Guide to English Language & Literature

Electronic Texts

Text Collections | Author Indexes | Finding Aids | Development Tools

These are just a few of many sites that contain literary electronic texts. A few directories, catalogs, and other types of finding aids are also included, along with a selection of tools that will help those who are interested in creating an electronic text collection.

Text Collections:

• American Memory

U.S. Library of Congress. Collection includes: African American Perspectives, Evolution of the Conservation Movement, Federal Theatre Project, Walt Whitman notebooks, Words and Deeds in American History.

• American Verse Project

University of Michigan: "The Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) is assembling an electronic archive of volumes of American poetry. Most of the archive is made up of 19th century poetry, although a few 18th century and early 20th century texts are included."

• Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935

Hypertext project maintained by Jim Zwick. A collection of historical and literary texts from the period, with commentary and photos.

• ARTFL

American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language - University of Chicago. Full-text databases of nearly 2,000 texts including novels, verse, theater, essays, correspondence, treatises, in literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. from 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Institutional subscription required.

• Bartleby.com

This Columbia University hypertext literature project includes near complete the works of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and others as well as a searchable Bartletts Familiar Quotations. Very well designed.

• Berkeley Digital Library Sunsite

University of California, Berkeley collection of electronic resources, including materials on Emma Goldman, Jack London, and California history.

• Bibliomania: The Network Library

A growing collection of early twentieth century texts marked up in html format.

• British Poetry 1780-1910: a Hypertext Archive of Scholarly Editions

Electronic Text Center Alderman Library University of Virginia. Editions of works by: Coleridge, Mary Robinson, D. G. Rossetti, Richard Polwhele, Tennyson, Wilde, and Keats.

• Celt Corpus of Electronic Texts

University College, Cork, Online resource for contemporary and historical Irish documents in literature, history and politics.

• Center for Electronic Projects in American Studies

Georgetown University. Descriptions of projects in American Studies.

• CETI: The Center for Electronic Text and Image

University of Pennsylvania, printed books, manuscripts, photographs, slides, maps, and sound recordings for scholarly needs from UPenn collections. Each collection lists more internet links for each topic.

• Digital Scriptorium

Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library Duke University. Including: Duke Papyrus Initiative, African-American Women, Civil War Women, Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement, Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection - four centuries of Italian and European history.

• Documenting the American South: Beginnings to 1920

The Southern Experience in 19th century America - University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Including first-person narratives and library of digital texts.

• DScriptorium

"DScriptorium is devoted to collecting, storing and distributing digital images of Medieval manuscripts" An aggregation of images from U.S. and French archives.

• Electronic Beowulf

University of Kentucky and British Library project to scan manuscript copies of the text. CD-ROM available. Some images can be viewed online.

• Electronic Text Center

University of Virginia--The Mother of All Text Centers. Includes texts concerning Middle and Early Modern English, and also Biblical, Latin, and French studies. Search the full text of documents for keywords.

• Emory Women Writers Research Project

Emory University. Searchable collection of full-text from 17th-19th century writers.

• The English Server

Carnegie Mellon University. A cooperative, managed by graduate students, faculty and staff in the English Department, that offers over 18,000 works, covering a wide range of interests and including original works.

• Etext Archives

Home for Zines, religious texts and more.

• Humanities Text Initiative

University of Michigan text project. Includes electronic texts and journals, SGML resources, and reference materials.

• Internet Classics Archive

Over 400 classical Greek and Latin texts (in English translation) with user-provided commentary and trivia sections.

• The Labyrinth:Resources for Medieval Studies

Sponsored by Georgetown University. Provides access to materials from Georgetown and around the web.

• Library of Southern Literature

Fully documented collection of electronic texts in both HTML and SGML (requires Panorama software) from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Libraries: Documenting the American South.

• New York Public Library Digital Library Collections

Includes finding aids to archival materials, online exhibits, and digital imaging projects from the Library's collection, especially the Schomburg collection of African Americana.

• The Oxford Text Archive

Oxford University, UK. A repository of scholarly editions and literary works in a dozen languages prepared from major research projects worldwide. Over 2,000 titles. Hard copy orders and electronic delivery. Permissions sometimes required.

• Perseus Project: An Evolving Digital Library

Tufts University library of resources for studying the ancient world. Includes texts, translations, art catalogs, images, and secondary essays.

• Project Gutenberg

A collection of thousands of electronic texts generated by volunteers worldwide. Problems of quality control and provenance are rampant.

• Publications of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

Other hypertext files at Virginia. Includes hypertext research reports on a great range of topics: U.S. Civil War, Rossetti, Swahili language, Pompeii, Piers Plowman, Alexander Bell.

• Thesaurus Linguarum Graecae (TLG)

University of California, Irvine. An electronic data bank of ancient Greek literature from Homer (8th century B.C.) to 600 A.D. with historiographical, lexicographical and scholiastic texts from the period between 600 and 1453 A.D. Texts available on CD-ROM.

• UTEL

University of Toronto English Library. Includes an electronic version of Representatvie Poetry and various renaissance texts.

• Victorian Web

From Brown University and George Landow, an excellent hypertextual examination of the Victorian era.

• The Victorian Women Writers Project

Indiana University. "The goal of the Victorian Women Writers Project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). The works, selected with the assistance of the Advisory Board, will include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama. Considerable attention will be given to the accuracy and completeness of the texts, and to accurate bibliographical descriptions of them."

• Web Concordances

Well organized hypertext concordance of Blake ("Songs of Innocence and of Experience"), Keats ("Odes of 1819"), and Coleridge ("The Ancyent Marinere"). Search by word and display the full text. Other titles coming soon.

• Women Writers Online (UT users or other subscribers only)

A project to develop electronic text versions of works by early women authors. "The WWP encodes works in English, or in English translation, by women before 1850."

• Wright American Fiction

"This is a collection of 19th century American fiction, as listed in Lyle Wright's bibliography American Fiction, 1851-1875. There are currently 2,887 volumes included (2,239 unedited, 648 fully edited and encoded) by 1,383 authors."

Author Indexes:

These sites provide access to web resources dealing with specific authors.

• American Literature on the Web

Maintained by Akihito Ishikawa, Department of English at Nagasaki College of Foreign Languages, Japan.

• Author Guides

From LSU Libraries Webliography. Links to individual author pages on the web.

• Catharton Authors

Links to a variety of sites and information, including websites, discussion groups, and etexts.

• Native American Authors

Extensive list of authors compiled by the Internet Public Library.

• The Mississippi Writers Page

Biography and bibliography of writers with Mississippi connections. From Ole Miss Department of English.

• Mississippi's African-American Authors

Brief biography and bibliographic notes about selected authors. From the Mississippi State University Libraries.

• Poets & Writers Directory Search

Abridged version of A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers, includes address and sometimes email and phone numbers for over 2,000 authors.

• Tennessee Authors Past & Present

Short bios and selected bibliographies for hundreds of authors who have lived some part of their lives in Tennessee.

• Voices From the Gap: Women Writers of Color

Compiled by the University of Minnesota. Contains biographical and selected bibliographical information.

Finding Aids & Catalogs:

These resources are cumulations of texts, providing access to materials from more that one site or collection on the Internet. Many can be searched by author, title, or keyword.

• ALEX

A catalog of electronic texts from archives around the Internet. Unmodified since late 1994, but still useful.

• Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature

Association of College and Research Libraries, Western European Specialists Section. Guide to texts available on the Internet.

• Malaspina Great Books Home Page

An index of texts from throughout cyberspace (including book dealers' catalogs), arranged chronologically, topically, and by author. From Malaspina University-College, based on Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.

• On-Line Books Page

Extensive and well-organized catalog of texts, including nonfiction, literary works, and periodicals.

• Online Texts Collection

From the Internet Public Library, a collection of texts from sites around the web. "The IPL Online Texts Collection contains over 7000 titles that can be browsed by author, by title, or by Dewey Subject Classification. They can also be searched . . . "

• The Universal Library

Compilation of texts (books, journals, multimedia) from numerous locations on the Web.

Development Tools:

The sites listed here can be of aid to anyone contemplating developing an electronic text project of their own.

• Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH)

CETH Newsletter and CETH Directory of Electronic Text Centers, which describes humanities computing programs throughout the world and includes links directly to many text archives.

• CHASS: Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

University of Toronto resource site for information, lists and links related to Humanities and Social Sciences Computing. Includes news, bibliographies, and conference announcements.

• Digital Library Federation

Fifteen of the nation's largest research libraries and archives have agreed to cooperate on defining what must be done to bring together--from across the nation and beyond--digitized materials that will be made accessible to students, scholars, and citizens everywhere.

• Dublin Core

"The Dublin Core is a 15-element metadata element set intended to facilitate discovery of electronic resources. Originally conceived for author-generated description of Web resources, it has also attracted the attention of formal resource description communities such as museums and libraries."

• Text Encoding Initiative

TEI is an international project to develop guidelines for the preparation and interchange of electronic texts for scholarly research, and to satisfy a broad range of uses by the language industries more generally. In this and attached documents, we describe the TEI and how you can obtain more information about it, including the TEI Guidelines.