An article titled Scanning Project Digitizes 25,000 US Library of Congress Books, by Art Chimes, caught my eye today. I’d previously read that Library of Congress volumes were being posted at www.archive.org, but had not spent any time checking it out in any depth. This article changed that. I proceeded to spend hours on the website. Archive.org is probably best know as the site where you’ll find the Wayback Machine, archive of pages from the Internet itself. But it is so much more…
Just one aspect of archive.org is the Text portion of the site. As of this moment, it is stated that there are 1,141,638 texts (in most cases books and periodicals) on the site. These texts are downloadable in a number of formats. In some cases they are text only, in many other cases they are available as a Flip Book, PDF, or DjVu.
I realize that just because 25,000 books from the Library of Congress have been digitized and are available on archive.org, does not mean that anywhere close to that number will be of interest to genealogists. So what can genealogists expect?
I did a number of searches to attempt to find what kinds of books – and the numbers thereof we can currently expect to find. I first tried to find a category for “Library of Congress” books. As far a I can tell, there is no such category. However, the following categories are tabbed:
- American Libraries
- Canadian Libraries
- Universal Libraries
- Project Gutenberg
- Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Children’s Library
- Additional Collections (note that Genealogy is found under this category, with 0 items in the collection)
To try to get some idea of the number of Library of Congress texts that might be in the collection, I did a search on the phrase, “Library of Congress.” I got 32,913 hits – the vast majority thereof having the Library of Congress as the “Book contributer.”
I then did a search for Connecticut history in the texts, getting 914 hits. Scanning down through
the books, it looked like a genealogist’s dream – a lot of really good books just waiting to be downloaded. To find out how many came from the Library of Congress, I added “Library of Congress” to the Connecticut History search. I then got 283 hits.
The first book, at the very top of the list, was A History of Connecticut Vol. 1, by Elias Benjamin Sanford, 1922. I proceeded to download a PDF file of the book. Please note that when I was using my Safari browser (Mac), I could not download a complete file. They were always about 2k short – and would not open. So I switched to Firefox, and the downloads worked perfectly. Once downloaded, I was able to right-click with my mouse and search the entire PDF file, looking specifically for my ancestors. It was exciting. There were hundreds of local histories for Connecticut in that list of 914 texts dealing with Connecticut history.
Now, I invite you to slip on over to archive.org yourself, and look for books that may contain evidence of your ancestors. You can work on the site as “Anonymous” – or register (for free) and take advantage of more options for members only. The link goes directly to the Text Archives page.