Skip to Main Content

Religious Studies Web Guide

Digital Text Collections

 

 First Page of Sa'd'is Bustan from World Digital Library

This section contains links to historical and secondary open access e-text collections. 

Use Menu options to link to collections for specific religions.

 

SEE ALSO:

 Sacred Texts 

 Images - open access fragments of illuminated manuscripts and papyri 

 

 

Multi-Religion Digital Text Collections

  • Directory of Open Access Books - over 2400 academic peer reviewed books
  • Forgotten Books - over 484,000 books - see Religion section - Can do analysis on word use in the texts in this collection
  • Gallica - over 1 million texts - produced by the Bibliothèque nationale de France - over 9,000 dcouments in the religion section. Also includes selected volumes from Migne's Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina
  • Getty Research Portal -  hundreds of works dealing with religion - focus of collection is art history
  • GlobeTheoLib and GlobeEthicsLib - extensive digital library of books and journals on theology and on ethics (political, bioethics, legal, religious, media etc.) worldwide. Most of the identified books and journals articles are freely available.  Produced by the World Council of Churches, this has extensive coverage for all religions
  • Hathi Trust - digitized collections of works from major research institutions and libraries. Includes over 7 million titles of which over 5 million volumes are in the public domain - includes over 25,000 religious studies books
  • Internet Archive - the open access text archive includes over 12 million freely downloadable texts. Includes over 100,000 works on religion
  • Open Access Digital Theological Library  -  over 190,000 open access ebooks and 10,000,000 journal  articles  in religious studies 
  • Open Edition books - over 7000 French texts
  • Pew Research Center Religion and Public Life - bioethics, same sex marriage, death penalty, religion and politics, religion and public schools, religion and social welfare, religion and the law, religion and world affairs.
  • Pluralism Project  Reports
  • Prolades (Latin American Socio-Religious Studies Program) - links to a variety of open access documents including overviews and chronologies
  • Project Gutenberg - over 50,000 public domain texts
  • Religion Commons - digital library of over 110,000 works
  • Religion Online - more than 6,000 articles and chapters available full text
  • Theological Commons - digital library of over 120,000 out of copyright books and periodicals on theology and religion, produced by Princeton Theological Seminary Library
  • World Digital Library (Library of Congress) - over 19,000 items, including over 700 relating to religion.  Digital works are located through the main Library of Congress search interface