Genealogy Tip: Recheck for digitized books

New digitizations of out of copyright books are appearing all the time. It's worth periodically checking the main digitization sites for people, events and locations in your family history.

Back last August I blogged about Google Books, and how they had digitized, and then extended copyright protection to a book published in the 1880s, only allowing a snippet view. The book was about my old home town of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, England. Not showing the full text of a book published that far back was a mistake, an example of being overzealous or simply careless in copyright protection.

Apparently Microsoft agree with me as I found the complete text of The silvery hosts of the North Sea : with a sketch of "quaint old Yarmouth" appearing in the texts section of the Internet Archive with MSN credited as the digitizing sponsor. Against possible copyright status is printed NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT. It's also on Microsoft's Live Search Books. Live Search adds a capability to search inside the book, not just the title as with the Internet Archive.