Liberty Fund, Inc.: The Online Library of Liberty
The OLL has won a “Best of the Humanities on the Web” Award for 2005-6 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the opinion of the awards committee, the OLL has some of “the highest quality humanities-related educational content on the Internet.” The OLL met the NEH’s demanding criteria for “intellectual quality, content, design, and most importantly, classroom impact.”
Our Goal
The purpose of the Online Library of Liberty is to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the internet in the pursuit of Liberty Fund’s educational activities.
Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty makes available at no charge to the public hundreds of full-length classic texts which have contributed to our understanding of the nature of individual liberty, limited and constitutional government, and the free market. The intended audience for this unique collection are scholars, faculty, students, and other members of the public. Access to the collection is completely open and requires no logging on, password, or payment of any kind.
The Collection
The OLL has over 1,000 titles by over 350 authors from Ancient Sumeria to the present day in the following disciplines:
- economics
- history
- law
- literature
- philosophy
- political theory
- religion
The OLL is made up of a number of sub-collections of titles:
- books published by Liberty Fund to which we have electronic rights (over 100 titles)
- a version of the “Great Books” program, with an emphasis of the contribution of the authors of the Great Books to our understanding of individual liberty and limited, constitutional government
- other titles which make up the classical liberal, conservative, and free market traditions
Study Aids
The books can be read on their own or in conjunction with numerous study aids such as biographical essays on key authors (J.S. Mill, F.A. Hayek), bibliographical essays on key concepts (the idea of Progress, natural law), and course syllabi (classics in the history of political thought).
Guides to the Authors
Every author has a biography page with information about their life and work and a list of their online titles. The authors are conveniently grouped by historical period (e.g. Ancient Rome, the 18thC) and into schools of thought. The latter brings together authors who shared particular intellectual interests or who were writing in the same historical period, such as the Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, the Founding Fathers of the American constitution, and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Guides to the Titles
Every title has a table of contents page with options to view the book in multiple formats (facsimile PDF, HTML or E-Book) or in smaller sections (e.g. chapters). The titles are grouped by discipline, intellectual debates (Religious Toleration, the French Revolution), topics (the Rights of Women, the Laws of War), and other interesting collections (Liberty Fund’s Natural Law and Enlightenment series). Under “Intellectual Debate” we bring together titles that were part of an important intellectual debate, e.g. Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution and the many replies this prompted (by Paine, Wollstonecraft, Godwin). Multiple and conflicting points of view are presented so that each text can be better seen in its intellectual and historical context.
Multiple Formats
Wherever possible, all titles are provided in three different formats:
- facsimile PDF so that scholars can see what the original text looked like, e.g. the 1764 edition of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, or the multi-lingual edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy
- professionally proof-read HTML with detailed and linked table of contents to aid navigation
- E-Book PDFs which have been created from the HTML version and which are self-contained files which can be easily downloaded to your hard drive and searched using PDF readers such as Acrobat or Preview
Special Collections
Many of the books published by Liberty Fund are also available online. Of particular scholarly significance are the following:
- the 7 volume Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith
- 14 volumes (of a proposed 40 volume collection) of the Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics
- the 25 hour-long digital audio collection The Intellectual Portrait Series: Conversations with leading Classical Liberal Figures of our Time
- the 11 volume Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (coming summer 2005)
The People Involved
The Online Library of Liberty is designed and built by the following individuals and companies:
- Dr. David M. Hart, BA (Hons) Macquarie University, Sydney; MA Stanford; PhD King’s College, Cambridge; Director of the Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc.
- Mr. Andrew Duncan, Assistant to the Director of the Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc.
- Crowley Micrographics, Frederick MD - scanning of books to PDF using an overhead Zeutschel scanner with a cradle to minimize damage to rare and fragile books
- Impressions Book and Journal Services, Madison WI - coding of the texts to XML and HTML
