Skip to Main Content

Rare Books and Special Collections

This guide supports research and teaching with our Rare Books and Special Collections.

Where to find digitized primary sources, old, and rare books?

CDRI
for images of religious art, artifacts, and architecture
The American Theological Library Association and the Association of Theological Schools's CDRI (Cooperative Digital Resources Initative) provides a range of digitized visual primary sources from  participating theological libraries across America .CDRI offers access to digital images of religious art, architecture, and iconography, including illustrations, photographs, coins, maps, postcards, and manuscripts.
Internet Archive
for a wide range of books from European and North American Libraries

The Internet Archive is a non-profit open source library that supports access to thousands of fully digitized volumes, including rare and old books, from libraries across the world, especially from North American and European collections.
Gallica
for rare and old books from French collections

Gallica is the BNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and its partner institutions’ open source digital library. You will find digitized manuscripts and early printed books from libraries, archives, and institutes across France.
Google Books
for a wide range of books

Google Books is a digital library consisting of millions of volumes, including rare and old books, that have been scanned by Google, and that are OCR (optical character recognition) readable.
DigitVatLib
for the Vatican's collection

The Vatican Library digital service provides open source access to an increasing volume of the Vatican’s holdings of manuscripts, incunabula, and archives. You will find high-quality scans, and navigation options to help you move through the books.
Early Christian Texts Online
for early Christian texts

The North America Patristics Society has gathered a range of databases and links to early Christian texts available online.

Top Tips

  • Most digital libraries have advanced search options for author, title, collection, subject, language, and year. These settings are worth noting because how you search will impact what you will find.
  • Many digital libraries support different viewing options, such as single page, double page, and mosaic layouts. A mosaic layout will help you to identify patterns within the book as a whole, whereas the two-page layout approximates the experience of the analog codex.
  • It is worth noting the benefits as well as the limitations of digital initiatives. For example, the quality of the scan, the availability of resources, reliability of the surrounding metadata, may vary from one platform to another.  
  • It can also be worth noting additional tools. For example, the Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that can track word usage across books made available in Google Books.
Google Books NGram Viewer

The NGram tool generates charts that illustrate the frequency in which selected words appear in printed books from as far back as the early days of the printing press to the present day. The data is generated from books that have been digitized by Google. For greater context, you can turn to digitized volumes to see how your selected word(s) were used upon the page. 

NGram Viewer Example: Heresy, Hearsay, heretical, heretic

 

Click here to track your own selection of words through the age of printed books: https://g.co/kgs/g8UpUQ.