The Internet Archive is “a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Since 1996, the Internet Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to collect more varied materials and collections, including texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. Content is provided by U.S. and Canadian libraries and cultural institutions, Project Gutenberg, the Biodiversity Heritage Library as well as through individual donations.
Currently, the Internet Archive includes approximately 1.3 million textual items, 170,000 moving images, and 330,000 audio items and 63,000 live music items.
- All content is in the public domain and all text items provide full-text access.
- The Internet Archive offers simple and advanced keyword searching of metadata (title, author, publisher, subject, description). You may also search by keyword within individual texts.
Keyword searching within text - Results may be sorted, grouped or refined according to different criteria displayed in the right sidebar.
- The Internet Archive provides texts in various formats, including Flipbook, PDF, and text. With-in text searching is highlighted with “post-it” notes for retrieval.
Sample search: where is the Marblehead Powder House and when was it built?
A search of the Internet Archive for “Marblehead Powder House” yields no results. A more general search for Marblehead, limited to texts from the American Libraries collection, does generate a list of results. The second result, A Guide to Marblehead, looks promising. I click on this link, then double click on the book’s image. Next, I can search within the text for “powder” (without quotes) or check the table of contents. Either way, I find the answer to my question on p. 39 along with a nice image.
Hint: when searching within texts in the Internet Archive, it is better to avoid common terms such as “house” or “street,” because the search will include in the results ALL instances where ANY of the search terms appear. By using only “powder” I greatly limit my results, even though I may get a few that are not relevant.
Search the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org