University of Michigan Library Adds 7,000 Volumes

The University of Michigan University Library has announced that it's added over 7,000 volumes to its Making of America Collection. Making of America is an online collection focusing on 19th century American publications. The majority of the materials they have were published between 1850 and 1876. The addition of these over-7,000 volumes brings their online volume count to 8,500 -- about 2.89 million pages of text.

This site is available at http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ . The first page gives you the option of browsing the collection's books or journals.

The books section has a simple search, advanced search, and browse. The simple search lets you search by keyword in full text, subject, or title, and set the time span of published volumes for your search. The search results will give you the volumes in which your search terms appear. Choosing a document will give you full bibliographic information, the option to search within the text, and, at the bottom of the page, the page numbers in which your search terms appears. Clicking on a page number gives you a page image. Advanced searching looks rather like simple searching only it gives you a few Boolean options, and the browse pages divide the books into letters, and then into first two letters (Aa, Ab, Ac, etc.) which makes it a little tedious to browse (it's always weird when I wish for frames.)

The journals section also has search, advanced search, and browse. Simple search allows for a single keyword and a specified timeframe. The results page provides bibliographic information, again, and pointers to either the entire article or the page(s) where your search term appears. The advanced search allows you several searching options, including frequency search or proximity search, while the browsing lets you choose either series (from Appleton's to Vanity Fair) or browse a collection of articles sorted by author's last name.

Mindbending amount of stuff here. If you want to browse here, be sure to set aside plenty of time; sometimes the server was a little slow to respond and there's a lot to explore. Worth a look.

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