Internet Archive, Universities Team Up For a Digitized Collection

Things that make me go whee: Internet Archive and ten universities agree to team up and make their own online library of digitized books. Whee!

You can get a nice article on this turn of events at http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1160176 . From the article: "In a statement, the Internet Archive describes the Text Archive as an Open Access archive that will "ensure permanent and public access to our published heritage". Over a million books have been committed to the Text Archive by the member institutes, with 50,000 available in the first quarter of 2005."

You can also get some comments from the source: from the Internet archive, announcement at http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25361 : "Researchers, scholars, and the general public will be able to leverage these collections in ways that have been familiar to library users for centuries-- unfettered searching through catalogs, reading and annotating the books, and sharing pieces with collegues. The public domain or appropriately licensed books will be viewed on-screen, searched, and printed for free using PDF and DJVU. Leveraging the book catalogs of the individual libraries, RLG (The Research Libraries Group, Inc.) and other catalogs, these books will be available to traditional library users without much retraining. "

The currently-available text archive is at http://www.archive.org/texts/ . The largest part of this section is The Million Book Project, which currently has over 14,000 text.

As with much of the archive, you can search the entire section of texts or you can view subsections. I did a full text search for sociology and got 11 results, from Sociology by Richard T.Lapiere to Education And Heredity. A Study In Sociology by J.M.Guyau. Two of the books were not available because they are currently under review by the Million Books Project.

Clicking on the title of a book provides additional information including the author, date, language, and public date. You may either download the book as a PDF or as one of two types of DjVu files. The archive tracks how often books are downloaded and has a place available for reviews.

This had to happen. Having just one company concentrating on digitizing books while a bunch of already-digitized books did not get organized in such a way leaves way too much on the table. I'm very glad the Internet Archive got hold of this -- they've come up with some great stuff in their time online. (Love those Prelinger archives.)

How about more tie-ins? How about an application that automatically hooks up a relevant keyword search from DMOZ categories to the Text archives? How about RSS feeds for keyword results?

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