Archive material

scanned images and (increasingly) full-text digital versions of over 125,000 books published in English up to 1700, from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.

traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) draws on resources from over 2000 libraries, including the British Library, the American Antiquarian Society and the Bodleian Library. It features an archive of monographs, or short works, from the 1700s – when the popularity of one-off and self-contained works inspired by arts, culture, public affairs, history and science was at its height.

This site is freely available to access. Darwin Online is the largest and most widely consulted edition of the writings of Darwin ever published. It is probably the most extensive scholarly website devoted to any historical figure.

This website contains over 212,000 pages of searchable text and 220,000 electronic images, at least one exemplar of all known Darwin publications, reproduced to the highest scholarly standards, both as searchable text and electronic images of the originals. The majority of these have been edited and annotated here for the first time with more than 4,900 original editorial notes.

This website also provides the largest collection of Darwin's private papers and manuscripts ever published: c. 20,000 items across c. 100,000 images, thanks primarily to the kind permission of Cambridge University Library.

containing the full text or page images of over 300,000 books published in England before 1800.

Open access eBooks available from JSTOR from a wide range of subjects. The titles are easy to use, with no DRM restrictions and no limits on chapter PDF downloads or printing.

Project Gutenberg offers over 50,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

The Queen Victoria's Journals resource is the product of a unique partnership between the Bodleian Libraries and the Royal Archives, working in collaboration with the online publisher ProQuest. This website reproduces as high-resolution colour images every page of the surviving volumes of Queen Victoria's journals, along with separate photographs of the many illustrations and inserts within the pages.

Each page has been meticulously transcribed and re-keyed, allowing for the journals to be searched. A number of specially-comissioned essays have also been included in this resource, to further support the study and understanding of Queen Victoria and her world.