Digitized Book Collections
- HathiTrust Digital LibraryHathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
- Project Muse This link opens in a new windowOriginally a platform for scholarly journals only, Project Muse now also provides access to a large collection of academic books.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new windowOriginally a platform for scholarly journals only, JSTOR now provides access to academic books, as well as primary source collections.
Searching by Subject Heading
Browsing by Library of Congress subject heading is a quick, easy way to start research on a new topic.
Suggested Subject Headings:
[country]--history
[country]--history--sources
For instance:
India--history--sources
Tip-- to find subject headings, do a keyword search in the Library Catalog, using terms relating to your topic. Find a result that fits your research and then consult the subject headings supplied in the catalog record.
Tips & Tricks
- Requesting a Book Using Interlibrary LoanThis page will show you how to place Interlibrary Loan requests for books not owned by the University of Illinois.
- ALA/LC Transliteration TablesThe ALA/LC Transliteration Tables are specific systems for converting from a non-roman script to a romanized one. The UIUC online catalog and Worldcat follow this system exclusively for transliteration.
General Catalogs
- WorldCat This link opens in a new windowWorldCat is a worldwide union catalog created and maintained collectively by more than 9,000 member institutions. With millions of online records built from the bibliographic and ownership information of contributing libraries, it is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind. You can also use WorldCat on the FirstSearch platform.
- University of Illinois Library CatalogUse the Library Catalog to identify books, journals (but not journal articles), microform collections, and digital collections owned by the University of Illinois. The Library Catalog is the primary tool for exploring the collections of the University of Illinois Library, the second largest academic library collection in the United States. In the Library Catalog you can search for books by subject, and you can identify the location within the Library of a particular book. If the book is an ebook, then you can link directly to the ebook.
South Asia Specific Catalogs
- South Asia Union CatalogueThe South Asia Union Catalogue is an historical bibliography describing books and periodicals published in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, colonial Burma, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka from 1556 through the present and a union catalogue of holdings.
- Digital South Asia LibraryReference sources, books, images, maps, and more. The Digital South Asia Library is a project of the Center for Research Libraries and the University of Chicago. Additional catalogs can be found under "Bibliographies."
- IndCatOnline Union Catalogue of books, theses and journals available in major university libraries in India.
- Urdu Research Centre CatalogThe Urdu Research Library Consortium has made accessible the private Urdu collection of Mr. Abdus Samad Khan. Mr. Samad Khan's library is widely considered one of the world's finest for early Urdu periodicals and printed books. Holdings are well rounded across all areas of Urdu publishing. Most imprints date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are unavailable at any U.S. library. There are over 26,000 monograph titles in the URLC collection.
- Roja Muttiah Research Library CatalogThe Roja Muttiah Research Library (in Chennai, India) is one of the most comprehensive Tamil collections in the world. Library's notable strengths are its holdings in classical and modern literature, literary criticism, medicine, cinema and the related culture of printed works (such as song books), folklore, material by and about women, religion and philosophy, and numerous publications of historical value. The collection is comprised of more than 100,000 volumes of books, journals, and newspapers. In addition there are rich holdings of oleolithographs from Ravi Varma's workshop, nearly 30,000 journal abstracts and indexes, an enormous collection of clippings, drama notices, wedding invitations, business and family correspondence, and palm leaf manuscripts. Most of the publications date from the later half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.
- The Pakistan National BibliographyA Subject Catalogue of the new Pakistani books deposited under the provisions of Copyright Law or acquired through purchase, etc. by the National Library of Pakistan, Islamabad.