LibGuides: 1-Mapped Pages: Books

Online Book Catalogs/Archives

In the past twenty years, there have been a number of projects where books have been digitized and made available through online archive databases. The book archives/databases below can be searched by subject, title and author. Theses book databases make many more books available to the researcher, and also many primary source books/documents.

The Digital Library of the Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Library's 'Digital Library' contains digital publications, collections and objects including online exhibitions, webcasts, digital editions, bibliographies and fact sheets, and finding aids/inventories for collections such as our trade literature collection and artist files.
Google Books
Use to find books either in the West Library or at other libraries. Books published before 1923 is usually available in their entirety for free. Google Books has scanned more than 25 million books from major libraries. It estimates that there are 130 million books in the world, and the intention it to scan all of them.
The Hathi Trust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than fifty partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the immense collections of partner institutions in digital form, preserving them securely to be accessed and used today, and in future generations. This digital library currently has: 7,839,381 total volumes, 4,406,107 book titles and 195,241 serial titles.
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive offers over 15,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. (2) Moving Image Archive. This library contains digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news. (3) Audio archive of 5.5 million audio files and recordings
Oxford Digital Library
Oxford University is internationally renowned for its scholarly library collections, and in particular for those of the Bodleian Library which has been a library of deposit for almost 400 years. The University has a long tradition in digital scholarship and there are a number of completed library projects focusing on the digitization of primary resources. Some of the primary sources digitized include Celtic and Medieval Manuscripts or 'Early Manuscripts at Oxford', Images of Medieval Manuscripts, the Oxford Text Archive.
World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
Counter Reformation
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is an online library of eBooks in the public domain, including fiction, non-fiction, classics, law, and technical.
The Online Books Page
The Online Books Page is a website that facilitates access to books (about 1 million) that are freely readable over the Internet. The Online Books Page was founded, and is edited, by John Mark Ockerbloom, He is a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. He is solely responsible for the content of the site. The site is hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, who provide the server, disk space, and network bandwidth for the site.

How to Use

The books to the right are examples of the many secondary sources available to you through the West Library on the Middle East post-World War 1. They can be used to gain new ideas, perspectives on a topic, plus to find new sources on a topic.

Below are four ways to obtain books.

Four Ways to Find and Use Books

Amazon
If borrowing is not an option, or it will take too long to borrow from another library, can can search Amazon to purchase a copy of a needed book.
Interlibrary Loan
This service allows you to borrow from another library. You submit the request for a book or journal article, and we'll find a library that has the requested item, ask them to send a copy to us, and then we'll notify you when the item is available.
Library Catalog
The Texas Wesleyan University Library catalog allows you to search through the print books that are located on the third floor. You can also access many electronic books through the catalog.
WorldCat
Worldcat is a world catalog because it allows you to search the collections and services of more than 10,000 libraries worldwide Worldcat has over 2 billion items to search.