Library Guides: Freely Available Resources for Research: Arts, Humanities and Area Studies

Freely Available Resources: Art History, Architecture, Music, Film

Archives of American Art This link opens in a new window
Collection of primary source documentation on American visual arts.
Collection of primary source documentation on American visual arts.
Cities and Buildings Database This link opens in a new window
A collection of over 12,000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world.
A collection of over 5000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages to the Parc de la Villette. Users can now search for buildings by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction, as well as other fields. Images have all been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain. Freely available to anyone with access to the Web for use in the classroom, student study, or for individual research purposes.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
Brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.
It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America's heritage, to the efforts and data of science. DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

Getty Research Institute Images
Includes artists’ sketchbooks, drawings and watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks, and early photographs of the Middle East and Asia. Available to the public for use without fees or restriction.
IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library
96,380 works · 324,160 scores · 36,506 recordings · 12,986 composers · 338 performers
Internet Movie Database
A database of more than 120,000 movies. Includes biographical records (including complete filmographies) for close to 200,000 individuals involved in international film and television industries. The Glossary includes definitions of terms and phrases frequently used in the world of movies, film, acting, and cinema-going. The Box Office Summary lists the weekly summary of top-grossing US films and also includes a year-to-date archive of top-grossing US films and listings of top-grossing international films.
Invaluable: The World's Premier Auctions
(formerly Artfact) is the world’s largest online auction marketplace of fine and decorative arts, antiques, collectibles, and estate sales. Search and buy from over 160,000 auctions annually. Includes more than 57 million complete auction results, plus information on more than 500,000 international artists.

Media History Digital Library This link opens in a new window
Digitized public domain media periodicals and online access to the histories of cinema, broadcasting, and recorded sound. [1905-1973]
The Media History Digital Library digitizes collections of classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain for full public access. The project is supported by owners of materials who loan them for scanning, and donors who contribute funds to cover the cost of scanning.

Turner Classic Movies (AFI database)
Database includes over 180,000 titles from 1890-1969.
UbuWeb
An online educational resource for avant-garde material. It includes texts and critical studies, visual, concrete and sound poetry, film and video art, sound art and music, and theatre and dance productions among other critical avant-garde material.
Discogs
Discogs is an online database and marketplace of music releases that helps any enthusiast — from casual fan to professional collector — savor music in a more personal and meaningful way.

Freely Available Resources: Literature, Classics, Philosophy

Project Gutenberg
Thousands of free ebooks, most are in the public domain (pre-1923).
Bartleby.com
A comprehensive public reference library containing a searchable database of reference, verse, and classic literature.

Encyclopedia Mythica This link opens in a new window
Mythology, folklore, magic, and definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.
Covers mythology, folklore, magic, and more and contains over 6,100 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.
Perseus Digital Library This link opens in a new window
A collection of more than 500 primary and secondary texts on the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Also includes images of vases, sculptures, buildings and other art and archaeological works.
A collection of more than 500 primary and secondary texts on the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Also includes images of vases, sculptures, buildings and other art and archaeological works.

Ancient World Online
Links to an Index of Ancient World online resources, viewable by title or by keyword. Also links to a list of open access journals in Ancient Studies and a list of Open Access Textbooks, OERs and primers.
Text Creation Partnership
Thousands of accurate, searchable, full-text transcriptions of early print books that are now available to everyone. Texts from Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Evans Early American Imprints.
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standardized, accurate, and faithful XML/SGML-encoded electronic text editions of early printed books. We’ve transcribed and marked up text — through manual keying, rather than optical character recognition (OCR) — from millions of static page images in ProQuest’s Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints. Raw transcripts are available for bulk download as zipped files for those wishing to do text mining or similar projects.
IIIF Collections: Manuscripts and Rare Books
Search across manuscripts and rare books dated before 1800 coming from many digital libraries in the world, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), Digital.Bodleian, Cambridge Digital Library, and more.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy This link opens in a new window
Online encyclopedia of philosophical concepts and philosophers written by leading scholars in the field.
A dynamic reference work in which each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field.

Freely Available Resources: Area Studies

GENERAL - AREA STUDIES

CRL Digital Collections
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The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries. Many of their international newspapers and other unique items that have been digitized are publicly available.
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UC Berkeley is a longstanding member of CRL.
Foreign Language News and Newpapers (MIT Library)
Links to newspapers online available in the following languages: Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

WESTERN EUROPEAN STUDIES

Biblioteca Nacional de Espana: Colecciones Digitales This link opens in a new window
Access to several large digital collections, including Classic Spanish Works.
Provides access to several large digital collections including: Quijote, Posters of the Republic and Civil War, Cartography (16th - 19th centuries); Hispanic iconography, Goya, and Classic Spanish Works. In Spanish.
Biblioteca Virtual Miquel de Cervantes This link opens in a new window
Digital library that provides free electronic access to one of the world's largest collections of digitized books, periodicals, documents, manuscripts, dissertations, images and audio-visual resources.
Dialnet This link opens in a new window
Articles, conference papers, book chapters, dissertations and other documents in the social sciences and the humanities published mostly in Spain and to a lesser extent in Latin America. [2001 - present]
Lists almost 1.4 million articles in over 4,000 mostly Spanish journals and magazines, and thousands of books and dissertations. Subjects covered include primarily the sciences and technology, but also the social sciences, humanities, education, business, and law. Open-access database created by a group of Spanish universities under the leadership of the Universidad de la Rioja, Logrono, Spain. Free article-alert service for registered users.
Europeana This link opens in a new window
Digital objects from European institutions.
Provides open access to more than 15 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers from more than 1500 European institutions. Europeana -- the European digital library, museum and archive -- launched in 2008 and is funded by the European Commission and its member states. This current prototype is one of many parallel projects of The European Library.
European Library This link opens in a new window
Holdings, maps, photographs and more from 48 national libraries in Europe.
Provides free international online access to holdings, maps, photographs, music, and digitized materials from 48 national libraries in Europe. Resources can be both digital (books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.) and bibliographical. (The European Library)
Gallica This link opens in a new window
Provides free electronic access to one of the world's largest collections of digitized books, periodicals, documents, manuscripts, images and audio-visual resources. One can browse (Decouverte), search (Recherche), or explore thematic groupings of materials (Dossiers).

German National Library/Deutsche National Bibliothek
Internet Culturale
Shared catalog and digital collection for Italian libraries and web portal to Italian cultural heritage.
OpenEdition
Scholarly open access books and journals in French and other European languages.
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OpenEdition is an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences portal with four complementary platforms: OpenEdition Books (ebooks), Revues.org (scholarly journals), Calenda (academic announcements), and Hypotheses (research blogs). It is a non-profit public initiative that promotes open access (OA) publishing, with the support of French research institutions. Most of the content is in French but also in other European languages, including English.

Persee: portail des revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales This link opens in a new window
Full text access to French scholarly journals in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. [dates vary]
An initiative of the French Ministry of State Education, Higher Education and Higher Education and Research.

SLAVIC/EASTERN EUROPEAN STUDIES

Digital Library, Russian State Library
Texts in Russian and other languages, music scores, early printed books, etc.
Electronic Library: Imwerden
Primary sources, Russian Literature; in Russian.
HUNGARICANA
A common website of Hungarian archives, museums and libraries, operated by the Library of Parliament, Hungary (Országgyűlési Könyvtár).
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The digitization was financed by the NKA (National Cultural Fund of Hungary) in the past years and we set ourselves the main goal to publish the cultural heritage of Hungary on one site: databases, records, documents, images, maps, etc. Now more than 100 institutes serve data, some of them from foreign countries. Library: publication of archives, museums, libraries
Postcards: more than 300.000 postcards
MAPIRE: Historical Maps of the Habsburg Empire
Maps: unique historical maps from the biggest Hungarian collections
Documents: medieval charters, notarial records, criminal cases, civil law cases, etc.
Old Hungarian Library (RMK)
Mapire
Map portal with historical maps of Habsburg Empire and Austro Hungary.

Osmikon This link opens in a new window
An interdisciplinary portal to a wide range of information in the field of Slavic and East European Studies. Contains some full text information on history, language, literature, politics, information science and culture of East, Central East and South East European countries and historical regions. (Formerly titled ViFaOst - Portal for East European Studies).

LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) This link opens in a new window
Indexes books, journals and proceedings to create an annual bibliography on Latin America consisting of works selected and annotated by scholars, alternating between focusing on the humanities and the social sciences.
Los Primeros Libros de las Américas This link opens in a new window
The Los Primeros Libros de las Américas: Impresos Mexicanos del Siglo XVI en las Bibliotecas del Mundo project is building a digital collection of the first books printed in Mexico before 1601
"These monographs are very important because they represent the first printing in the New World and provide primary sources for scholarly studies focused on a variety of academic fields.

Approximately 220 unique titles are held in institutions around the world with most held in Mexico and the United States. The project currently brings together 15 partner institutions in Mexico, the United States, South America, and Europe."
RedALyC: Red de Revistas Cientificas de America Latina y El Caribe This link opens in a new window
A collection of over 1200 open access scholarly journals covering all aspects of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences published by more than 500 institutions in 22 Ibero-American countries. (Red ALyC) [1993-]
Developed by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. All journals from Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) are now aggregated through and included in RedALYC.
SciELO: Scientific Electronic Library Online This link opens in a new window
Journals from Portugal, Spain, and South Africa are also included. The SciELO project is an initiative of the Foundation for Support to Research of the State of São Paulo, Brazil (FAPESP) and the Latin American and Caribbean Center for Information on Health Sciences (BIREME).

EAST ASIAN STUDIES

CiNii
The database provided by the National Institute of Informatics (Japan) covers books, articles, and dissertations held by Japanese academic libraries. Links to open access articles and dissertations are included whenever available.
Database of Laws and Regulations (China) (English language)
NDL Search
Covers holdings of the National Diet Library (NDL) and other academic and public libraries, museums, and archives in Japan, including digital archives.
Cultural Japan
Discover digital resources on Japanese Culture from all over the world. More than a million items are collected for this platform.
Japan Search
Find digital archives in Japan

SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES

Digital South Asia Library
The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users. Includes online dictionaries, images, maps, statistics, bibliographies, books, journals and more.
Sarai - South Asian Studies Virtual Library
Includes ebooks, ejournals, images, and other resources in a wide variety of disciplines.
South Asia Open Archives
South Asia materials digitized by the Center for Research Libraries, available on the JSTOR platform.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Southeast Asia Digital Library
The Southeast Asia Digital Library covers a variety of interdisciplinary Southeast Asian resources in various languages and formats for scholarly research, teaching, and learning.
DREAMSEA Repository
DREAMSEA is a “Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia.”

MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES

Arabic Books Online (ACO)
Provides digital access to close to 15,000 Arabic books in public domain from various distinguished libraries.
İslâm Araştırmaları Merkezi (İSAM)
Provides access to a number of useful Turkish databases in history, literature, arts, religion, Ottoman court records/documents and more.
Al-Aqsa Mosque Library: Historical Periodical Collections (1900-1950)
Includes 20 sets of historical materials that document the history of Palestine. This unique collection of periodicals represents an irreplaceable source of information about Palestine and its people. Part of the British Library's Endangered Archives project.
Al-Meshkat
Includes text-based (searchable) materials in writings from the long course of Islamic civilization. In Arabic.
Cambridge University: Islamic Manuscripts
Cambridge University Library's collection of Islamic manuscripts dates from the origins of Arabic scholarship in Cambridge in the 1630s, over 5,000 works, including the collections of Thomas Erpenius, J.L.Burckhardt, E.H.Palmer and E.G. Browne.
Farabi Digital Library
From IRCICA, Farabi includes several collections such as: Ottoman Yearbooks, Voyages in Middle East, Korans, and much more.
Georgetown University: Islamic Medical and Scientific (IMSE) Database
Collection of resources pertaining to Islamic perspectives in the broad field of bioethics. This is a collaborative effort of two Georgetown Libraries: the Bioethics Research Library (Washington) and the School of Foreign Service-Qatar Library (Doha).
Jara'id : A Chronology of Nineteenth Century Periodicals in Arabic (1800-1900)
This website, from the Zentrum Moderner Orient, provides a chronology of nineteenth-century periodicals in Arabic. Although it is meant to include all periodicals published in Arabic in the period from 1800 to 1900, this chronology is certainly incomplete.
Princeton University: Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative
The private manuscript libraries of Yemen, estimated at 50,000 codices, constitutes the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world. Texts in this archive were composed, copied, studied, and preserved by Zaydi scholars from the tenth century to the present.
UNRWA Photo and Film Archive for Palestinian Refugees
"Collective memory is a vital element of communal identity, and this rich archive documents one element of Palestinian identity: the refugee experience…” – Filippo Grandi, UNRWA Commissioner-General.
University of Chicago: Mamluk Bibliography Online
The aim of this collection is to compile comprehensive bibliographies of all primary sources relating to the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, as well as all research and discussion--scholarly and popular--germane to the subject.
Arab Image Foundation's digital photo archive
Provides access to "over 500,000 photographic objects and documents from and related to the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora has been gradually assembled over the last 20 years by artists and researchers and through donations."

JEWISH STUDIES

Sefaria
An online open source free content digital library of Jewish texts, including Tanakh, Mishnah, Talmud, as well as works of halakhah, philosophy, and modern works.
Ben Yehuda Project / פרויקט בן-יהודה
Classics of modern Hebrew literature including poetry and prose, essays, letters, memoirs, and reference works.
KTIV: The International Collection of Digitized Manuscripts
Open access to over 70 thousand digitized Hebrew manuscripts from over 500 collections worldwide.
Digital YIVO
Main page for YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’s plentiful online resources: collections, exhibitions – and websites, such as the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
In geveb : a journal of Yiddish Studies (אין געוועב)
The hub for discussions of Yiddish literature, language, and culture, for the next generation of Yiddish scholarship.
Yiddish Book Center
An excellent resource portal for digitized text, oral history, podcasts, audio books, and other cultural material.
Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art
A collection of more than 260,000 digitized images of objects and artifacts from 700 museums, synagogues and private collections in 41 different countries, as well as architectural drawings of synagogues and Jewish ritual buildings from antiquity to the modern day.
National Library of Israel Digital Collections
Main page for the National Library’s rich digital resources, including: Historical Jewish Press and Bibliography of the Hebrew Book, as well as the Visual Memory photo collection, and more.
JDC archive
Online collections – and curated exhibits – from the records of the Jewish overseas rescue and relief organization. This rich trove of photos, artifacts, films, oral histories, name indexes is a valuable resource for the study of modern Jewish history.
Center for Jewish History Digital Collections
Portal for digital collections of the CJH and its five partner organizations: American Jewish Historical Society, The American Sephardi Federation, the Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Iraqi Jewish Archive
Startling evidence of the once vibrant Jewish life in Iraq came to light in May 2003 — over 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents were discovered in the flooded basement of the Iraqi intelligence headquarters by a US Army team. The remarkable survival of this written record of Iraqi Jewish life provides an unexpected opportunity to better understand this 2,500-year-old Jewish community.

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Freely Available Resources for Research: Arts, Humanities and Area Studies

For History and Primary Sources, see the Social Sciences tab

Freely Available Resources: Art History, Architecture, Music, Film

Freely Available Resources: Literature, Classics, Philosophy

Freely Available Resources: Area Studies