UW-Madison Libraries Digital Collections

Seeking to make scholarly materials available worldwide, and enabling users to search entire classic texts by keyword, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries began building its digital collection in 1995. Since then, the collection has grown in scale and scope, now including more than 30 resources that feature text, images, audio, and video for study.

In the case of electronic facsimiles of previously published books, users are able to view images of the book's original pages, in addition to being able to search the full text electronically.

Many of the materials in the digital collection have been selected because they can no longer be circulated due to age, condition, and vulnerability. Further, because of their content and importance, these materials warrant the additional search and retrieval capability that can be provided by SGML encoding using the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative.

The UW-Madison Libraries offer these resources in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea—that the bounds of the University and its benefits should extend to the boundaries of the state itself—and seek to take that idea even further, enabling scholars around the world to benefit from the strength of our collection.

In the event of sufficient interest, the Parallel Press can offer bound replicas of the original texts found here. For a list of titles currently available, visit our books page. To request a reprint of a title, please take a moment to fill out a reprint request form.

Please visit the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections for a list of online collections and descriptions of those collections