Many books on Wakefield history already included
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 to create an online digital library and preserve it for future historians as well as current users. The archive currently contains well over a million books, as well as extensive collections of media such as newsreels, advertising, cartoons, music, radio shows, and more. There is even an archive of periodic historical snapshots of the Web, preserved for the future. Materials in the archive, mostly published prior to the 1920s, are in the public domain and can be used without restrictions.

The archive has a number of major institutional contributors, such as the Library of Congress and Boston Public Library, which houses one of the eighteen scanning labs that churn out 1,000 scanned books per day for the collection. Almost 150 of Beebe Library’s historical books on Wakefield or Massachusetts history and genealogy have already been digitized for the archive thanks to the efforts of other large participants. Wakefield’s Beebe Library is now contributing local titles to be scanned as well to round out our collection, which will enable librarians and researchers to have convenient online access to the full text of history books about the town.

You can find titles in the archive in two ways. First, you can go directly to www.archive.org and search their online catalog. Second, you can search our own NOBLE catalog and if you find a link that says “Internet Archive Full Text” you can go directly to the online version at the archive’s site, where you can view it in several different formats including PDF, plain text, or flip book. All formats are fully keyword searchable, particularly handy for old titles that may not have indexes. To search specifically for archived books, simply add the words “INTERNET ARCHIVE” to any of your other search terms.

In time, the Archive’s online collections will become the first stop for researchers wanting easy access to historical documents.

Categories: Library News
Tags: archive, Boston Public Library, BPL, history, Internet Archive, local history, NOBLE, Wakefield, Wakefield history, Wakefield MA, Wakefield Massachusetts