Skip to Main Content

YYGS: Online Special Collections & Other Resources: Home

A guide to accessing online special collections and other resources, from Yale and beyond.

Using Online Resources

Welcome to Yale! Though you cannot be physically on campus this summer, we want to make sure that you know how to access as many resources as possible. Librarians from Yale Library have put together this guide to help you find:

  1. Online Special Collections (digitized archival material, photographs, etc.)
  2. Electronic Resources (e-books, journals, newspaper articles, etc.)

Resources included on this guide are available online either because they are in the pubic domain, Open Access, or not governed by a license or copyright restriction. For the resources included on this guide that are not from Yale, availability is subject to change.

Featured Open Access E-Books

Digital Public Library of America

All of the materials found through DPLA—photographs, books, maps, news footage, oral histories, personal letters, museum objects, artwork, government documents, and so much more—are free and immediately available in digital format.

Project Gutenberg

One of the oldest and most famous online book collections. Most of the items the collection are the full texts of public domain books.

HathiTrust

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. Select 'Advanced Search' to search by format type; select 'Full-Text Only' to retrieve Open Access content.

Internet Archive

A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form; provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public.

National Academies Press

The National Academies Press (NAP) publishes the reports of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Featured Images, Archives, and Museums

Yale University Library Digital Collections

Yale University Library Digital Collections includes digitized images, archival documents, and other special collections materials. Try a keyword search in this collection and see what you find!

Beinecke Digital Library

The Beinecke Digital Library includes more than a million images of collection material, including books, manuscript material, photographs, and artwork. While the Beinecke Digital Library is quite large, it represents only a fraction of total collections material on-site.

Yale University Art Gallery

The Yale University Art Gallery, founded in 1832, is the home of more than 250,000 objects representing Eastern and Western cultures and ranging in date from ancient times to the present day.

Smithsonian Collections (U.S.)

Search over 14 million digital records with more than 3 million images, video and sound files, electronic journals, and other online media.

New York Public Library Digital Collections

Explore items digitized by The New York Public Library's. New material is added every day, including prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, video, and more.

Online Archive of California

Provides free public access to detailed descriptions of primary resource collections maintained by more than 200 contributing institutions including libraries, special collections, archives, historical societies, and museums throughout California.

Library of Congress (U.S.) Digital Collections

Digital collections from the Library of Congress (U.S.), including American Memory, Prints & Photographs, Maps, Film, National Jukebox, and much more.