A couple days ago, Eric Wittenberg passed on to me another great online source for books, texts, and many other media types. It’s the “Internet Archive” at http://www.archive.org. There appear to be even more digitized books accessible here than on Microsoft’s site that I posted about previously. Both of these sites often take you to the same database for books. A search will repeat a particular source several times when it’s in different databases.
Just type in what you’re looking for in the search box at the top of the screen, then select the media type. When you find what you want, you can flip through the book, download it, print it, etc.
Last night I was thinking about the digitization of so many historical sources – books, papers, manuscripts, newspapers, all kinds of documents. I can easily see where, some day, everything in – for instance – the Library of Congress, National Archives, university libraries, historical repositories, etc. will be available for viewing online. You can see anything you want from the comfort of your own computer.
Researchers who now work doing this digging for scholars and writers will probably one day be mostly out of a job, but such easy access to this nation’s historical documents can only be good – now everyone can see the sources for themselves.
Check out the site. It’ll keep you quite busy.
