About
OpenTexts.World is an experimental service that provides free access to digitised text collections from around the world. Think of it as a search engine for books.
Every year, libraries worldwide digitise hundreds of thousands of books. Open Texts brings (some of!) those collections together, allowing you to search across a multitude of different libraries worldwide.
What’s on our shelves
8 million items
If you put them all on one very long bookshelf, they’d keep going for over 100 miles!
85 languages
From Middle German to Tagalog, if someone’s written it down, it’s probably here.
15th century onward
We have records from as early as 1455 through to many more modern books.
Where our records come from
OpenTexts.World currently searches digitized content from the following libraries:
- HathiTrust (4,425,106 items)
- Internet Archive American Libraries Collection (2,956,349 items)
- DigitalNZ (244,376 items)
- Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (231,088 items)
- The Wellcome Collection (182,576 items)
- National Library of Scotland (26,971 items)
- National Library of Wales (2,801 items)
- Queen's University Belfast (186 items)
Want to see your library here? Learn how to contribute your data.
Who’s responsible for this site?
- Stuart Lewis (National Library of Scotland)
- Gill Hamilton (National Library of Scotland)
We’ve been grateful for assistance from the Scottish Tech Army, including:
- Design: Sarah Semark (Octopus Think)
- Programming: Brian Beacom
- Data: Ali King
- Project Management: Alec Davis
And a special thank-you to our content providers who have provided millions of records of digitised texts.
The service is based on research undertaken by the Global Digitised Data Network, an Anglo-American research collaboration, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Get involved
If you’re curious about how everything works, the code for this site is publicly available on GitHub. We welcome your feedback, bug reports, and feature requests—please feel free to file an issue!