Tech T.I.P. 11/25/2010

Discover Digital Libraries

Denise Barrett Olson

The last couple of years has brought a growing buzz of news about e-books and readers like the Kindle, Nook and iPad. Actually, electronic books (e-books) have been around for quite some time. Groups like the Project Gutenberg folks have been digitizing public domain books for years. And, a growing number of archives are discovering the benefits of digitizing their collections. Not only does this provide a way to make these delicate items available for public access, but it's also a cost-effective disaster management plan.

The e-reading craze has been a boon to researchers as many more public domain books are being digitized to add to the pool of books available on these devices. I'm especially delighted to see more and more local and military histories appear along with memoirs, journals and diaries. While Benjamin Taylor's Pictures of Life in Camp and Field will never be a best seller, to someone researching the Civil War battles at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, it could be a treasure-trove of information.

Cemetery researchers also benefit as a growing number of books about cemeteries are also showing up in these libraries. For example, at the Internet Archive you'll find books from the American Battle Monuments Commission for each of the American cemeteries in Europe. These books contain photos, maps, history of the cemetery and the battles that populated it.

Why are these digital resources important? They give us a snapshot of the area or cemetery at the time the book was published. In my case, a cemetery inventory from 1892-93 includes descriptions of wooden grave markers that no longer exist. I found a copy of that inventory spread across several issues of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register.

Where can you find these books? A good place to start is the Internet Archive. Their collection covers texts, images, video and audio - and don't forget the Web's Wayback Machine. In the Texts section, searches for "cemetery", "graveyard", "tombstone" and "epitaph" turn up dozens of titles. Books can be viewed in your web browser or downloaded in any number of formats. By the way . . . the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center is one of Internet Archive's digitizing sponsors and you can keep up with their contributions by visiting their page at the site.

Most of us are already familiar with Google Books as a research resource. Here you'll find both public domain and copyrighted publications. Google also offers both in-the-browser viewing and download options. Project Gutenberg is the grandfather of public domain libraries and another great resource. They have recently updated their interface making it even more user-friendly. The online reader is still only plain text but they are offering a growing number of download options.

If you are lucky enough to have an e-reader (or are expecting one from Santa), you might find FeedBooks and ManyBooks.net handy. There is no web-based viewer - only downloads - but my experience has been that these books have less formatting and OCR errors than other sources. Both offer RSS feeds to keep up with new titles added to the library.

Take some time and browse "the stacks" of these digital libraries to see what gems you can find. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Good hunting!