Indispensible Research Tools

As critical as I have been of Google’s scheme to disregard the copyright rights of authors, I have a very difficult time finding any fault at all with this extremely useful web site. The link is to Microsoft’s Books Live site. Bear in mind that the depth of how much I despise Microsoft–also known as the Evil Empire–and that saying anything at nice about Microsoft is extremely difficult indeed for me. Hat tip to Teej Smith and J. D. Petruzzi for bringing this site to my attention.

However, the Evil Empire’s Books Live project has digitized thousands of PUBLIC DOMAIN works in order to make them available to the consuming public. These works are no longer eligible for copyright protection, so there are no royalties and may be used by anyone for any reason. I did a search for Ulric Dahlgren earlier this evening, and found a number of really useful items there that I had either never heard of, or had overlooked in the course of doing my research. The site is free, and it’s free to use the materials found there.

The only down side is that the images are digital scans, so you can’t do a copy/paste. You either have to print out the pages you want, or you have to sit and transcribe them. However, that’s a small price to pay for the benefits received. As hard as it is for me to endorse anything even remotely related to Microsoft, this site gets an enthusiastic two thumbs up from me.

Penn State University has another very useful project. It’s been digitizing Civil War newspapers from a number of large and small towns around the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The site can be found here. There are a number of good newspaper sources there, such as the Philadelphia Post and the Chambersburg Repository. There are also articles from a newspaper I had never before heard of, but which may well have my favorite newspaper name of all time, the Wellsboro Agitator.

These two digital history projects are enormously useful, and I commend them to you.