Help for the Digital text Library

Digital Text Library Pages

The Digital Text Library contains digitized books, journal articles and other materials. All of the items in the library are believed to be in the public domain, or available under a non-restrictive Creative Commons licence, which means the item can be used for any purpose without restriction (public domain), or can be used for most purposes with possibly some restrictons (creative commons licence).

Most of the texts are available as PDF (Portable Document Format) files; you will need a PDF reader (such as the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar program) to view those. Some items also have a plain text version that can be viewed with any word processor or text editor.

For some items the original text is available from other sources (Google Books, Internet Archive, etc.), but in a less-than-convenient form; for example, the text of interest may be part of a much larger work. For such texts the relevant sections have been extracted from the larger work. In some cases the item is only available as page scan images, and so is not easily searchable.

Library Catalog

Clicking on a link in the library catalog list will display a page that describes the digital text and its author, and provides links to the downloadable digital texts. The catalog is initially listed by title in alphabetical order, but you can click on any column header to sort by that column.

Library Index

The library index is a list of keywords with links to library texts that have information on the topic of the keyword. The information on the topic may not be the main subject of the text, but there will be some useful information on it. The same text can appear multiple times under different keywords. The link to the text description page is the author's last name plus the date of publication (e.g. James, 1931).

Description Pages

Clicking on a link for an item (in either list) will display the description page for the item. This page shows the name of the author or editor, some details about where and when it was published, notes on the author and the text, and links to the downloadable library item itself, sometimes in more than one format. There will usually be a link to the original source of the item, if that source is available online.