Finding early printed books: external resources online

Digital Facsimiles of Early Printed Books
These are the major sources for digital facsimiles. A more comprehensive list is maintained by the British Library – http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/webres/rarefacsimile/index.html

Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War. Available to Wellcome Library registered readers only.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Over 180,000 English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 available online with full-text searching of more than 33 million pages of material. It is in essence, every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Available to Wellcome Library registered readers only.

Google Books
The books in Google Book Search come primarily from two sources: publishers and libraries. It shows useful information about the book, and in many cases, a few snippets – a few sentences to display your search term in context. When a book is out of copyright, you can view or download it in its entirety. Information on libraries involved can be found at
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/partners.html. Most of the books will be after 1800.
http://www.google.co.uk/books

Gallica
Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), open to the general public around the world since 1997. It serves as a digital encyclopedia and consists of: printed materials (books, journals, newspapers, printed music, and other documents), graphic materials (engravings, maps, photographs, and others), manuscripts and sound recordings. Today, this digital library includes more than 200,000 volumes of digitized texts http://gallica.bnf.fr/

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non profit organisation which is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. It provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public. Participating libraries include the Library of Congress, University of Toronto and Cornell University. http://www.archive.org/

Medic@
Initiated in the autumn of 2000, Medic@library is the digitization project of the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine Department for the History of Medicine. It provides web access to electronic resources dealing with the history of medicine and dentistry.
http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm

Munich Digitisation Centre
The Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ) handles the digitisation and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions. It provides one of the largest and fastest growing digital collections in Germany, now comprising 250,000 titles available online. http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/index.html?c=startseite&l=en