It is amazing how the Internet can help your research. Many universities and other organisations have digitised records and books to be viewed, and sometimes searched on and downloaded, online. Even institutions abroad may carry UK-relevant titles. These may be complete digitised books or just their indices. The University of Pennsylvania in the USA claims to list over 3 million books on the web!
The HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 18+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. You don’t need to log in or have an account to search in HathiTrust, and up to 40% of the collection is available for anyone to read online.
HathiTrust Digital Library is the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries. The collection includes materials typically found on the shelves of North American university and college campuses with the benefit of being available online instead of scattered in buildings around the globe.
You may not be surprised to know that Google has “the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books.” Using a simple Google account (a Gmail account for instance) allows you to create your own library of Genealogical resources.
Other open libraries you may want to view include:
- https://www.gutenberg.org/
- The Internet Archive
- Google Scholar
