Primary texts - novels, stories, poems, etc - Literature - BC3 Library at Butler County Community College

Finding the Text: Novels, Stories, Poems, Play, Essays

Finding primary texts in the BC3 collection (novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, etc)

BC3 Library Catalog This link opens in a new window
This catalog lists all of the books, DVDs, CDs, journals and other resources available at the BC3 Library on the Butler campus.
EBook Collection This link opens in a new window
Collection of academic online books covering a wide range of subjects.
EBook Central This link opens in a new window
Ebook Central is a collection of academic eBooks from leading publishers. It covers the arts, business, education, health & medicine, history, law, literature & language, religion & philosophy, science & technology and the social sciences.
Literary Reference Center Plus This link opens in a new window
EBSCOhost's Literary Reference™ Center (LRC Plus) is a full-text database that combines information from major respected reference works, books, literary journals as well as original content from EBSCO Publishing. Literary Reference Center Plus contains everything in Literary Reference™ Center, plus the following: over 1,200 additional full-text literary reference books/works, over 200 additional full-text literary journals and magazines, 35 volumes of new contemporary literature titles from Salem Press, 40 full-text literary study guides and 72 literary videos.

Request it through Interlibrary Loan

Can't find the text freely available. This is often true for newer titles. If that is the case, locate the citation information and request it through interlibrary loan. It usually takes about a week to get a book. Here are sources to help you find information on the exact book you want. Then use the library's interlibrary loan form to request it.

WorldShare
AccessPA
Amazon
Google

Request a BOOK

Free Primary Texts and Resources on the Web

http://guides.library.cornell.edu/amlit

Google Books

A collection of books that includes a combination of free titles (most of which are in the public domain) and newer titles that must be purchased.

Project Gutenberg
A site that features free downloads of ebooks for use on computers, ebook readers, and other mobile devices. Most titles in this collection are in the public domain.
The HathiTrust Digital Library
"HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. "
ManyBooks.net
While most items in this collection are from Project Gutenberg, this site allows users to download free ebooks in a wider variety of formats enabling compatibility with more reading devices.
Google Books
An ebookstore that includes a combination of free titles (most of which are in the public domain) and newer titles that must be purchased.
The Medieval and Classical Library
An excellent resource for locating full text works "of some of the most important literary works of Classical and Medieval civilization." Users may use a basic search box to locate resources, or browse by Author, Title, Genre, and Language. There are also several links to further classical e-texts and guides to Medieval studies.
The Modern English Collection
This extensive digital library collection, maintained by the University of Virginia, "contains fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, letters, newspapers, manuscripts and illustrations from 1500 to the present." Users may browse the collection by last name of the author or by area of interest (Women writers, African American writers, others). Each work is accompanied by a bibliographic header that provides information on the electronic text as well as the original print version.
The Oxford Text Archive
"The Oxford Text Archive holds several thousand electronic texts and linguistic corpora, in a variety of languages. Its holdings include electronic editions of works by individual authors, standard reference works such as the Bible and mono-/bilingual dictionaries, and a range of language corpora." Note: Before accessing texts from the OTA, users must enter an email address to receive the download location for the file.
The Poetry Archives
A searchable collection that contains over 5,000 complete poems.
Representative Poetry Online
Representative Poetry Online, maintained by the English Department at the University of Toronto, is the online version of the scholarly text, Representative Poetry. On this site, users can access more than 3,100 poems by 500 poets, both classical and current.
The Victorian Women Writers Project
This website from the Indiana University Libraries houses approximately 200 complete texts written by "lesser-known" British women writers of the Nineteenth Century whose works are more difficult to locate. The site includes "anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books, and volumes of poetry and verse drama." Most of these resources are in the public domain
Open Library
A project of the Internet Archive the Open Library contains over one million ebooks available for download in various formats including the accessible DAISY format for blind or visually impaired users.

Literature: Primary texts - novels, stories, poems, etc

Finding the Text: Novels, Stories, Poems, Play, Essays

Finding primary texts in the BC3 collection (novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, etc)

Request it through Interlibrary Loan

Request a BOOK

Free Primary Texts and Resources on the Web