Cornell University Creates Home Economics Archive

Cornell University has created an archive of over 1,500 volumes (over 600,000 pages) related to home economics at http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/index.html. The
volumes available within were published between 1850 and 1950 and are just as fun a cultural browse as they are an exploration into home economics.

There's such a vast amount of information on this site that there are several different ways to view it. You can browse the topic lists, which include bibliographies of the archive contents in that topic. You can browse an alphabetical listing of books (this is a LONG browse.) Or you can search by keyword. Keyword search can be full-text, author, or title, and you can build a Boolean query with a series of pull-down menus.

The search "soap making" found 30 results (note that the search results counts by the number of matches found in each document, so this search found 30 results in something less than 30 volumes. For example, if a search result found five volumes with ten matches of the keyword in each volume, that search would have fifty results.) Search results include the name of the volume (and sometimes the date) as well as a link to the table of contents and to matching keywords.

I found myself drawn to "The modern laundry guide: a collection of the best articles published in the National Laundry Journal during the past two years" (published in 1905). I clicked on the table of contents and got further information about the book as well as links to its content. You can view the volumes in the archives page-by-page or as entire text files (the site does warn that entire books can be very huge and can crash your browser.) Lots to see here.

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