I was surprised to find that only one out of ten people in a class I recently spoke to admitted to knowing about the Internet Archive. For city directories and parish register transcriptions alone its worth knowing about, and replete with other useful resources for the genealogist.
Try it out by going to www.archive.org/details/texts and searching on a town name of your interest.
The search doesn't get into the body of the text. Do do so click on the title of the book of interest, then click on "Read Online" in the left hand column, then search from the box at the top of the right hand column.
The University of Toronto continue to add digitized books to the Internet Archive. I recently found The universal assistant and complete mechanic : containing over one million industrial facts, calculations, receipts, processes, trade secrets, rules, business forms, legal items, etc., in every occupation, from the household to the manufactory (1880). This was the world our ancestors lived in.
I agree, but.....
ReplyDeleteI have had some success using the Internet Archive, but also a lot of frustration. Its performance has been very erratic. On its bad days, getting access to its first page takes many minutes, or eternity, freezing my browser at 50% activity, causing the message that the application is not responding so that I have to kill it. If one chooses to download a book in any of the formats provided, the download speeds are often at least two or three times slower than I get downloading from other sites. This is especially acute with PDFs. Google shows that I am not alone in having these problems.
I would be interested to know if other users are having these problems, stating which of Bell or Rogers they are using.