In addition to the 10 million+ printed books available to you here in the Library, we also have a rapidly growing collection of digitized books. Most of these collections support full-text searching.

Internet Archive and Google Books.

Hundreds of thousands of books digitized from the collections of North American and British research libraries, including University of Illinois. These are the two largest digitized book collections that are free to use.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Fully searchable collection of nearly 150,000 English-language works published between 1701 an 1800. Search Tip! Try limiting your search to the “front matter” of books (tables of content, prefaces, forewords) or the “back of book” indexes.

If you need early printed books (1500-1900) from or about the Americas, there are two good collections to try: Archive of Americana and Sabin Americana. Both of these collections are full-text searchable. (Note: Sabin Americana is a Trial subscription.)