Using Digital Libraries: Search Strategies for Family Historians

Elizabeth M. O’Neal PO Box 1259, Lompoc, CA 93436 [email protected] https://www.swangenealogy.net https://mydescendantsancestors.com

Looking for books about your family history? You may be able to find them without leaving the comfort of your home! Millions of books have already been digitized and are free to use, as well as download to your personal library. Learn where to find the best digital book collections, how to strategically search them, and how to save your finds to your computer or cloud storage for later reference.

Digital Libraries – Family History

FamilySearch Digital Library - https://www.familysearch.org/library/books

The newly-updated FamilySearch Digital Library contains more than 440,000 digitized genealogy and family history books and publications from the archives of family history libraries such as the Allen County Public Library, the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, and others.

Included in the collection are family histories, county and local histories, genealogy magazines and how-to books, gazetteers, medieval histories and pedigrees. While some books are only viewable in a Family History Center, many can be viewed from – as well as downloaded to – your home computer.

To access the FamilySearch Digital Library, visit FamilySearch.org, and click “Search” in the top menu. In the drop-down menu, select “Books.” On the home page of the digital library, you will see a simple search bar. Here, you can type in a surname, historical events, groups of people, or names of places. A search will cover every word of text.

The content of the digital library is freely viewable, but you may need to create a free FamilySearch account and sign in to view images.

Genealogy Gophers - https://www.gengophers.com

Genealogy Gophers provides access to more than 80,000 digitized family histories, regional and local histories, genealogy magazines, how-to books, gazetteers, newsletters, and medieval histories provided through a partnership with FamilySearch, The Internet Archive, and other free book sources on the Internet.

What makes Genealogy Gophers different from the other digital libraries is their search technology, developed specifically for “identifying real people named in genealogy books.” In other words, their search engine focuses on people, along with their names, dates, and places.

While technically free to use, Genealogy Gophers is a small operation and hosting a website is expensive. You can see 3 books a week for free, and after that they ask for a small donation to help defray the hosting costs: $3 for a month or $20 for a year.

MyHeritage - Compilation of Published Sources (free) https://www.myheritage.com/research/collection-90100/compilation-of-published-sources

One of MyHeritage’s best kept secrets is it’s repository of digitized books, all of which are free to access - you don’t even need to log in with a free account. The site currently hosts 84,206,882 pages in 447,870 sources, which includes “thousands of published books ranging from family, local and military histories, city and county directories, school, university and hospital reports, church and congregational minutes and much more.”

All records include images of the book’s pages, as well as an OCR text transcription. If you have a MyHeritage account, you can save a record directly to a person in your tree. You can also print individual pages as a hard copy or PDF, or right-click > save image as… to save a copy of the image to your computer. It does not appear possible to download entire books at this time. Digital Libraries – General

Google Books - https://books.google.com

As of 2015, Google Books claimed to have over 25 million scanned book titles; the project slowed down at that point due to legal issues, and the current number of books is unknown.

Search for books on Google Books or on Google.com. Narrow your results by selecting “Books” from the “More” menu. If a book with content that contains a match for your search criteria is found, a link will show up in your search results.

If a book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given permission, you will be able to see a preview of the book, and in some cases the entire book. Otherwise, you may see a limited preview, snippet view, or no preview. If a book is in the public domain, you can download a PDF copy.

You will also get links to where you can buy the book or borrow the book from a library (via WorldCat). With a free Google account, you can add the books you’ve found to your personal library for later reference.

Internet Archive - https://archive.org

Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Today, the Internet Archive contains over 21 million downloadable books and texts, as well as 550,000 modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account. Look for family, county and local histories, yearbooks, census records, newspapers, magazines, and even contemporary genealogy how-to books. Books on the Internet Archive are offered in many formats, including DAISY files intended for print disabled people. The Internet Archive also accepts contributions of digital materials from the community.

There are numerous ways to search the Internet Archive. Please see https://help.archive.org/hc/en- us/articles/360018359991-Search-A-Basic-Guide for assistance.

HathiTrust Digital Library - https://www.hathitrust.org

HathiTrust (pronounced “haw tea”) is a partnership of academic and research institutions offering a collection of over 17 million titles digitized from libraries around the world.

Books that are either uncopyrightable (i.e., some government works) or in the public domain can be searched and viewed in their entirety. Books that are still in copyright are considered “limited,” and can be searched, but cannot be viewed, allowing you to decide whether or not to obtain a copy of the book from another source.

Visit https://www.hathitrust.org/help_digital_library#SearchTips for help searching HathiTrust.

Project Gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Project Gutenberg offers over 59,000 free eBooks which you can download or read online. You will find the world's great literature, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

There is no fee or registration required, and no special apps are needed to read the books. Scanning and digitizing is done by volunteers, so donations are gladly accepted to help defray costs.

Digital Libraries – Aggregators

If you can’t find what you are looking for at a specific digital library, try your search at an aggregate site. These sites search multiple digital repositories at one time.

Digital Public Library of America - https://dp.la

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an all-digital library that aggregates metadata — or information describing an item — and thumbnails for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

Open Library - https://openlibrary.org

Open library is a project of Internet Archive. To date, they have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. Open Library is an “open” project that welcomes your contributions; you can fix typos in texts, add books, and offer technical assistance.