Rare Books and Special Collections Instructional Support Guide

The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago. This is possible through AOR’s corpus of thirty-six fully digitized and searchable versions of early printed books filled with tens of thousands of handwritten notes, left by two of the most dedicated readers of the early modern period: John Dee and Gabriel Harvey.

A digital map from the International Council on Archives showing which archives have digital collections available around the world.

An artist’s book is a piece of artwork manifested in book form. This gallery represents some of the over 300 artists’ books housed at the MassArt Library. Among the artists represented in our collection are Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Sol Lewitt, Andy Warhol, Allan Kaprow, Bruce Nauman, Michael Kirby, Robert Smithson, Christo, Angela Lorenz, Tamara Oppenheimer, Laura Davidson, Stephanie Stigliano, Julie Chen, and Laurie Anderson.

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries contains more than 130,000 books and periodicals published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library improves research methodology by collaboratively making biodiversity literature openly available to the world as part of a global biodiversity community.

You can see books, manuscripts, maps, playbills, scores and much more. Researchers can use our collection of electronic resources and databases to help them find material relevant to their research.

A home for the discovery of digitised material and research outputs from the University of Cambridge and beyond.

Books for children from around the world available in full online.

The City of Vancouver Archives acquires a variety of records that document the city's history.

Hear the story of the Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it, and find thousands of historic photographs, documents, newspapers, letters and other primary source materials from immigration to the WWII incarceration and its aftermath.

Digital Bodleian contains digitized materials from the Bodleian library collections at Oxford University.

A scratchpad for referencing known uses of CC licensing and material in the GLAM sector: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Please add to the list and turn compelling uses into Case Studies.

The Digital Public Library of American contains digitized library and archival materials from partner institutions across the United States, including the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. Our website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research.

Comprising over 250 early modern printed books bearing handwritten annotations, this collection offers rich evidence for studying the material history of reading.

This collection contains complete digital scans of over 300 early modern English bound manuscripts from the Clark Library. Dating primarily from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, these handwritten texts comprise a vast range of manuscript genres, including commonplace books, miscellanies, recipe collections, historical treatises, literary manuscripts, sermon notebooks, scientific texts, heraldic manuals, musical collections, travel narratives, legal compilations, and account books.

A project from the Early Modern Center in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara to make broadside ballads of the seventeenth century fully accessible as texts, art, music, and cultural records.

Europeana provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more from thousands of European archives, libraries and museums.

The Fisher local digital collections were developed at the University of Toronto in collaboration with the staff of Collection Digitization and Information Technology Services Department. All of our local digital collections provide page images, enhanced indexing features, and the capability to conduct full text searching on the contents of the documents themselves.

Offers online access to over 100,000 images from the Folger Shakespeare Library, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art. Users who create accounts can also save groups of images.

Gallica contains digitized materials from the national Library of France and its partners.

This tool is designed to help researchers, scholars, and educators discover the variety of resources available across the Getty's collections, which include collections in each the four programs: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. Filter by GRI Digital Collections.

Collection of full books and magazines stored in Google’s digital database.

These collections represent just a sample of the Ransom Center's diverse holdings in literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts. New materials are added regularly.

Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.

HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries. The Digital Library is a repository providing access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.

Collections include manuscripts, charters, incunabula, anatomical literature and drawings, maps, journals and newspapers, and more.

Historical Anatomies on the Web is a digital project designed to give Internet users access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the collection of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

The Huntington Digital Library is the online database of Huntington Library digitized materials. It aims to support the research needs of Huntington readers and staff and to share digitized resources with a broader community. New content is regularly added.

The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to create a digital library of international children's books. The materials included in the collection reflect similarities and differences in cultures, societies, interests, lifestyles, and priorities of peoples around the world.

Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies & music, as well as 150 billion archived web pages.

The UC Berkeley Collection contains maps and atlases of Japan and the world created between Tokugawa and Meiji eras.

Digitized versions of items from the Freer|Sackler Library's collection of illustrated Japanese rare books from former owners Charles Lang Freer, Robert O. Muller, and Gerhard Pulverer.

The Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection (JFABC) digital library is an online guide and finding aid for the rich collection of artists' publications available in Flaxman Library Special Collections. The JFABC brings together close to ten thousand artists' publications in all formats and media including: books, zines, multiples, video and audio recordings, digital works, periodicals, and other intimate works of art created by artists of local, national, and international significance.

High resolution images from the Library's archive of early American images, map collection, and political cartoon collection are available through Luna. Scans of over 10,000 full books are available through Internet Archive.

Digitized materials from the Library of Congress including books, maps, serials, ephemera, audio recordings, and more.

The Linda Hall Library Digital Collections provide access to significant rare and fragile materials from the collections of the Linda Hall Library, the world’s foremost independent research library devoted to science, engineering, and technology.

Explore more than 80 digital projects covering a wide array of subjects including, art, architecture, history and literature, engineering, medicine, maps, music, and urban design.

This curated selection explores medieval manuscripts that were digitised as part of The Polonsky Foundation England and France Project: Manuscripts from the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 700–1200. Discover stunning highlights of illuminated manuscripts set in their cultural and historical context and explored in a range of articles.

The world's largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500.

The goal of the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series is to 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.

Pierpont Morgan's immense holdings ranged from Egyptian art to Renaissance paintings to Chinese porcelains. For his library, Morgan acquired illuminated, literary, and historical manuscripts, early printed books, and old master drawings and prints.

Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) handles the digitization and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions.Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) handles the digitization and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions. It provides one of the largest and fastest growing digital collections in Germany, now comprising more than 900,000 titles available online.

Choose "Books" and limit search to "Available Online" for open access materials.

Digital Collections is the National Library of Medicine's free online repository of biomedical resources including books, manuscripts, still images, videos, and maps. The content in Digital Collections is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain.

Resources include digitized images from the collection across a number of subject areas, digitized maps, moving image archives, and more.

This growing collection exemplifies the collection strengths of the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL, including French pamphlets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, postcards, history of the book, and more.

The Academy is home to one of the most significant historical libraries in medicine and public health in the world. The Library's Digital Collections and Exhibits website provides users with access to our historical collection on the history of medicine and public health. Users can explore some of our unique materials, including our rare books, manuscripts, pharmaceutical trade cards, and many more.

An online database containing 736,893 items digitized from The New York Public Library's collections, featuring prints, photographs, maps, book arts, fashion, manuscripts, streaming video, and more.

Corpus Christi College and the Stanford University Libraries welcome you to Parker Library on the Web, a digital exhibit designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Publications on bibliophilia, printing & publishing, and book history 25,000 printed books, 600+ manuscripts from this Dutch printing museum (interface in English).

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. Project Gutenberg eBooks are mostly older literary works. Most were published before 1924, with some published in the decades after. Use one of the Search methods on this page, or try using the Bookshelves to browse by genre, age group, and topic.

The spectrum of modern and contemporary Artists' Books in Reed College's Special Collections and collected on this website include traditional letterpress printed books of poetry, conceptual book works, sculptural and visual works, concrete poetry, and magazine works.

Over 35,000 digitized books and manuscripts as well as digitized photo collections, ephemera, and seed catalogs.

The Smithsonian Libraries has a rich, diverse collection of artist-made books from the early 20th century to today.

Instant access to rare historical photos, maps, books and more from Toronto Public Library

The University of Victoria Libraries support a variety of digital initiatives to promote wider access to our unique UVic collections. Our digital content ranges from the latest student theses and faculty publications to manuscripts from centuries past.

This database is an illustrated, descriptive index to the Artists' Book Collection, located in the Kohler Art Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Presently, the Artists' Book Collection contains over 1400 titles. The database indexes nearly 1200 of those titles, most of which have one to four images to visually represent the structure and/or content of the book.

Allows members of the public to explore some of the beautiful and fascinating early-modern books within East Anglia’s libraries in the comfort of their own home, as well as providing fun, family-friendly creative activities inspired by the books

VPL's Special Collections has a significant collection of historical photographs relating to British Columbia and Yukon. The online Historical Photographs Database provides access to over 38,000 digitized images.

Thousands of freely licensed digital books, artworks, photos and images of historical library materials and museum objects.

The Women Writers Project from Northeastern University is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Their goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. They support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.

The Wren Digital Library provides access to digitised collections from the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The founding purpose was to digitise the College’s collection of Western medieval manuscripts catalogued by M. R. James in 1901-3. There are currently over 850 of these manuscripts accessible online.