Eletronic Text Resources

Electronic Text Resources

This index is by no means comprehensive, but many of the larger established sources of electronic text are listed, together with some smaller, more specialised resources. Please note that many of the general resources linked from here divide resources into subject areas. We have tried to provide indications of the type of text available from the resources listed, both in terms of subject matter and format. Additional tools for searching for and looking up phrases, or strings, are also mentioned where appropriate.

The categories used in the index are meant to be helpful. Some texts fall into more than one group. For example, a French text might well be of historical interest. In such cases, we have tried to use the most appropriate category.

If you have any suggestions, corrections, or notice broken links, please contact Henry Merivale (A.J.H.Merivale@leeds.ac.uk).

Gateways and Other Indexes

Athena Authors and Texts - http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/authors.html
Pierre Perroud's directory of literary, historical and scientific texts, arranged by author. Most of the texts are in English, but links are also given to texts in French, German, Italian, Russian and other languages.
CETH Directory of Electronic Text Centers - http://tabula.rutgers.edu/ceth/etext_directory/
Intute: arts & humanities - http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
A very wide range of resources are listed, including bibliographical references as well as full texts, categorised by subject area.
Intute: social sciences - http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/
offers a range of resources relating to the social sciences, including bibliographical references as well as full texts, organised by subject.
Online Book Initiative - gopher://gopher.std.com/11/The Online Book Initiative/
The project dates back to 1990, and most text is available as plain text only, but the collection is large, organised in part by author and in part by subject.
Online Books Page - http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
A directory of thousands of texts listed by subject, author and title, together with information about the formats used.

Electronic Text Centres and Digital Libraries

Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts - http://www.infomotions.com/alex/
a large collection of English and American literature and Western philosophical texts by over 100 different authors. Sophisticated searching and concordancing facilities are available. The texts are stored as plain text, but different formats, such as PDF, can be automatically generated for download.
Bartleby.com: Great Books Online - http://www.bartleby.com/
A commercial site, with adverts, and a large collection of verse, fiction, and nonfiction texts arranged in a series of helpful indexes and provided in HTML format.
Oxford Text Archive (OTA) - http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/
Founded in 1976, this collection holds a large number of texts, which can be located by searching for author, language, or title. Many texts have been marked up in SGML and are available to download as text files.
Project Gutenberg - http://promo.net/pg/
Provides access to a very large collection of text, in a plain text format, for which you can search by author or title.

General Historical Resources

EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe - http://eurodocs.lib.byu.edu
Offers transcriptions, facsimiles, and translations of European historical documents from all periods.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/index.html
Paul Halsall's widely cited collections include texts and bibliographies arranged by period, region, religion and theme.

Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Texts

Decameron Web - http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/dweb.shtml
A site dedicated to Boccaccio's masterpiece, offers a great deal of contextual material, and a powerful searching facilities, which offer the ability to identify instances of words and collocations.
Charrette Project - http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/ss/
"A complex, scholarly, multi-media electronic archive containing a medieval manuscript tradition - that of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette" - images of the original manuscript pages are provided, together with texts in TEI-conformant SGML and plain text formats. Search tools are also offered.
Digital Scriptorium - http://www.scriptorium.columbia.edu/
A collaborative project providing access to an image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html
Part of Paul Halsall's Internet History Sourcebooks Project. The Medieval Sourcebook offers a wide range of texts.
Perseus Digital Library - http://perseus.tufts.edu/
An excellent resource offering a large number of Greco-Roman Classics and English Renaissance literature, together with a selection of secondary literature covering these fields. Dictionaries and advanced searching tools are also provided/
Teams Middle English Texts - http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm
A resource which aims the "make available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions." Frames are used to display notes alongside the text proper.
World of Dante - http://www.worldofdante.org/
Deborah Parker's project offers an electronic edition of Dante's Inferno which has been marked up in SGML, but is transformed into HTML for viewing with a web browser. The underlying SGML markup is used to allow quite complex searches, for example, the researcher can search for all people born in a given place.

Religious Resources

Ahlul Bayt Digital Islamic Library Project - http://www.al-islam.org/index.php
A wide range of Islamic resources are offered, including bilingual Arabic-English texts with commentaries.
Religious Studies Web Guide - http://www.ucalgary.ca/~lipton/texts.html
Includes links to texts associated with many religiouns, from Bahai to Zoroastrianism.

Chinese Texts

Chinese Philosophical Etext Archive - http://sangle.web.wesleyan.edu/etext/
Offers a number of classical and more recent philosophical text in Chinese, encoded using Big5 character encoding.
Zhongwen.com Chinese Character and Culture - http://www.zhongwen.com/
A resource offering an integrated dictionary which links every character to a definition and etymological information. Frames are used to divide the display into different areas. A range of text is available for reading online, including both classical and modern literature.

French Texts

ABU: La Bibliothèque Universelle - http://abu.cnam.fr/
A collection of (mainly) French electronic text, with powerful search facilities that allow the collection to double as a language corpus.
Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) - http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/ARTFL/
A collection of texts, bibliographies and online specialist dictionaries.
Gallica - la Bibliothèque Numerique - http://gallica.bnf.fr/
The digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France - has an especially rich collection of facsimile copies of old texts in PDF format.

Other Specialist Sites

ENGnetBASE: Engineering Handbooks Online - http://www.engnetbase.com/
Freely provides textbooks on subjects from software engineering to biomedical engineering in PDF format.
Office of Public Section Information - http://www.opsi.gov.uk/
Offers official publications on line, including all UK legislation since 1988.
The Rossetti Archive - http://www.rossettiarchive.org/
In addition to the hypermedia archive of Rossetti's work, a series of essays is offered which documents the creation of the archive and some of the wider issues surrounding humanities computing.
Victorian Women Writers Project - http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/welcome.do
A substantial collection of texts by British women writers of the 19th century, marked up in TEI-conformant SGML, but available also in HTML for viewing with common web browsers.

Online Dictionaries

Other resources listed in this directory provide dictionaries. This has been noted in the relevant entries. You can locate such resources using your browser's find facility to look for "diction".

OED (Oxford English Dictionary) Online - http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl
Can be used from the University Campus.