Two Minute Tutorials (or less)
Working with Electronic Book Projects
When you do the Extend Search, one option you can choose is to search in Electronic Book Projects. Selecting this will do your search automatically in the major book digitization projects in the world.
Electronic Book Projects
This tutorial will give you a very brief overview of what you are searching when you come to this page.
When you select Google Books, you will be searching the full-text of the scans made by the Google Books project, which currently contains over 7 million scanned books.
Electronic Book Projects
While many of these books can only be partly viewed, many others can be read online completely or even downloaded.
You can limit to books that you can read in full-text by date of publication
You still have to Evaluate! See the 2-Minute Tutorial Evaluating Information Resources
The Internet Archive also contains many hundreds of thousands of beautiful scanned books, but also contains videos, images, and other resources. It contains the Wayback Machine, which actually archives old pages of the Internet. See Disappearing Websites for more information.
You can limit your search in several ways
The Biblioteca Digitale Italiana is an excellent site for scans of Italian language materials, including many musical scores. You have to be a little careful though‌ This search for romanticism found nothing.
But you need to search in Italian, so the search for romanticismo retrieves three scanned books!
The Biblioteca Italiana is another site that has electronic versions of books by many older Italian authors.
The Online Books page from the University of Pennsylvania has links to many books online and uses the controlled vocabulary. When you first click into the page, it will have searched by title. You can then refine the search if you would like to. For example, there are three books with the word “romanticism” in the title, but if you click on Search Subject ….
You will find several others. You can also search for the author’s name.
Another database you will be searching will be the Catalog of U.S. Government Documents. Obviously, there will be some materials that will retrieve zero in this database, but it is a rich resource for many topics, not only U.S. government policy.
For more information on how to use government documents see the page in the Two Minute Tutorial
Europeana is a huge, cooperative project of the European Union countries. There are vast numbers of resources here and it is growing every day. There are texts, videos, images, sounds from institutions around the EU.
The HathiTrust Digital Library contains scans of public domain materials held in many university libraries. It is built primarily from scans by Google, but many more are available for public viewing. Most of these are older books.
You can restrict this search to full-text only
The European Library searches the catalogs of many European libraries simultaneously. There are many digital materials as well, of books, manuscripts, images, audio recordings and almost everything. Many of these materials have been digitized. The DEFAULT search is for digitized materials.
Select the Library you wish to see
It shows up here. Many you can See online.
The Making of America project consists of scanned books and journals, mainly from 19th century United States. To search it completely, you must search in both Cornell and Michigan.
It automatically searches Cornell. Click on Michigan to search everything.
Two Minute Tutorials (or less)
Working with Electronic Book Projects Go to: List of Two-Minute Tutorials