DON'S FREEWARE CORNER -- NOV 2014
THE INTERNET ARCHIVE --
FREE SOURCE OF INFORMATION AND WEBSITES
This page was last updated 2014-11-05
Underlined titles are links.
To Google search these notes and subpages CLICK
HERE and enter your search terms.
Return to Don's
Freeware Corner Page or Don's
Family History Class Notes Page .
=============================================================================================
DON'S FREEWARE CORNER 2014-11
THE INTERNET ARCHIVE -- FREE SOURCE OF INFORMATION AND WEBSITES
©2014 Donald R. Snow
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter,
and are posted on http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be updates, corrections, or additions.
INTERNET ARCHIVE OVERVIEW
The Internet Archive is an effort to take "snapshots" of the entire
Internet at periodic intervals. This is called "crawling the
Internet". The Internet Archive started in 1996 and, since
then, has stored all the data, programs, information, audios,
photos, videos, etc., that it finds on the days it crawls the
web. There is an article about the founder, Brewster Kahle,
and other workers at
https://archive.org/about/bios.php . FamilySearch had
Brewster Kahle as a keynote speaker at one of the RootsTech
conferences. Because of storing these snapshots of the web you
can find information and downloads that were there at one time, but
have been removed for various reasons. It also allows you to
see a history of the website of an organization, for example the
Utah Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (formerly the Utah Valley
PAF Users Group). A good history and discussion of the
Internet Archive from the New York Times is at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/the-internet-archive-trying-to-encompass-all-creation/?_r=0
. If it's "out there" on the web, or was "out there" on the
web, it's findable and is NOT private, so don't post anything you
might want to keep private. The Internet Archive website
contains several parts including the WayBackMachine, Videos, Audio,
and Texts.
Here are examples of information related to family history that is
stored on the Internet Archive. Everything is downloadable in
various formats, e.g. texts can be downloaded in formats that
include pdf, EPUB, and Kindle, and they are all OCR'd. That
means they are Optical Character Recognized so they are every-word
searchable when you download them.
MARIE TAYLOR'S GENEALOGY LINKS WEBSITE
Marie Taylor worked at the FamilySearch Library and compiled a good
collection of hundreds of FH websites and information. It was
online for several years, but is not now. But go to the
WayBackMachine on Internet Archive -- http://archive.org
-- and type "genealogy-links.org" (without the quotes) and
you'll see all the dates a copy of her website was preserved.
Or click here to go there directly --
https://web.archive.org/web/20061001000000*/http://genealogy-links.org
. Click on any date and you will see what the website looked
like then. In about 2006 her website had the most information
on it. Many of those URL's are still valid and of those that
aren't, you can copy and paste them into Google to see if there is a
more current version.
LDS CHURCH FAMILY HISTORY VIDEOS
Enter lds.org in the WayBackMachine to see how many times the Church
website was crawled; or go directly to it at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lds.org
. Here's the link to a 4-minute video that the Church put out
in 2008 on Member Involvement that included Diane and I when we were
serving as Directors of the New York FHC in Manhattan -- http://web.archive.org/web/20110101190749/http://broadcast.lds.org/familysearch/Training/FH_2008__03_MemberInvolvement__8757_eng_.wmv
. They included us in the middle of a presentation by
President Uchtdorf. This video was released on DVD several
years ago and was posted on the Internet, but isn't now. All
the old FH training videos that were ever posted are available this
way.
JOURNALS AND MAGAZINES INCLUDING LDS ENSIGNS, IMPROVEMENT ERAS, AND
CONFERENCE REPORTS
On the Internet Archive there are nearly 7 million texts
stored. Click on Texts and type in "Mormon" without the quotes
and you get 1500 hits. Use the Advanced Search and enter
Creator Contains "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" and
you get 4000 hits including all the Church magazines such as The
Improvement Era, the Relief Society magazine, the Millennial Star,
The Ensign, all the General Conference Reports, foreign language
Church magazines, etc. These are mostly linked there from
other websites such as the Church History Library or the Harold B.
Lee Library at BYU. The Internet Archive must have signed
contracts with many libraries to show their postings and, I imagine,
save a copy of them. The General Conference Reports are from
the first one printed in 1880 through 2009. In searching you
need to use the complete name of the Church unless Mormon or LDS was
shown as the creator of it somewhere.
BOOKS AND NEWSPAPERS
You can type in the name of a book and, if it's there, you can
download a copy to read on your computer or portable device.
Since all texts are OCR'd, they are every-word searchable, so you
might try typing in your ancestor's name and see if it occurs in
some text somewhere. Try typing in a place, for example,
Provo, Utah, and you get many items, including City Directories of
Provo. There is also a collection of newspapers on the
Internet Archive so there are obituaries and other articles. I
don't know how complete that collection is, but if the newspaper had
an archive posted on the Internet somewhere, it should be stored on
the Internet Archive.
VIDEOS, LIVE MUSIC, AND AUDIO
On the Home page are links and numbers of each type of item stored
on the Internet Archive. For example, there are over 2 million
audio recordings. Everything is grouped into categories so you
can browse any category of interest. There are over 30,000
podcats and over 10,000 audio books. I have enjoyed browsing
through and downloading some of the music items. There are
nearly 2 million movies in the Videos section, all
categorized. In the Feature Films section there are over 300
comedy films.
CLASSIC ARCADE GAMES
A recent article pointed out that they have just included 900
classic arcade games on the Internet Archive -- http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/11/internet-archive-offers-900-classic-arcade-games-for-browser-based-play/
.
THE UVPAFUG WEBSITE
By entering uvpafug.org in the WayBackMachine to see all the
crawlings of our UVPAFUG and now, UVTAGG, website. They
crawled it 214 times between 2000-08-16 and 2014-08-18. You
can click on any date and see what it looked like then. So all
my old FH notes are stored there and can be viewed, if anyone is
interested. This is a source of all the announcements we made
of weekday classes sponsored by UVPAFUG and lots of other
information. All the dates and notes for all our classes are
there. Too bad we didn't start our website sooner. To
get back to the Home page click on the Internet Archive logo in the
upper left corner.
THE HYDE PARK FAMILY HISTORY CENTER WEBSITE (NOW THE LONDON FHC)
You may have to use Google or some other search engine to find the
old URL. For example, I couldn't remember the Hyde Park Family
History Centre's old URL, so I Googled it and found it was
www.hydeparkfhc.org . Using that in the WayBackMachine it was
fun to look at the website from a few years ago when Diane and I
were serving missions there and I was the webmaster of it.
It's now changed to www.londonfhc.org
. Interestingly, the Mission President had asked me to write
and I had posted on the earlier website notes of Helps for new
Senior Missionaries coming to the England London Mission and we
would send them the URL so they would know at little of what to
expect. Those notes were not linked anywhere on the Internet
and you had to know the URL to get to them. The result is that
they are not available on the WayBackMachine since there was no way
the bot could know about them. When a new couple was called to
the England London Mission, the Mission President would send me an
email to contact them and tell them where to find the Helps.
Fortunately, I still have one of the original files because it is
not saved on the Internet Archive. There is a link to download
a copy of the old PAF 5.2.18 there, though, and that still works on
the WayBackMachine, so if anyone needs a copy of PAF it is still
available.
Well, you can see the value of knowing and using this
resource. I'd be interested to know if you find anything this
way that has really helped you in your family history.
Return to Don's
Freeware Corner Page or Don's
Family History Class Notes Page .
=================================================================================