American Memory Books

The above link provides access to more than 1,200 digitized books available through the Library's American Memory collections (please allow several seconds for the page to load). American Memory collections with the most books listed in the catalog follow:

American Memory

• An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490...
• American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920
• The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeak...
• Puerto Rico at the Dawn of the Modern Age: Nineteenth- and Early-Tw...
• "California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's E...

Full-text books and periodicals available through American Memory's The Nineteenth Century in Print collections are not available through the online catalog.

Global Gateway Books

The above link provides access to more than 500 digitized books available through the Library's Global Gateway collections (please allow several seconds for the page to load). Global Gateway collections with books listed in the catalog follow:

Global Gateway

• Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands
• France in America
• The Kraus Collection of Sir Francis Drake
• Meeting of Frontiers: Siberia, Alaska, and the American West
• Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Fron...
• United States and Brazil: Expanding Frontiers, Comparing Culture

Digital Interlibrary Loan Books

The above link retrieves more than 1,000 full-text books made available through the Library's Digital Interlibrary Loan Program (please allow several seconds for the page to load). This program, designed to provide access to books too fragile to circulate on interlibrary loan, was discontinued in early 2008.

Sloan Foundation Digitized Books

The above link (please allow several seconds for the page to load) leads to 10,000 records for full-text books digitized as part of a program funded by a $2 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The program, "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress," focuses on public domain works, with a major focus on at-risk brittle books and U.S. history volumes. The full text of all Library of Congress titles currently digitized as part of the Sloan Foundation grant (more than 66,000 titles as of May 6, 2010) can be found through the Internet Archive.

Note: To conduct a search of the Internet Archive for Library books part of the Sloan Foundation project, go the Advanced Search page. In one Custom Field drop-down menu, select the sponsor (not sponser) option and enterSloan Foundation as the sponsor. In a second Custom Field drop-down menu, select the contributor option and enter Library of Congress as the contributor. Your search will now be limited to Sloan Foundation books contributed by the Library.

Other scanned books

The above link retrieves more than 500 full-text books not part of American Memory, Global Gateway, or the Digital Interlibrary Loan Program (please allow several seconds for the page to load).

Other Online Library Books

Several other areas of the Library's Web site provide access to full-text books. The Library's Rare Book & Special Collections Division makes available digitized items from its collections, including a number of books, on its Web pages. More recent Library of Congress publications, such as a history of the Library of Congress, annual reports,illustrated collection guides, and Federal Research Division country studies, can be found through the Library's publications page.

The Library of Congress has contributed more than 50,000 full-text items to the Internet Archive; more books are added each week. To search Library of Congress books by keyword or title, go to the Advanced Search page, select contributor from one of the Custom Field drop-down menus, and enter Library of Congress as the contributor. Then, create a search query using the other search fields.