Italian: Find Books

Books and Dissertations

Start with CLIO to find books and journals in Columbia University library collections. (Use the Pegasus catalog to find books and journals in the Law Library collection.)

Then try WorldCat, the largest online catalog in the world, with over 100 million book and journal records.

To find dissertations, start with Proquest Digital Dissertations. You can also check DART, the European e-theses portal. For Italian dissertations only, see: Tesionline.

Other essential catalogs and resources include:

  • Center for Research Libraries
    The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) makes primary and rarely-held research materials available to Columbia affiliates via interlibrary loan and document delivery.  CRL holdings are strong in newspapers, foreign dissertations, and international materials.
  • Borrow Direct
    Borrow Direct enables Columbia University students, faculty, and staff with library borrowing privileges and active e-mail accounts to request material from Brown University, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
  • Interlibrary Loan enables eligible Columbia University affiliates to borrow material from other libraries and universities and obtain copies of articles or book chapters from titles that are not owned or available at Columbia.
  • Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma
  • Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze

Columbia's E-Book Databases

  • ACLS Humanities E-Books: Provides full-text and full-page-image access to titles in most humanities disciplines and in area studies. The books included have been recommended by scholars as significant contributions to their respective fields. Offered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) in collaboration with ten learned societies and nearly 80 contributing publishers.
  • Brill's Medieval Reference Library: Complete and unabridged online edition of print Brill encyclopedias: Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimage, Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, etc.
  • Cambridge Books Online: includes many e-book collections from Cambridge University Press.
  • Ebrary: Multidisciplinary e-book database.
  • EBSCOHost: Multidisciplinary e-book database.
  • HathiTrust: A shared digital repository of pre-1923 digitized books from academic and research institutions, including Columbia.
  • Project MUSE: Full-text versions of peer-reviewed journals from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies, as well as thousands of ebooks, with emphasis on humanities and social sciences.
  • Past Masters : Several searchable full-text collections of writings by key philosophers and thinkers from ancient times to the present, including Anselm, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Wittgenstein and many others.
  • Torrossa: Online resource offering full text access to Italian books, conference proceedings, and journals by major Italian and Spanish publishers. Torrossa includes material previously available through Editoria Italiana online.

Free Online E-Book Collections

The resources listed below can all be found freely online.

  • Biblioteca dei Classici Italiani
    This website contains digital versions of Italian classics from the Middle Ages to today. It is possible to search by keyword or browse by author or time period. There are also digital versions of some criticism related to the primary texts.
  • Biblioteca Italiana
    This resource, run by the "Università di Roma, La Sapienza" contains a vast amount of Italian primary sources with xml markup, ranging from the 13th-18th centuries. One of its most useful features is the ability to perform full-text searches.
  • De Bibliotheca
    Features many Italian-language texts, including primary sources, but may not be authoritative editions.
  • Firenze University Press Open Access Collection
    Firenze University Press publishes the results of academic research, primarily conducted by the University but also by the national scientific community, and certified by the Scientific Committee that steers its choices, disseminating its products within the academic circuits in Italy and abroad.
  • IntraText Digital Library
    Full-text Digital Library offering books and corpora as lexical hypertexts on Creative Commons License.
  • Italian Dialect Poetry
    Curated by Prof. Luigi Bonaffini at Brooklyn College. Includes print and sometimes audio recordings of dialect poetry. Search by poet's name or region.
  • Italian Women Writers
    This website from the University of Chicago features a large number of primary texts by Women Writers along with biographic details and the opportunity to conduct full-text searches. The writers included stretch from the Duecento to present day.
  • Letteratura Italiana
    This website, run by Pianetascuola and Einaudi, contains a number of digital primary source texts from the Duecento to today. It does not allow searching, as Biblioteca Italiana does, but the texts are often available for download in PDF and well-suited to reading on a tablet or e-reader.
  • Liber Liber biblioteca digitale accessibile gratuitamente- è una o.n.l.u.s. (organizzazione non lucrativa di utilità sociale) che ha come obiettivo la promozione di ogni espressione artistica e intellettuale.
  • OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks
    The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books, and provides services for publishers, libraries and research funders in the areas of dissemination, quality assurance and digital preservation.
  • World Digital Library
    The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Includes books, journals, manuscripts, films, newspapers, photographs, and sound recordings. Conduct key word searches or browse by place, time period, topic, type of text, or institution.

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