Online Books: Free Access to Full-Text

Forced Migration Online's Digital Library includes a number of books in its collection. Some examples:
- Barbara Harrell-Bond's well-known text, Imposing aid: emergency assistance to refugees (1986)
- Risks and reconstruction: experiences of resettlers and refugees (2000), ed. by Michael Cernea and Christopher McDowell
- Human rights in the OSCE region: the Balkans, the Caucasus, Europe, Central Asia and North America (various years), the annual report from the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights

Google Book Search allows users to search the full-text of books. (The total number in their collection is not indicated.) Searches can be performed on all books or limited to books viewable in their entirety. For copyright reasons, users may only be able to view snippets or extracts of books found through Google. Currently, not many forced migration-related titles are available in full through this service, but this will no doubt change over time.

The Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement has made a number of its books available in full through the National Academy Press, including:
- Exodus Within Borders: An Introduction to the Crisis of Internal Displacement (1999)
- The Forsaken People: Case Studies of the Internally Displaced (1998)
- Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of Internal Displacement (1998)

Many annual reports/yearbooks are accessible through the web sites of relevant forced migration organizations. While many of these titles might be considered grey literature because they are not produced or distributed by mainstream publishers, they are important texts that provide key analysis and substantive information. Examples include:
- All four editions of UNHCR's State of the World's Refugees
- Amnesty International's annual surveys of human rights
- Editions of the World Refugee Survey from the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI)
- ECRE Country Reports dating from 1999
- Global overviews of internal displacement from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)

So much information is now available online that it is always worth searching for the title of a text or monograph. If the complete item cannot be retrieved online, users will very likely still find a reference to it, either through a bookseller, on the publisher's site, or in a library. For example, searching on book titles in Google will often produce results from Amazon.com or from WorldCat, a library catalogue service that indicates which libraries in your area carry the title.

Posted in Publications.