Thursday, March 3, 2011

Using the Internet Archive Website: Books - Post 2

In the post, Using the Internet Archive Website: Books - Post 1, I highlighted the problems I've had searching for genealogy-related books on the site working with the plain text books on the Internet Archive website (http://www.archive.org/).  I provided simple work-arounds that I use in the hope that other frustrated searchers will use them.

There are several other ways to search and read the books on the Internet Archive.  Here is the screen for the plain text book (4th screen in first post):


In order to see other formats for this particular book, the user can click on the red "See other formats" button to the left of the plain text panel.  When you click that, this screen appears:


In the left-hand panel (headed "View the Book"), there are choices for:

*  Read Online
*  PDF
*  B/W PDF
*  EPUB
*  Kindle
*  Daisy
*  Full text
*  DjVu

There is a Help file that defines the different choices.

In the right-hand panel of the screen above is source and catalog information for the work. 

If the user chooses "Read Online," then color images of the book pages, as scanned, are shown in the central panel.  Here's the cover of the Samuel Sewall book:



There is a Search Box in the top line.  I searched for "Seaver" and the page with the first instance of the search term showed on my screen:


There was only one instance in the book, and the system went right to it.  See the orange tack in the bar at the bottom of the screen?  That shows where the search terms are found.  If there is more than one, then more show up as orange tacks on that line.  Each one shows a snippet of text when the mouse is run over it.  The user can click on each orange tack and the book will flip to that page.

There are icons in the bottom bar that can be used to show one page view, two page view (as above), thumbnail view, zoom in, zoom out, flip left, and flip right.

In the online two page view like the above, the user can click on the page to "turn" to the next page.

The book can be downloaded in PDF format and saved to your computer folders.  To print book pages, the user could click on PDF and show it on the screen, then print selected pages.  The user could also take screen shots of the pages, copy them to a word processor, and print the selected images.  The user could save just those pages as a file.  Copying text from the book pages is only possible in the Full Text version of the book, which has line breaks and any OCR errors included.

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