The Library provides access for UIUC faculty, staff, and students to several major collections of digitized texts.  These are available from the “Online Research Resources” page off the Library Gateway http://www.library.uiuc.edu/orr.  Select the “Reference Tools” [though of course these are collections of digitized text, not really reference tools] tab and browse by subject (check box) or search specific titles (search box).

There is a wealth of digitized text collections that are available to anyone on the web, and for the most part, these are not included in the listing of online resources on the Library Gateway.  However, some of these publicly accessible sites are listed under “Online Resources” on the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library web site. http://www.library.uiuc.edu/hix/online.html

Here you will find links to the extensive American Memory Project at the Library of Congress, the American Slave Narratives anthology from the University of Virginia E-text Center, a collection of Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls from Stanford University, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London, 1674-1834, the Document Archive of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930,  and the Scottish Archive Network, among many other resources.

Early English Books Online offers digital facsimiles of books published between 1475 and 1700.  Additionally, for some of the works in the collection, there is also re-keyed text that has been tagged to permit sophisticated searching of structural elements (e.g., epigraphs, dedications, quotations) and genre (e.g., sermons, letters, songs), with links to the corresponding page images.  The database, which is still in production, now contains 100,000 titles in their entirety, scanned from microfilm, plus the transcribed text of about 3500 works.  (For works that have not yet been scanned, you can use EEBO as an index to the microfilm set, which we also own.)  The entire text of the works is fully searchable, and you can also search the subject headings for each work.  You can combine search terms, and you can limit your search to specific fields (author, title, subject, publisher, city of publication, date of publication, and other elements).  You can print and/or download your search results.

The database includes works on military, legal, and economic history and social conditions, as well as political and diplomatic history, religion, and literature.  Types of primary source material available in EEBO include first person accounts, parliamentary reports, popular pamphlets, political tracts, sermons, scientific and medical treatises, and speeches.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains (or will contain when complete) the full content of nearly 150,000 English-language works published between 1701 and 1800.  It is being released in sections, and the sections on history and geography, the social sciences (including works on politics, trade and commerce, industry, and finance), medicine, science and technology (including accounts of scientific expeditions), and literature are now complete.  (Law, philosophy and religion, and reference will be added later this year.)  Here you will find travel accounts, memoirs, gazetteers, historical surveys, parliamentary reports, position papers, commentaries, reports of expeditions, natural histories, and literary works.

To create this database, the publisher scanned the works from thousands of reels of microfilm that had been previously produced.  You can perform keyword searches on the full text of all the works in the collection, or you can search for specific authors or titles.  A particularly nice search feature enables you to limit a keyword search to the “front matter” of books (tables of content, prefaces, forewords) or the “back of book” indexes.  You can combine search terms, and you can stipulate that “near matches” be retrieved, which will help retrieve variant spellings of words, as well as words that might not have been captured in scanning with 100% accuracy.  You can print individual pages or up to 10 pages at a time in PDF format (using Adobe Acrobat Reader).

Empire On-Line offers page images of original documents pertaining to the British empire.  To date only section I (“Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969”) of five projected parts has been completed.  This database combines original documents (138 in section I), both archival manuscripts and printed books, with background essays by scholars and other supplementary material such as chronologies and biographical information.  Documents in the database have been indexed by name, place, and subject.

The sources digitized for section I include travel narratives (journals, memoirs, and reports of expeditions), various publications of the Church Missionary Society, such as the periodicals Church Missionary Quarterly Token and Indian Female Evangelist, as well as the Missionary Papers from 1816 to 1878.  There are annual reports of the Church Missionary Society and other organizations, correspondence and journals from missionaries in Africa, North America, India, and the Caribbean, and a selection of documents from the Macmillan Cabinet Papers (1957-63).The scholarly essays for section I discuss a range of themes in empire studies and link to specific texts illustrating or documenting the analysis.