DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - DEC 2018
RECORD COLLECTIONS ON INTERNET ARCHIVE
©2018 Donald R. Snow - Last updated 2019-01-11
Don's Freeware Corner notes are printed in the UTAH VALLEY TECHNOLOGY AND GENEALOGY GROUP (UVTAGG)
Newsletter TAGGology each month and are posted on his Class Notes Page at
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html
where there may be corrections, updates, and additions.
INTERNET ARCHIVE
The Internet Archive is a free website at https://archive.org/.
There is a good Wikipedia article about it at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive .
Here is a quote from the Wikipedia article: "The Internet Archive is a San Francisco-based
nonprofit digital library with the stated mission of 'universal access to all knowledge'.
It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites,
software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and nearly three million
public-domain books." To do this, among other things, it makes a "snapshot" of the entire
world wide web every few days and makes these snapshots available to everyone for free.
It was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster_Kahle --
and is supported completely by donations. He has been a keynote speaker and presenter at
several RootsTechs conferences in Salt Lake City. You can sign up for a free account to store
information, upload data, and several other things, but this article will only discuss
some things you can do without an account.
INTERNET ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS
On the first page of the Internet Archive website you see a row of icons of the kinds
of collections they have, e.g. Web, Texts, Video, Audio, etc. At the right end is
an icon for Collections. Clicking on it shows that they have 382,000 collections
of materials, all of which are free to anyone. On the left side of the screen
you see the break down of all these, e.g. by Subject, Type, Creator, and Language
and you can click to examine any of these groups of collections. There is
an icon to show more details in the names and the group can be sorted in various ways,
by Title, for example. Clicking on Topics & Subjects brings up one or more pages
of keywords and you can check as many of these keywords as you want and then click
"Apply Filters" to see those groups under those key words. These keywords
include things like all the U.S. states, types of records, etc. For example,
there are 67 collections related to California and 80 more that are
californiarevealed, whatever that means. There are 154 collections relating
to the United States and 37 related to Yearbooks. There are lots of newspapers,
lists, maps, and other types of records.
SEARCHING
To the right is a search box to find the types of collections you want immediately.
Note that this is NOT the search box at the top for THE WAYBACK MACHINE.
That will be discussed in another Freeware Corner article. For an example of searching,
type into the search box a state of the United States that you are interested in
and see what comes up. On the left side are more Filters that you can click
to narrow your search to various kinds of records or dates or locations. I was
surprised at the large number of hits here for everything that I tried.
KINDS OF COLLECTIONS ON INTERNET ARCHIVE
To see the complete list of collections on Internet Archive I kept clicking at the bottom
to expand the list downward, but finally stopped after 137 pages and never did
get to the end. Each page has information of about 20-30 collections and the number
of items in each collection. I saved this large file by printing it to PDF and that gave
me an abbreviated version, but it was searchable and showed the numbers of items
in each collection. It was only 137 pages of the entire list and I have no idea
how much further it would have gone. By going through this 137-page file I selected
out collections that were of interest to me, both for family history and
for other interests, e.g. math and jazz music. It really gave me an understanding
of how much information there is on this website and how it is organized. To give you an idea
of these collections, below is the list of my family history selections and then later the list of collections I want to check for other interest. After compiling the list, I alphabetized it so that related collections
would sort near each other. I couldn't tell what the original sorting order was.
The numbers after the collection names are the rounded-off numbers of items in
that collection. You can see that some have thousands, or even millions, of items
and others, just a few. This is only meant to whet your appetite and I only
selected about 1% of those on my 137-page list.
SOME FAMILY HISTORY COLLECTIONS OF INTEREST
Boston Public Library - 55,000
Brigham Young University Library - 25,000
British Army List - 220
British Navy Lists - 120
BYU Campus Publications - 500
California Digital Collection - 191,000
Church History Library (LDS) - 15,000
Community Audio - 2,465,000
Community Video - 926,000
Computer Magazine Archives - 22,000
Computer Newsletters: User Groups and Flyers - 4,700
Congregational Library of the American Congregational Association - 1,200
Daily Colonial Newspaper Collection - 33,000
David O. McKay Library, BYU Idaho - 1,600
European Libraries - 654,000
Family History Library - 1,000
Genealogy - 141,000
Giganews Usenet Collection - 25,000
Great Classics Reading List - 70
Indianapolis Public Library Yearbooks - 600
Internet Archive Books - 824,000
Journals - 1,758,000
JSTOR Early Journal Content - 452,000
Kansas State University Newspapers - 1,700
Kansas State University Yearbooks - 120
Kentucky Digital Newspapers - 95,000
Latter-day Saints Millennial Star - 2,500
LDS Church Magazines - 5,000
LDS Church Magazines - German, Scandinavian and Dutch - 7,000
Million Book Project - 10,000
Minnesota Historical Society - 2,600
MIT Open Course Ware - 400
New York Public Library - 144,000 items
Newspapers - 204,000
North Carolina Digital Heritage Center - 14,000
Passenger and Crew Vessel Lists for New York, NY 1897-1957 - 7,100
Pennsylvania Germans - 170
Podcasts - 394,000
Powerpoints - 2,300
Project Gutenberg - 59,000
Reclaim the Records -- Several collections, mostly vital records of Eastern U.S. - 1,000s
Rutland Historical Society - 950
Scottish Family History - 430
State Library of Massachusetts - 1,500
The Boston Library Consortium - 82,000
The Improvement Era (LDS) - 800
The Library of Congress - 159,000
The Magazine Rack - 145,000
The Newberry Library - 44,000
The PastPages News Homepage Archive - 1 ,714,000
UCLA Yearbook Collection - 100
UF Family Search - 7,300
United States Census - 23,000
University of Michigan Books - 209,000
University of Pennsylvania Libraries - 1,700
USGS Maps - 59,000
USGS Maps of Arizona - 1,900
USGS Maps of California - 2,800
USGS Maps of Colorado - 1,900
USGS Maps of Idaho - 1,700
USGS Maps of Nevada - 1,900
USGS Maps of Texas - 4,400
USGS Maps of Utah - 1,500
WWII Archive - 5,000
UNITED STATES FEDERAL CENSUSES
Internet Archive seems to have all the U.S. Federal Censuses. To find them for Utah,
for example, search for "federal census utah" (without the quotes).
These can be sorted in several ways and you can download them for the states
and counties you want. There are several formats for downloading, including pdf.
They also have a nice reader on the Internet Archive website where you see
two pages of the censuses side-by-side and can click to turn the pages.
This works fast for rendering (showing) the pages. If you find something you want,
you can download and/or print it. Since there were several filmings
of the U.S. censuses, when you find something in a U.S.census on
FamilySearch Historical Records, or Ancestry, or elsewhere, you can find the
same page on Internet Archive and the filming may be better. Keep in mind that
Internet Archive does not have the censuses indexed, so if you don't know
where the person is in a census, use one of indexed versions, e.g.
FamilySearch Historical Records or Ancestry, and find them,;then locate that page
of the census on Internet Archive.
RECORDS RELATED TO THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
In the list above are several collections of records relating to the LDS Church,
e.g. old LDS periodicals, both in English and in other languages, and
thousands of items from the Church History Library. These include
all the General Conference Reports and many historical books such as
Church Chronology by Andrew Jensen and these are all downloadable. Among other
items, I found the Scandinavian Jubilee Album (50 years) after Erastus Snow
started missionary work in Denmark, and several other Church items that I was interested in.
COMMENTS AND SOME ADDITIONAL INTERNET ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS I WANT TO SEARCH SOMETIME
There are thousands more collections, so there are probably many that you would be interested in.
There are many, many university library collections, so you might want to examine
those that are located near the areas you are researching for genealogy,
since those may have local genealogy collections. Here are some additional collections that I want to look at sometime.
78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings - 132,000
78rpm Records Digitized by George Blood. L.P. - 106,000
Album Recordings - 4,800
Audiophile CD Collection - 182,000
Boston Public Library 78rpm Collection - 46,000
Folkscanomy Mathematics: Books of a Mathematic Nature - 300
Free Music Archive - 16,000
Free Music Charts - 68
Khan Academy - 2,000
Old Time Radio - 2,500
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London - 18,000
Radio Archive - 13,000
TED Talks - 2,800
Television Archive - 1,633,000
The David W. Niven Collection of Early Jazz Legends, 1921-1991 - 600
WWII Era Audio Recordings - 100
CONCLUSIONS
I was surprised at how many different collections and types of collections of records
that Internet Archive has, and they are adding new records all the time.
One of the search filters is for records added in different time periods, so you can
keep up-to-date without having to go through the collections you have already been through, if you keep track of your searches. The problem for me here is that there
is so much there, that I lose track of time while examining the data. I will write
more Freeware Corner articles about Internet Archive, so stay tuned.
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