Online books
Various websites provide access to digitised copies of books. Online books can contain a wealth of useful material with the added bonus of the ability to search the text. You will find many links to online books across the FIBIwiki.
Please note that links to historical books are provided as an information and research tool and FIBIS cannot verify the accuracy of such works nor guarantee they are free from bias. Readers are advised to note the date of any historical books and assess the material accordingly.
See also:
Contents
Google Books
Google Books is an online repository of digitised books scanned from libraries around the world. Books that are labelled 'Full View' can be read in their entirety and pdf copies can be saved to your computer.
There are thousands of books that have content relevant for family history research including directories, civil lists, biographies and military histories. As well as reading around a topic or finding out about a place, it is worth searching on an ancestor's name in inverted commas e.g. "John Doe". You may have to try various combinations of the name. This is particularly successful for ancestors of a certain social class living in the first half of the nineteenth century, but you never know what you may find. Try tracing an officer's career via listings of promotions, look for births/marriages/deaths or find the postings of an apothecary. Using the Advanced Search to narrow down the time frame of publication can be useful.
FIBIS on Google Books
FIBIS has a Google Books library with books on topics related to its aims. You can search within the books in the library, a useful technique for eliminating results unrelated to historical British India topics. The library is currently still growing.
- View the FIBIS Google Books Library
Copying Information from Full View Google Books
The following is not available if the book is labelled 'Limited View' or 'Snippet View' or 'No Preview'.
When you are reading a Full View book you can click:
- ”Plain Text” to copy the text to a Word or similar document. What you copy will not be fully accurate, so you will need to check your copy against the original wording.
- ”Clip” as a first step to copying a part of the actual page. A small blue rectangle should appear around the word clip. Next left click and draw a rectangle around the paragraph you require. Click within the paragraph which should then become blue. Then copy the link which appears under “Image” and paste in a document. You can subsequently use this link to view the paragraph you have saved. You can also use programs such as Powerpoint to make a slide of the paragraph you have clipped.
Note that the Clip function will only appear when the Google Book page is in HTML Mode. What if it’s not there AND the book is Full View? Click on "Overview" (top left hand corner) and go to the very bottom of the page. If it says Standard Mode, click on this wording and HTML Mode should appear. When you subsequently read the book, the Clip function should be available.
Archive.org
Project Gutenberg
Over 30,000 free electronic books to download. The books available are out of copyright, so there are many dating from the 19th century. They are available in Plain text (.txt) format, having been OCR scanned and carefully checked by volunteers.
Digital Library of India
Digital Library of India has many interesting books whose titles you can see if you search using words such as Bengal, Calcutta , Madras and Bombay. However to actually view these books you will need to download a plugin whose details you will find on the website. Books available include volumes of the Calcutta Review published later than those available on Google Books, books in the Indian Records Series, Yearbooks etc
Rare Books On Sindh
Many books on Bombay and Sindh. Must be downloaded to view.
Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. A researcher has advised:
There are a surprisingly large number of English books, especially scientific journals, and travelogues. Somebody in France was systematically collecting these throughout the early and mid 19th century. There was an earlier version of the "Great Game" going on between Britain and France. My 4 x great uncle John Croft Hawkins, a Bombay Marine officer, took the first steam vessel up the Euphrates to Hit in what is now Iraq. I knew he had done this, because it is mentioned in his obituaries, but do you think I could find an account of it in the British papers? No, either it was so "secret" that the papers were hidden away and lost, or the ants had got it. Yet I have found a nearly contemporary French account of his progess! I have found books in Galica that are not available in Google Books, and some that are only Snippet View in Google Books are available in Full View.
Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection
Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Cornell University Library: South East Asia Visions
The website says: South East Asia Visions is a collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern Southeast Asia from Cornell University Library's John M. Echols Collection. The site provides online access to more than 350 books and journal articles written in English and French. The works in the collection were selected for the quality of their first-hand observations and, together, provide a comprehensive representation of Southeast Asia.
