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Visitors and Alumni : Book Materials

free tools to begin research

Find book information and obtain free book material.

The tools below will allow you to search for book information, and in some cases obtain free online books.

NOTE: Couresy Card Holders, Alumni, and Emertus professors have access to the paper book collection through our online catalog. For additional information see the "Loan Periods, Renewal Limits and Fines" section of our Policies page.

Alumni do not have access to I-Share book borrowing; alumni should request books the SXU library does not own through their local public library.

One excellent resource for searching the full text of millions of books is Hathi Trust Digital Library or http://books.google.com/, which provides access to the fulltext of materials now available as public domain materials (published prior to 1924).  In addition, if the publisher has given permission to Google, other books are available for preview or full-text access. For newer materials you can see snippets online, but you must obtain the complete books through your local public library. As of May 2010, it includes about 6 million volumes, over 1 million of which are public domain (at least in the US). 

The Digital Library collection is found within the Internet Archive, which digitizes music, videos, and TV News, The database grows by over 1000 books a day, as well as mirrors books from Google Books and other sources. As of July 2014, it hosted over 8 million public domain books, which is far greater than the approximate 1 million public domain books at Google Books.

The Project Gutenberg initiative has hand-typed thousands of public domain books and speeches, and there may be many editions of classic materials. 

One additional free search tool to consider is Summon (from Princeton). You will see information within books and other materials...but you will not have links to the full text materials.

WorldCat 
The Online Computer Library Center supports WorldCat, a catalog 69 million bibliographic records and 1 billion individual holdings. Use WorldCat to determine citations for books, journals, videos, and music and to locate a copy near you. 

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