Internet
Classics Archive
Visitors can select from a collection of more than 400 works of
classical literature by 59 authors. All texts, originally in Latin, Greek,
Chinese, or Persian, are translated into English. Here you will find the
writings of three Chinese philosophers, including Confucius, and three Persian
writers, as well as Ovid, Julius Caesar, Aristotle, Aesop, and others. The site,
which originates at MIT, also includes a search function that facilitates use of
the texts for classics research as well as related reader recommendations,
trivia questions, and links to further information (the latter requires a user
name and password for access to Britannica Online). See
classics.mit.edu/index.html.
National Academy Press
As publisher for the National Academies, National Academy Press
publishes more than 200 professional-level titles a year in science,
engineering, and health. An imprint of National Academy Press, Joseph Henry
Press, is dedicated to publishing science titles for the scienceliterate lay
reader. NAP’s Web site,
books.nap.edu/index.html, features more than 2,500 titles from both presses online for free
reading. This invaluable service puts cutting-edge research at the fingertips of
scholars, students, and the interested public. Instead of purchasing books or
waiting for their availability at the local public library, readers can now
click on the book they want to read and launch its contents into their browsers.
A search function facilitates searching by title or keyword. A built-in personal
agent allows a user to specify preferences, from which the NAP site will
generate lists of new or recent titles fitting the reader’s profile. From this
Web page, visitors can also purchase printed and bound versions of books at an
enticing 20 percent discount.
Humanities Text Initiative
Based at the University of Michigan, the Humanities Text
Initiative offers free online access to a wide array of classic, American, and
European texts. At HTI, users will find four complete versions of the Bible, the
Book of Mormon, the Koran, the texts of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, and the
works of William Blake. Included in the Humanities Text Initiative’s eclectic
special collections are the American Verse Project, the Corpus of Middle English
Prose and Verse, the Medieval Review, and a Bosnian Travel Guide. One special
collection, the Making of America, is well worth visiting. It is a collection of
scanned, original, primary documents in American social history from the
antebellum period through Reconstruction. The collection currently
contains approximately 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th
century imprints. These works are reproduced as image files, so visitors can
view the original documents as they were set forth. See
www.hti.umich.edu.
Early English Books Online
Early English Books Online
(wwwlib.umi.com/eebo) is an outstanding digital library of 125,000 texts, ranging from the
first book printed in English by William Caxton through the Shakespearean period
and the English Civil War. This vast
collection includes works by Malory, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, and
Galileo, as well as musical exercises by Henry Purcell, prayer books, almanacs,
calendars, and many other primary sources. The database can be searched by
author, title, printer, publication date, type of illustration, and Library of
Congress subject heading. Works are presented as PDF images. To access all of
the material, visitors must obtain a user name and password. However, featured
content is viewable free of charge, including more than 200 "greatest hits" of
early English writing.
Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is a global consortium of
scholars in the humanities, social sciences and history, along with archivists,
librarians, curators, and others interested in presenting scholarly information
in a new way. ECAI TimeMap is a set of software tools that allow scholarly
research results to be displayed in the dimensions of space and time, lending a
geographic and temporal sensibility to the findings. More than a dozen projects
currently take advantage of the ECAI’s TimeMap architecture, including one on
Austronesian linguistic mapping. See
www.ecai.org for more information on projects that have been
completed or are under development.
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
(early-cuneiform.humnet.ucla.edu),
a collaboration in progress between
scholars at UCLA and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is
building a digital repository of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of
writing, around 3200 B.C., until the end of the third millennium. Although
scholars have been deciphering cuneiform for 150 years, many essential tools,
such as a reliable paleography and a useful lexicon and grammar guide, are
unavailable to most researchers. More than 120,000 tablets exist from this
period. The CDLI dataset will consist of texts and images, combining document
transliterations, text glossaries, and digitized originals and photo archives of
early cuneiform. The online resource will be of interest to both distant
scholars and to museums holding fragile collections of cuneiform that could be
destroyed by frequent handling.
Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia
The Electronic Text
Center (etext.lib.virginia.edu)
combines an online archive of tens
of thousands of SGMLand XML-encoded electronic texts and images with a library
service that offers hardware and software suitable for the creation and analysis
of text. The center, based at the University of Virginia, holds a collection of
45,000 on- and offline humanities texts in many languages (including Apache,
Chinese, and Japanese) and 350,000 related images. Of these materials, 5,000
texts and 164,000 images are available to the public. The rest are available
only to the 39-campus community of the state university system. Represented
disciplines include history, literature, philosophy, religion, and history of
science, with collections in multiple languages. The university owns a number of
special collections, including those on Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, the Salem
witch trials, and the Plymouth colony.
California Digital Library
The California Digital Library
(www.cdlib.org) licenses scholarly materials, including journals,
abstracts, and databases, and is creating electronic access to rare archival
collections within the university library system. Among its wide-ranging
collections are the Online Archive of California, a database of digital
descriptions of archival and manuscript collections from libraries around the
state (these archival search aids have never been available in electronic form
before); Counting California, government data and statistics about our most
populous state; the Melvyl Catalog, which records more than 15 million holdings;
and the California Periodicals Database, to which the Getty Center, Graduate
Theological Seminary in Berkeley, and state public libraries have contributed.
CDL also stores thousands of electronic journals and specialized reference
resources.
HighWire
This science archive from Stanford University Libraries offers
links to more than 370,000 articles from 299 journals and other research content
providers.Through HighWire
(highwire.stanford.edu),
visitors can navigate through myriad
journals in the life sciences, medicine, and physical sciences, as well as a few
social science journals and useful non-journal sites such as the Oxford English
Dictionary online. Visitors can search by author, subject, or discipline.
HighWire d'es not serve simply as a portal, however. By including links among
authors, articles and citations; advanced searching capabilities;
high-resolution images and multimedia; and interactivity features, the site
lends added dimensions to the information provided in the printed journals. Some
of the journal content is available free to non-subscribers.
Visible Human Project
The Visible Human Project from National Library of Medicine has
produced complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of
the male and female human body using CT, MRI, and anatomical images. The
datasets are designed to serve as a common reference point for the study of
human anatomy, as a set of common public domain data for testing medical imaging
algorithms, and as a test bed and model for the construction of image libraries
that can be accessed through networks. See
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html.
