Major Digital Libraries

Major Digital Libraries

• Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé

  Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) provides access to the library, archival, and museum collections in the history of medicine from several institutions in Paris.
  Medica provides open access to electronic versions of the library’s rare and ancient documents, including monographs, theses, articles, periodicals, and manuscripts, a total of 122,000 items. Series include antiquity, medieval times, diseases and epidemics, history of medicine and its institutions, pharmacology, and others.
  The Banque d’images et de portraits, provides access to more than 200,000 images of objects and pictures from the collections of the BIU Santé as well as the Bibliothèque de l’Académie natioale de médecine, the Musée de L’Assistance Publique Hôpitaux de Paris, the Musée des Moulages de l’Hôpital Saint-Louis, the Ecole nationale vétérinaire d’Alfort, the Musée François Tillequin, and the Bibliothèque médicale Henri Ey du Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne.
  The Collection Asclépiades provides access to theses and dissertations in the history of medicine.
  URL: https://u-paris.fr/bibliotheques/biu-sante-medecine/

• British History Online

  British History Online brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. It is a digital library of key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800. It currently contains more than 1,200 volumes.
  URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/

• British Library

  British Library’s Online Gallery contains 30,000 items from the library’s collection. This includes maps, rare books, and significant historical documents. The Online Gallery also includes exhibitions on a variety of topics such as Henry VIII, Britain and the American Civil War, and Victorian popular music.
  URL: https://imagesonline.bl.uk/

• Digital Library of the Caribbean

  Digital Library of the Caribbean is a cooperative of partners within the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections. Types of collections include but are not limited to: newspapers, archives of Caribbean leaders and governments, official documents, documentation and numeric data for ecosystems, scientific scholarship, historic and contemporary maps, oral and popular histories, travel accounts, literature and poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts.
  URL: http://www.dloc.com/

• Digitized Medieval Manuscripts App

  Digitized Medieval Manuscripts App contains links to more than 300 digital libraries which are home to more than 20,000 medieval manuscripts.
  URL: http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org/ 

• Europeana

  Europeana contains millions of items from a range of Europe’s leading galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Collections include: books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers, paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects, films, newsreels and TV broadcasts, and music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts.
  URL: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

• French Revolution Digital Archive

  French Revolution Digital Archive is a collaboration between Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It consists of two collections: the Parliamentary Archives and the Images of the French Revolution. The Parliamentary Archives provide a record of parliamentary deliberations as well as letters, reports, speeches, and other first-hand accounts covering the years 1787-1794 from a great variety of published and archival sources. The Images of the French Revolution are composed of high-resolution digital images of approximately 14,000 individual visual items, primarily prints, but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects which display aspects of the Revolution.
  URL: http://frda.stanford.edu/?locale=en

• Gallica

  Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, providing online access to more than 3,000,000 documents. This includes: 600,000 books, 88,000 maps, 56,000 manuscripts, 1,166,000 images, 1,499,000 periodicals and newspapers, 28,000 scores, and 34,000 sound recordings.
  URL: http://gallica.bnf.fr/

• Harvard Library Digital Collections

  Harvard Library Digital Collections contain thousands of historical photographs, pamphlets, manuscripts, books, music scores, rare maps and other rare and unique materials. The Open Collections Program has created six subject-specific collections containing over 2.3 million digitized pages, including more than 225,000 manuscript pages. The Open Collections Program topics are: Harvard in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries; Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History; Islamic Heritage Project; Expeditions and Discoveries: Sponsored Exploration and Discovery in the Modern Age; Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics; Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930; and Women Working, 1800-1930.
  URL: http://library.harvard.edu/digital-collections

• Library and Archives Canada

  Library and Archives Canada contains several databases of textual, photographic, audio, and video materials. Databases are organized by topics, such as Aboriginal Heritage, Immigration, Ethno-Cultural Groups, Military Heritage, Censuses, and Vital Statistics.
  URL: http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/Pages/discover.aspx

• Medical Heritage Library

  Medical Heritage Library is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading libraries providing free and open access to historical resources in medicine. The collection, available through the Internet Archive, contains tens of thousands of items such as rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films from the past six centuries. The MHL’s principal contributors include: the Wellcome Library; the U.S. National Library of Medicine; The UCSF Library and Center for Knowledge Management; The New York Academy of Medicine; Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus; The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University; The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; and The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University.  There are as well many other content contributors who have added digitized materials to the MHL. Materials from all participating institutions can be searched through the MHL website.
  URL: http://www.medicalheritage.org/about/

• Mountain West Digital Library

  Mountain West Digital Library provides access to over 958,000 resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and government agencies, counties, and municipalities in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, Hawaii, and other parts of the U.S. West.
  URL: http://mwdl.org/index.php

• Project Gutenberg

  Project Gutenberg is a free online digital library with over 49,000 works. The majority of the books are older works whose copyright has expired and are now public domain, such as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The library’s science bookshelf includes works in subjects such as biology, chemistry, microbiology, and physiology. Books are primarily in English.
  URL: http://www.gutenberg.org/

• Qatar Digital Library

  Qatar Digital Library contains archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, and photographs, including explanatory notes in Arabic and English, documenting the history of the Gulf Region. The library contains more than 500,000 images including 500 maps, charts, and plans of the Persian Gulf and the wider region, and Arabic scientific manuscripts on topics such as medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and engineering. The library also contains articles written by experts on selected documents.
  URL: https://www.qdl.qa/en

• Smithsonian Institution

  Smithsonian Institution has digitized more than 1,300,000 museum objects and library and archival materials, including images, video and sound files, and electronic journals. The collections of specific museums and archives can be browsed online.
  URL: http://collections.si.edu/search/ 

• U.S. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division

  U.S. National Library of Medicine, History of Medicine Division’s Digital Collections contain more than 15,000 book, serial, and film resources, from the 16^th to 20^th centuries. The collections are organized into themes such as Medicine in the Americas, 1610-1920; Cholera Online, 1817-1900; and The Public Health Film Goes to War. The National Library of Medicine website also contains several special digital projects including: Profiles in Science, the archival collections of prominent scientists, physicians, and others who have made significant contributions to science and medicine; Historical Anatomies on the Web, images from important anatomical atlases in the library’s collection; Turning the Pages, digitized images of rare and historic books in the history of medicine; The Visible Human Project, complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of male and female human bodies; and Islamic Medical Manuscripts, images of the roughly 300 medieval Persian and Arabic manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine.
  URL: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/digitalprojects.html

• UCLA Library Digital Collections

  UCLA Library Digital Collections contains images, texts, maps, and audio and video files organized into 99 separate digital collections on a range of topics in local, American, and world history.
  URL: http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/

• Wellcome Library

  Wellcome Library is currently in the process of digitizing its massive collections. The Library’s digital collections consists of thousands of items including published books, pamphlets, archives, posters, photographs, and film and sound recordings, covering a wide variety of topics, such as asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war.
  Wellcome Images is a collection of 170 000 historical and contemporary images, covering medical and social history, contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
  URL: http://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/

• World Digital Library

  World Digital Library makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from all countries and cultures.  The library contains more than 12,000 items from 193 countries from 1200 BCE and 2000 CE. Content includes books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, journals, prints and photographs, sound recordings, and films. Each item on the WDL is accompanied by an item-level description that explains its significance and historical context. Additional information about selected items is provided by curator videos. Other features include advanced image-viewing, timelines, interactive maps, and in-depth thematic sections on selected topics. All navigation tools, bibliographic information, and content descriptions are provided in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
  URL: http://www.wdl.org/en/