Online Services - LibriVox & Project Gutenberg

The Ocean Shores Public Library is proud to announce the two new additions to the library material collection.  Online, through the Catalog, be sure to check out LibriVox and Gutenberg.

Some examples of works that patrons can access include, but are not limited to:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (LibriVox)
The Adventures of Pinocchio (LibriVox)
Sherlock Holmes (LibriVox)
Fairy Tales from Arabian Nights (Gutenberg)
Memoirs of the Union’s Three Great Civil War Generals (Gutenberg)

LibriVox (pronounced [ˈlibrɪˌvɑks]) is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers since 2007. 

Around ninety percent of the collection is in English, although LibriVox recordings are available in 33 languages altogether.

LibriVox is a volunteer-run, free content, Public Domain project. It has no budget or legal personality. The development of projects is managed through an Internet forum, supported by an administrative team, who also maintain a searchable catalogue database of completed works.

To use LibriVox from our Catalog system, click Electronic Resources in the upper right corner of this page, then scroll down and click on the LibriVox logo. To access directly, go to http://www.librivox.org/

Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence. Hart has said he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge, and to do so by the end of the 20th century.

He used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution.

By the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort. All of the text was entered manually up until 1989 when image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more widely available, which made book scanning more feasible. As the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the project's day-to-day operations that Hart had run.

Starting in 2004, an improved online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse, access and hyperlink. Project Gutenberg is now hosted by ibiblio at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To use Gutenberg from our Catalog system, click Electronic Resources in the upper right corner of this page, then scroll down and click on the Project Gutenburg logo. To access directly, go to http://www.gutenberg.org/

Enjoy the new services and feel free to ask any questions:

By calling the library: (360) 289-3919
In person:  573 Point Brown Ave NW
Email:  oslibrary@osgov.com