Digital collections

The Library subscribes to a number of electronic resources which are available to registered readers in both Reading Rooms from 10:00 to 17:00 Monday to Friday. The links below will not work properly from outside the Museum. These resources are intended for non-commercial research purposes only – any commercial use is prohibited.

• Complete Dictionary Of Scientific Biography: nearly 800 in-depth articles of famous and influential scientists from ancient times to the recent past.
• Electronic journals: an a-z list of all the Science Museum Library’s subscribed electronic journals. 
• The Illustrated London News Historical Archives, 1842-2003: a completely digital version of the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper, consisting of 260,000 full colour pages.
• JSTOR: 1,151 digitised full-text journals (over 5 million articles; over 28 million pages) from a wide range disciplines, includes many science related journals, such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
• OCLC FirstSearch: The world’s most important bibliographical database for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine.
• The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: over 57,000 biographies of British people who have shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond.
• The Oxford English Dictionary Online: the accepted authority on the development of the English language over the last millennium, with over 615,000 words defined, using nearly 2.5 million quotations. 
• Oxford Reference Online: 175 language and subject reference works in a single cross-searchable resource.
• The Times Digital Archive: nearly 7.9 million articles from The Times newspaper published from 1785 to 1985. 
• Who’s Who & Who was Who: the famous biographical directory of over 100,000 noteworthy and influential people in all walks of life, in the UK and worldwide, published annually since 1849.