DIGITAL RESOURCES

Access to free e-books, audiobooks, photographs, and more.

The Digital Maine Library provides every resident of Maine with access to online resources that include a collection of full text articles and abstracts from magazines, newspapers, journals and reference. It also provides students, business people, public library patrons, and higher education students and educators the ability to use online learning tools.

The DPLA is a digital platform with the aim of bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites, and making them freely available to students, teachers, researchers, and the general public.

This project of the Maine Historical Society brings together images, records, and other historical items from over 250 institutions in Maine. You can search or browse the collections, create your own collection of images and documents, and explore the online exhibits.

Similar to DPLA, Europeana is an internet portal that connects users to millions of books, paintings, films, museum artifacts, and archival records. Their mission: "We transform the world with culture! We want to build on Europe’s rich heritage and make it easier for people to use, whether for work, for learning or just for fun."

Search from over 50,000 e-books that are available for free (and permanent--no need to return) download!

A project of the non-profit Internet Archive, Open Library is an effort to create "One web page for every book ever published." Signing up (which is and will always be free) provides access to hundreds of thousands of e-books.

Librivox offers free audiobooks to download--all public domain (no longer under copyright) titles, read by volunteers.

Books digitized by Google can be searched for by the usual means--title, author, etc.-- but also by quotes from the text. Books that are in the public domain can be downloaded for free, those that are still under copyright can be accessed by varying degrees depending on copyright status. This is a great tool for finding out what books exist--or existed, as Google has digitized many out-of-print titles--on a particular topic.

Never read a series out of order again! A librarian's secret weapon, the KDL What's Next Database is an incredibly comprehensive collection of series lists, which you can search by author, title, series, and category/genre.