Cultural Heritage
Freely accessible cultural collections: books, sheet music, audiobooks, classics, and museum holdings.
187 curated websites
Website rankingsExplore overall, trending, and category rankings
All websites Academic Research Online Learning Practical Tools Creative Tools Explore the World Developer Tools Fun & Games Cultural Heritage Science Exploration Health & Living Career Development Shopping & Deals Social & Community Design Inspiration
Cultural Heritage
11 websites
IMSLPA wiki-based library of public domain sheet music where volunteers submit scans and newly typeset editions that pass copyright review, with each file tagged separately for Canada, the US and the EU. Free to browse and download.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art CollectionThe online collection of The Met in New York: over 492,000 public-domain artwork images and metadata for the entire collection released under CC0, free to search and download, with a keyless open API and a weekly-updated CSV dataset.
Shidian GujiA free digital reading and editing platform for pre-modern Chinese books by Douyin Group (ByteDance) and Peking University, offering full-text search, page-image comparison and machine-assisted translation across 73,000+ titles.
LibriVoxA volunteer-narrated library of free public domain audiobooks, offering more than twenty thousand completed titles for streaming and download, with all recordings dedicated to the public domain in the United States.
Project GutenbergThe oldest eBook library on the Internet, founded in 1971, offering works whose U.S. copyright has expired — free, no registration, readable online or downloadable as EPUB, Kindle, and plain text.
Guwendao (formerly Gushiwen)A classical Chinese literature reference site founded in 2011 and renamed Guwendao in late 2025; it indexes poems, prose, classics, and famous lines with translations, annotations, and appreciations, free to read without an account.
Digital Dunhuang (数字敦煌)The Dunhuang Academy's official digitization project; its resource library freely publishes whole-cave high-resolution images and panoramas of 30 caves, alongside an open material library, in Chinese and English.
Chinese Text ProjectOpen-access digital library of premodern Chinese texts maintained by Donald Sturgeon since 2006: over 30,000 titles focused on pre-Qin and Han works, with aligned Chinese-English parallel texts, a dictionary, source scans, and an open API.
Standard EbooksVolunteer-driven project producing carefully typeset, proofread public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg transcriptions with public domain cover art; every title is free in epub, azw3, and kepub, dedicated to the public domain.
Zdic (汉典)Free online Chinese dictionary launched in 2004: each entry combines the Kangxi Dictionary, Shuowen Jiezi, Mandarin Dictionary, phonology, dialects, and glyph origins on one page, plus classical text, poetry, and calligraphy sub-sites.
The StoryGraphAn independent UK reading tracker that recommends your next read from mood and pace data plus machine learning, with quarter-star ratings, reading stats, and spoiler-safe buddy reads; free and ad-free at its core, Plus for advanced stats.