English Research Guide

The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. 

Citing digital primary sources can be challenging, as the particulars of the citation will depend not only on where you accessed the material, but also on what kind of material it is. In general, it is a good idea to collect as much citation information as you can (URL, page number if available, access date, dates on the original document, database name and publisher).

Advice and formats for citing digital archives:

 From the Purdue University Online Writing Lab
 Citing Archival Resources
 Digital Archives Materials

These online collections include digital versions of many out-of-copyright works including government documents, historical magazines and other periodicals, and books published before 1923.

• GoogleBooks
  Full-text collection includes books in the public domain. Includes only snippets of books still under copyright unless otherwise specified by author or publisher. Also includes magazines and periodicals.
• HathiTrust
  Multi-university-library digital library, draws on GoogleBooks' digitization project. GSU is not a member library, so downloading not possible, but generally full-text viewing is.
• Internet Archive
  Digital library, includes texts as well as moving images, live music, audio.
• Project Gutenberg
  Digital copies of books whose copyrights have expired.
• Center for Research Libraries Digital Collections
  Wide-ranging collection of digitized resources. Search the CRL's catalog, or browse the collection.