Staying off campus has meant severing ties with our libraries, which made many of us look online for textbooks and reference material. Some universities and institutes have curated and redesigned their digital libraries to suit our needs. We pick 5 digital libraries that can be your go-to.
The University of Calcutta launched its digital library during the pandemic; it’s open to all and is for free. There are two major reasons behind this move.
“The first is our responsibility to our students and our faculty, whose education and research have been obstructed by the prohibition on physical access to the library collections. The second is our responsibility, as a public institution, to the citizenry as well as the world at large,” says a note from the varsity’s vice-chancellor Sonali Chakravarti Banerjee.
We loved to browse: The Tagore Law Lectures (1870-1986) and The Calcutta Review (1844-1966). Also in the collection are many important theses, dissertations, university ordinances, regulations, and old question papers for students to look up.
NATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY OF INDIA
The National Digital Library of India (NDLI) has been set up by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, along with IIT Kharagpur, to provide a free-of-cost platform to students during the pandemic. This library is also accessible to differently-abled learners.
There’s a wide range of subjects including engineering, literature and law. The featured collection includes documents on important events from the past and biographies of famous people. One can also find different journals, conference documents, educational videos and scholarly publications.
We loved to browse: The Ancient, Medieval and Modern History Books sections, and the Psychology video lectures.
An initiative of Carnegie Mellon University, the Universal Digital Library has one million free texts on topics covering art, science and literature mostly.
The user-friendly page allows you to search by the book title or the name of the author. The books are categorised by the titles, year of publication, subject and language in the ‘browse the collections’ section.
We loved to browse: The section on astronomy, books on European history, descriptive guides to musical theory and vocals.
The Yale’s Digital Collections page has classics, old manuscripts and various books of literature preserved for the public to look through. The site is free of cost, and no sign-in is needed to browse the documents. You can scroll through the segments divided into ‘Digital collections’ and ‘Other digital collections’.
We loved to browse: The Persian Philological Texts, School of Drama Photographs (1927-2001), the New England Indian Paper Series and the Arabic and Persian Medical Books and Manuscripts.
You can search across more than 6 million digitised items and read about any topic here. The Harvard University Digital Library offers “free, public access” to collections that include manuscripts, art and audio-visual archives.
There are rare Chinese books, botanical illustrations and manuscripts from the medieval and Renaissance periods, along with 19th-century American trade cards and East Asian cultural images.
We loved to browse: Archival material like the Benjamin Waterhouse papers and Letters from Thomas Jefferson (1801-1808). Also, the historical maps of Virginia, Louisiana, Boston and plans of Yorktown and Gloucester. As part of ‘Harvard Law’, The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society has a strong collection on internet law. The publications can be of great help to young lawyers and scholars.
