NYU Global Library Services

Online collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias, biographical sources, quotations, bilingual dictionaries, and measurement conversions covering topics from the arts to the sciences.

Dissertations

Primary Sources Online

Primary sources are materials that provide direct evidence of first-hand testimony concerning the period or subject under investigation. They enable a researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an event.

Examples of online primary source collections available from NYU Libraries include:

• In the First Person: Index to Letters, Diaries, Oral Histories and other Personal Narratives;
• Historical New York Times (1851-);
• Digital National Security Archive;
• Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945.

Find all of these on the A-Z database page.

Search here for books, journals and other print materials, videos, sound recordings, e-books, e-journals, databases, and indexes in our local libraries and special collections.

Helpful Hints for Finding ebooks at NYU

• The Books & More tab holds many, but not all, of the ebooks to which NYU has access.  Look to the Suggested ebook Databases list below for suggestions on where to find other ebooks we have access to.
• The ISBN number for an ebook does not coincide with the ISBN for the hard copy.  Therefore it is often better to search by title and publisher using the Full Text Online limiter to find the ebook within the results.
• Commercially published editions of ebooks are much less likely to be found in our database subscriptions than those published by academic presses.  Examples of commercial publishers are Penguin, Harper Collins, Macmillan and McGraw-Hill.  Examples of academic presses are Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Yale University Press, etc…
• ebooks published by a university press are more likely to be found on databases run by those presses.  See the Publisher Specific Databases section below.

Suggested ebook Databases links have been provided, but all of them can be found in Databases A-Z.   

Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Google Scholar helps you identify the most relevant research across the world of scholarly research. 

Customize your "Scholar Preferences" for automatic linking to NYU's full text. Enter "New York University Libraries - Get at NYU" in the Library Links box; save your preferences.

Search across the full-text of books. Most of the books available in their entirety are in the public domain and no longer under copyright.