Some years ago, the British Library partnered with an external funder to digitise a large collection (~45,000 titles, ~65,000 volumes) of 19th century books. These are currently available through JISC Historic Books and other sources such as via print-on-demand copies at Amazon and an iPad application.

The Library have recently announced that:

We've recently made all 68,000 digitised volumes and their accompanying JP2, PDF, metadata and OCR text files from our Historical 19th Century Books collection available under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark. This unique selection includes many rare or inaccessible books published between 1789 and 1914 and covers a wide range of subject areas including philosophy, history, poetry and literature.

It is not yet publicly available online, due to size issues - the whole collection comes to around 4TB, including page images and marked-up XML. However, I have been able to start uploading selected volumes to Commons and Wikisource (the OCR is very good quality) and I am happy to take requests for anything that might be useful.

The collection is predominantly UK-published material in English, as would be expected; however, there are significant amounts in French and German, and a few hundred in various other European languages. Both fiction and nonfiction are covered; anecdotally, there seem to be particular strengths in travel books, but this may just be a quirk of the period.

There are two caveats. Firstly, there's no accessible public catalogue restricted to just this collection (though we do have a single massive spreadsheet). It's all in the central catalogue, and this search should cover most of what's in it.

If you find any item which a) has "[electronic resource]" in the title, b) dates between 1780 and 1920, and c) looks like a record for a book, there is a good chance it's part of this collection and available for release.

Secondly, it's not well-indexed. Older catalogue records tended not to have good subject-headings by modern standards, and so often all that we have to go on as to what the book is about is the title - there is no full-text searching available at the moment. If you can't find anything relevant, try searching on variant terms - or feel free to make very broad requests and see what I can find!

So far uploaded:

• Burke, W.S. - Cycling in Bengal (1898) (DjVu, Wikisource (in progress).)
• Cole, Henry - A hand-book to Hampton Court (1884) (PDF, DjVu)
• Garner, Robert - Natural History of the County of Stafford (1844) (PDF)
• Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897) (PDF, DjVu)
• Kennedy, Robert John - A Journey in Khorassan (1890) (PDF, DjVu, Wikisource (completed).)
• Malabari, Behramji M. - Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882) (DjVu, Wikisource (completed).)
• McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856) (PDF, DjVu, Wikisource (in progress).)

• Suggestions for what you would like me to dig out and upload are welcome! There are substantial amounts of, for example, local histories which may be useful.

Sister Nivedita

• Sister Nivedita Atmaprana will be highly helpful to expand Sister Nivedita article! Remove this request if it does not meet condition mentioned here! --Tito Dutta (talk) 02:51, 31 January 2013 (UTC)reply
• Also this --Tito Dutta (talk) 02:55, 31 January 2013 (UTC)reply
  • No luck, I'm afraid - both too recent. Andrew Gray (talk)

• This book about the Père Lachaise Cemetery ? ~Pyb (talk) 11:10, 26 April 2013 (UTC)reply

Yes! Downloaded; will get the PDF up shortly but the DjVu might have to wait a little while. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:22, 26 April 2013 (UTC)reply

PDF Andrew Gray (talk) 11:17, 27 April 2013 (UTC)reply