Many of our students may be taking courses over the summer semester right now, some may be working summer jobs, and some may be taking a deserved break.  If you do find yourself away from our library over the summer or are otherwise doing some research on the web, we’ve come across a few great resources we thought we’d share with you.

Open Library – This project is in the early stages right now, but already has a great wealth of resources available.  The authors of the site are attempting to chronicle every book ever written in web form.  In theory, all books would have an entry page giving basic statistics of the book.  And hopefully, many should be viewable online.  There are other similar projects to this, however Open Library is so far the only one that is offering its procedure and findings via open source.

Text Archive – From the site’s description: “This collection is open to the community for the contribution of any type of text, many licensed using Creative Commons licenses.”  Text Archive has collected and chronicled many resources in different categorized collections pertaining to a number of different types of texts.

Project Gutenberg – Similar to the open library, this site provides a great number of free e-books available for online reading.  Different formats are also available to import to your mobile device such as a PDA or Amazon Kindle.

We hope that you’ll find these interesting and helpful over the summer!