have fun.'
- Project Bartleby
- Columbia University has been steadily adding to its electronic texts library, Project Bartleby, since January 1993. They have a very high reputation for accuracy and some of them are searchable, which adds to their usefulness.
- The On-line Books Page
- A searchable list of over 12 000 online titles that are free for non-commercial use. Always up to date and carefully maintained by John Mark Ockerbloom.
- Alex catalogue of electronic texts
- The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is collection of digital documents. The scope of documents in the collection include items from American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy.
The Catalogue has a number of unique features. First, not only can you search for and display texts from the collection, but you can also search the content of located texts. For example, you can search for Mark Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. Simple. You can then search the content of The Adventures for the words like 'fish' and 'belly' to get a description of Huck Finn's father. Moreover, you can search the content of multiple documents simultaneously. For example, you can first locate all the documents in the collection authored by Mark Twain. Next, you can search selected documents for something like 'slav*' (which includes slave, slaves, slavery, etc.) to draw out themes across texts.
- Project Runenberg
- Inspired by Project Gutenberg, this service provides lots of useful links to Scandinavian literature electronic texts, and to related sites.
- Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
- An excellent site, sponsored by Princeton University and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
- Norton Online Archive
- The Norton Online Archive is an ongoing project that at present includes more than 150 fully edited texts, ranging from the Middle Ages through the Victorian Period. You may browse the list of authors either chronologically or alphabetically by last name. Clicking on a name will download, in a single document, all the selections for that author.
Texts are provided in .pdf format.
Oxford Text Archive
Provides access to "an extensive collection of high-quality electronic texts, reference works and linguistic corpora." Many of their resources are available free of charge.
This page is maintained by Jennifer Osborn
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