The World Culture Link Collection of the WCH is intended to grow into an extensive collection of links to websites, video channels, blogs etc. that covers all countries and major cultural regions in the world. It by no means claims to be comprehensive but presents a critical selection of what we regard as the most rewarding, informative and inspiring resources that we could find.
If you think that we missed important sites, we’re open to criticism and suggestions. Feel free to send an e-mail to the site administrator.
The current page collects links of general interest for visitors interested in global culture and in classic art and literature: archives, online libraries, virtual museums, blogs, publishers with an international scope, magazines etc. The focus is on freely available resources in the public domain or under one of the creative commons and/or open access licenses.
Directories & Reviews
Open Culture
An extensive directory of free e-books, audio books, movies, artworks, textbooks and other educational media, featuring short, but informative reports about the latest available content.
The Public Domain Review
Hailed as “a model of digital curation” it features insightful essays about new and rediscovered literary, artistic and scientific works in the public domain.
Online Archives
Internet Archive
The most extensive collection of cultural documents and sources on the Internet and perhaps one of the largest ever created: millions of scanned books, magazines, scholary articles, educational resources, audio books, images, studio and live music, movies, historical documents, you name it. The Wayback Machine that initially started the project – an archive of snapshots of defunct websites – is today only one of many services provided by this invaluable gift to the Internet community and to the world in general, worth a Nobel Prize or two.
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Wikimedia Commons
The media supplement of the popular Wikipedia which is listed further below, a vast, community-created collection of public domain images, videos and audio files many of which are linked into the respective Wikipedia articles.
Zeno.org
An online archive especially interesting for readers fluent in German. Although not all translations are up to contempory standards anymore, it offers a wide and useful selection of classical literature as well as historical, scientific and reference works. Even more interesting than the text sections might be the vast collection of more that 40.000 artworks, mostly by classic to modern European artists but also with some samples of the art of other cultures.
Ubuweb
A comprehensive collection of digitized avantgarde works and documents: concrete and visual poetry, sound art, audio, film etc. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith it has long been forgiven that it is was initially a kind of pirate website that cared little for the copyright status of the materials offered for free download here. Most of the originators are glad today that someone took on the work of saving these works for posterity.
Online Libraries
Classic Short Stories
The name of the site basically says it all. Apart from not a huge, but solid selection of classic works for short fiction enthusiasts it offers some useful links and bibliographic information.
HathiTrust Digital Library
Founded in 2008, the HathiTrust is a non-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries that has digitized more than 17 million items. For the normal user, without access via a partner institution, the majority of its items are search only. It still offers, however, more than 7 milion volumes that can be read online and even downloaded.
The Literature Network
Mostly a collection of literary classics, also some religious texts, reference works and nonfiction, complemented with some learning and discussion resources: forums for literary, philosophical and religious debates, collections of quotes, summaries and quizzes, and surveys of literary periods and movements.
Standard Ebooks
This growing selection of classic fiction and nonfiction is in itself nothing extraordinary. All of these works can be easily accessed elsewhere. The additional benefit of the Standard Ebook project, however, is to offer them as carefully produced and proofread ebooks in various formats (epub, azw3, kepub, advanced epub and for online reading), with nice covers.
Fadedpage
Somewhat comparable with Standard Ebooks, this is another initiative to create an archive of carefully produced free e-books, based on volunteer work.
World of Tales
Rewarding for young readers and parents as well as for students and scholars, it’s an extensive collection of children stories, falktales, fairy tales, and fables from all over the world: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North and South America, with links to a number of classic fairy tale and fable collections.
Poetry
Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation – emerged from the Poetry magazine, that it continues to publish, in 2003 – is an American literary society that seeks to promote poetry and lyricism to a wider audience. Its website offers short, but insightful biographies of classic and modern poets, essays about poets and poetical topics and a wide selection of poetic works.
Poetry.com
Poetry.com is a collaborative platform for poets worldwide, offering a vast collection of works by both renowned and emerging poets. It’s a community-driven project that serves as a hub for poets to share their works, receive feedback, and connect with like-minded fellow poets.
Poetry Daily
This site is build around the nice idea of presenting one new poem every day (that can also be delivered via e-mail newsletter). It is complemented with an archive, a news section, book reviews and essays.
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Today its one of the leading publishers of contemporary poetry and funder of poets in the United States. Its website offers, apart from extensive information about its publishing activities, a wide selection of classic, modern and contemporary works.
The Poetry Archive
The speciality of this poetry collection is that it offers historically significant audio recordings of major poets reading their own works.
Reference
Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Britannica as such needs no introduction. Visitors of the online edition may miss the comprehensiveness and wealth of detail of the classic 29-volume book set. What it lacks in extend it somewhat makes up with accessibility. One of the most useful features of the online Britannica are the structured article collections that serve as useful introductions to numerous topics. The Britannica has the reputation of being especially competent in the field of history.
Encyclopaedia.com
Praising itself, perhaps justifiable, as “the world’s #1 online encyclopaedia”, it gathers content from more than 200 individual reference works, which explains why you may frequently find several articles for a given search term and why the scope and the depth of the articles varies.
Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Comparable with the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (see below), it’s an academic information resource, hosted by the University of Tennessee at Martin, with extensive, peer-reviewed articles of a cross-cultural scope written by professional philosophers.
New World Encyclopaedia
New World Encyclopedia is a wiki-based encyclopedia which contains carefully selected articles that are rewritten and supervised by a team of editors with academic and literary qualifications. If differs from the origininal Wikipedia in that it is based on an editorial policy that includes a more rigorous article selection, editorial review process, and its wholesome value orientation: to organize human knowledge not just for its own sake, but for its value to the reader and the world as a whole.
Scholary Community Encyclopaedia
The idea of a community-created encylopaedia is extended here into a scientific reference resource, open for fresh ideas and approaches, covering fields from natural sciences to arts and humanities. It also features the peer-reviewed Encyclopaedia Journal with selected encyclopaedia content and the Encylopaedia Books that collect articles on specific topics.
Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
The no. 1 information source about philosophy on the Web, also noteworthy for readers interested in world culture because it includes many insightful articles about philosophical traditions beyond the Western canon.
Wikipedia
The concept of the Wikipedia should be known to everyone with even a faint acquaintance with the Internet, a huge, free general encyclopaedia entirely created by volunteers which has spawned versions in numerous languages and several related projects. The quality is not undisputed. In many cases the mutual corrections, extensions and discussions in the Wikipedia community have over time resulted in articles that are at least a solid starting point for further studies. Since most articles are basically open to modification by everybody, however, it can’t be denied that articles of peripheral or special interest are sometimes culturally, politically or personally biased.
World History Encyclopaedia
An unconventional encyclopaedia that presents a wealth of historical information in a manner especially suited for laymen, learners, students and adolescents, with survery articles, timelines, maps, source translations and various media.
Databases
WorldCat.org
The world’s largest online library catalog that offers an easy streamlined access to bibliographic and location data of millions of books, articles, dissertations and other media items in libraries all over the world.
Religious Texts
Internet Sacred Text Archive
The definition of “sacred texts” that this comprehensive and carefully curated collection implies, is rather generous and extends beyond English standard translations of the scriptures of world religions and peripheral belief systems to folk tales and literary works of spiritual significance, complemented with comments, introductions and scholary works.
Bibel-Online.net
An accessible, well-structured collection of mostly German Bible translations, featuring several editions of the Luther bible, complemented with the Biblia Hebraica, a critical edition of the Hebrew Tanach.
ERF Bibleserver
Perhaps the most comprehensible collection of Bible translations, in numerous languages from Arabic to Chinese, with a focus on German translations up until the latest translation efforts.
King James Bible Online
An online edition of the King James Bible, the authoritative English Bible translation commissioned by King James in 1604, first published in 1611 and codified in 1814 as a standard for all English-speaking Christians.
The Noble Quran
A great ressource to study the holy book of the Muslims both in English translation and in the Arabic original. Especially interesting are the audio recordings of each surah.
The Quran
Similar to the previous it also offers the complete text of the Holy Quran both in English and in Arabic, the latter not only in Arabic script but also in Latin transliteration.
The Gnosis Archive
A comprehensive collection of source translations, introductions, comments and scholary works connected to the Gnostic and Hermetic traditions, among others a complete translation of the Nag Hammadi library.
Sacred Books of the East
Sacred Books of the East is a 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts edited by the German-born British philologist and orientalist Friedrich Max Müller (1983-1900) and published by Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910, compiling essential sources of Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Islam. This site offers free download of all 50 volumes as pdf files. The collection is also available in the Internet Archive.
Art Collections
Artvee
An extensive selection of high resolution image files of classic to modern classic artworks, aggrevated from the public domain sections of major museum websites, with numerous useful options for browsing and exploring.
Cantor Arts Center – Stanford University
The Cantor Arts Center of the Stanford University features a permanent collection of 38,000 works that are made accessible here by means of thematic portfolios, object type selections and geographic origin.
The Cleveland Museum of Art
The website of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio, founded in 1913 and repeatedly extended and modernized up into the present, offers open access to more than 38,000 works in high resolution, with comments and detailed work information and explorable in detail via an elegant web interface.
Getty Museum Collection
The website of the world-renowned J. Paul Getty Museum – commonly known as the Getty – is the easiest way to research the vast collections of the museum, housed at two locations in Los Angeles, California.
Getty Open Content Program
The Getty also offers a significant subset of the museum’s collections as image files here, “freely available for study, teaching, and enjoyment”.
Google Arts & Culture
As one of the most useful and charitable projects of data kraken Google that somewhat counterbalances the corporation’s dubious business practices, this site offers easy access to the collections of numerous renowned international museums.
The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation – Collection Online
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, better known as The Guggenheim, founded by entrepreneuer and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1939 and located today in a landmark building, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1959, on the Upper East Side of Manhatten in New York City, is home to a continuously expanded collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art. Its online collection presents a searchable database of over 1,700 selected artworks by more than 625 artists from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection.
LACMA Collections
The LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States and has grown out of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science, and Art, established in 1910 in the Exposition Park neighborhood. The most interesting aspects of its online presence are perhaps the presentations of Latin American, Asian and modern Islamic art, of 20th century fashion and of handicrafts such as glass and ceramics.
Library of Congress – Digital Collections
The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. needs no introduction as the world’s largest library, home not only of more than 30 million books and print media but also of countless manuscripts, historical documents, photos and media items of all kind. Its digital collections are maybe the most diverse listed here, an overwhelming richness of curated and commented collections not only of artworks in the strictest sense but also of historically significant documents from sheet music to maps, photos, postcards and much, much more.
The Met Collection
The website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art – or simply “the Met” -, the largest art museum on both American continents, located at two sites in Manhatten, offers access to about half a million works from the Met’s collections. It’s especially interestering for its many gateways into specific artforms and the art of various cultures and regions. Open access images are marked in the indexes (for more information see at the bottom of the page).
Open Access at the National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art in Landover, Maryland, is home to more than 150,000 paintings, sculptures, decorative artworks, photographs, prints, and drawings from all eras of Western art. Its open access program offers high resolution image files of about 50.000 artworks for free download.
Rijks Studio
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is the national museum of the Netherlands, dedicated to Dutch arts and history. The online collection of almost 800.000 works has not surprisingly a focus on the golden eras of Dutch art, but offers some samples of Asian art as well.
Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art
Taken as a whole, the Smithonian Institution is the largest organization of associated museums, education and research centers in the world. Located around the National Mall in Washington D.C., it consists of several massive art, history, natural history and technology museums. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, presented online here, houses exceptional collections of Asian art, with more than 44,000 objects from China, Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, the ancient Near East, and the Islamic world, dating from the Neolithic period to today.
Music Archives
Archives of Traditional Music
The Archives of Traditional Music, hosted by the Indiana University, is an audiovisual archive that documents music and culture from all over the world. With over 100,000 recordings that include more than 2,700 field collections, it is one of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States.
The Max Hunter Folk Song Collection
A digitized archive of almost 1,600 Ozark Mountain folk songs, hosted by the Missouri State University Department of Music, recorded between 1956 and 1976 by a traveling salesman from Springfield, Missouri, who took his reel-to-reel tape recorder into the hills and backwoods of the Ozarks, preserving the heritage of the region by recording the songs and stories of many generations of Ozark history.
World Literature
Literary Hub
Founded by editors Morgan Entrekin, Terry McDonell, and Andy Hunter in 2015 and funded by independent publisher Grove Atlantic, it has become one of the major sources of high-quality literary discussions on the Web, publishing personal and critical essays, interviews, and book excerpts from more than hundred partners, including independent and large publishers, bookstores, non-profit organizations and literary magazines.
Public Books
Many of the essays published in this “magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship” – which has a strong focus on literature, but is open to other artforms and various fields of scholarship as well – take new, reissued or classic books as an occasion to discuss wider aesthetic, social, philosophical and scientific issues of general interest. Founded by literature professor Sharon Marcus and anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom in 2012, it aims at uniting “the best of the university with the openness of the Internet”, publishing writing “that is erudite without being esoteric and brings scholarly depth to discussions of contemporary ideas, culture, and politics.”
Words Without Borders
Words Without Borders is, without a doubt, the best literary magazine for international literature on the Web (among others a role model for the WCH’s international science fiction magazine InterNova). Since its inception in 2003 it has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry and graphic novels from more than 140 countries, in high-quality translations from 136 languages, with a strong focus on marginalized regions and literatures and an open mind for all kinds of styles and genres. It has recently been restructured from publishing monthly thematic issues about specific regions and topics into a continuously updated e-zine. Well-organized reading lists make the richness of its archive accessible.
World Literature Today
World Literature Today is perhaps the best-known printed literary magazine for contemporary international literature. Its website is rewarding even for non-subscribers and features selected content from the print edition. Occasionally complete issues are made available online for free for a limited time.
Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature: An Overview
Founded by George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History at the Brown University in Providence, and grown out of course material, it’s a growing collection of information about contemporary literature in English of countries and continents that were culturally shaped by the era of colonialism and imperialism.
Postcolonial Studies @ Emory
This blog, a pioneering project of digital humanities, founded by Deepika Bahri, Professor of English at the Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and her students in 1996, does not only portray fiction writers and artists but also critics and theorists who are relevant in the wider context of postcolonial studies.
Three Percent
Three Percent, a lively, both visually as well as intellectually stimulating resource for international literature, hosted by the University of Rochester, New York, features news, musings and reviews of modern and contemporary world literature.
world literature, world books
An extensive collection of short, but useful book reviews of mostly contemporary world literature by Danny Yee, without geographic limits, reaching from Africa to South East Asia.
Litprom
The Litprom, a Germany literary society based in Frankfurt / Main, follows for forty years now its mission to raise in the German language area the awareness for the literatures of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arabic world. Its website, available both in German and English, is most useful for members, but also features news and reviews of general interest.
World Music
World Music Central
Maybe the no 1 source on the Web of up-to-date reports and samples of music from all over the world, also useful for its collection of world music reference information such as glossaries, festival notes and musician biographies.
BBC Radio 3 – Music Planet – World Music archive
The BBC Radio 3, perhaps the culturally most significant of the BBC radio stations, broadcasts classical music and opera (it has been called “the world’s most significant commissioner of new music”), with jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also featuring. This archive collects recordings from more than twenty years of its Music Planet program.
RootsWorld
RootsWorld is primarily a world and roots-folk music magazine and radio program that is funded exclusively with readers and listeners donations. It features news, portraits, videos and samples of music from all over the world.
Traditional Music Channel
One of those Youtube channels that have misappropriated a video portal to exclusively present audio, with visuals serving only as illustrations. It presents a wide-ranging selection of traditional music compilations from Western and Eastern Europe to the Americas, Africa and Asia, even some from the Pacific area. The introductory notes are short but can serve as a starting point for further studies.
Global Art
Art Through Time: A Global View
A fresh, well-produced approach to the history of art from a global perspective through a series of 13 op-topic video lectures, hosted by the online learning platform Annenberg Learner.
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
The idea of this timeline is to make the history of global art and culture accessible through the rich collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To just call it a timeline, however, is actually an understatement, as the site presents a huge repository of artworks, chronologies, and more than 1.000 essays.
World Cultures & History
The World Cultures & History section in the Digital Collections of the Library of Congress is a vast, ecclectic archive of media collections about artistic, folkloristic, pop-cultural, social, political and historical issues from all over the world. It’s one of these places of discovery on the Web where a user may frequently be delighted about finding things he never thought he was looking for.
Global Architecture
Dezeen
Who ever has researched architecture on the Internet can hardly have missed Dezeen, a high-quality architecture and design magazine with a global, open-minded scope, encompassing the traditional and the latest trends, with lots of photos, concise and insightful reports, enhanced with interviews and in-depth essays, one of those publications that have set standards for cultural magazines on the Web.
ArchDaily
Matched only by Dezeen this popular site is another great resource to keep up-to-date about the latest developments in international architecture.
Daily Architecture News
An interesting architecture news site that offers excellently written reports and well-produced videos, centered around a plethora of high-resolution photographs.
Institute of Classical Architecture & Art
The Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA) is a nonprofit membership organization committed to promoting and preserving the practice, understanding, and appreciation of classical design. To do so, the ICAA offers a broad range of educational programs. The ICAA website is not only useful for its members but also features articles and videos of interest for a general audience.
History in 3D
This project offers a chance to experience important locations of ancient architecture through walk-through and fly-by videos of detailed 3d reconstructions based on archaeological records, some of which have been repeatedly enhanced and updated.
Global Theatre
Global Cinema
Folklore
Museums
Virtual Museums
Magazines
Blogs
Reviews & Canons
Academics
Open Access
Publishers
Books
Media