Free Resources: Databases

HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world's great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.

Most books available here are in the Public Domain unless otherwise noted, and are therefore free to download, use, re-use, and re-mix without regard to copyright.

This list includes databases, collections and search tools, selected by Smithsonian Libraries staff, that are freely available via the Internet.