[KS] Online books

[Brother Anthony]

It might be helpful to explain a little more about the Internet Archive's online texts. Many people only know about the Google Books project. In addition to Google Books texts, the Internet Archive's "Texts" site's searches  http://www.archive.org/details/texts  also include (for example) the books in the Gutenberg Project and the books scanned and made available by a considerable number of major libraries, the Princeton Theological Library and the UC libraries amongst others. 

The Archive's layout with the clear links to the available formats is very helpful. One advantage of the Internet Archive is that the complete texts it holds are included in any standard Google web search, which is not (oddly) the case with the books in the Google Books pages.  If you enter a quotation from a scanned book in the Google web search, the result will usually be an Archive page, not a Google Books page. There is a separate search engine within Google Books (so frustrating, since many out-of-copyright texts are only given as snippet views . . .).

The Internet Archive has huge scanning projects of its own, separate from Google Books. For example, several of the most interesting books in my list are from the Princeton Theological Seminary, many of whose books can be viewed through the Archive  http://www.archive.org/details/Princeton  . if you go to http://www.archive.org/details/university_of_california_libraries you gain access to an index of the books in UC selected by the UC librarians and scanned by IA. U Toronto Library is a major contributor in Canada . . . What they are calling the "Universal Library" is described in that page ( http://www.archive.org/details/universallibrary ) : "The Universal Library Project, sometimes called the Million Books Project, was pioneered by Jaime Carbonell, Raj Reddy, Michael Shamos, Gloriana St Clair, and Robert Thibadeau of Carnegie Mellon University. The Governments of India, China, and Egypt are helping fund this effort through scanning facilities and personnel. The Internet Archive has contributed 100k books from the Kansas City Public Library along with servers to India. The Indian government scanned the appropriate books. The Internet Archive has performed automated conversion of these scans into this collection. " 

The books in my list are particularly interesting for being available as high-definition pdf scans of the originals, which are often completely unavailable outside a handful of libraries. The text files converted from the pdf images are not always very accurate, especially when italics are involved, of course, but the pdf scans of the books donated to Princeton in 2005 by Professor Samuel H. Moffett are of especially fine quality, I find. And very interesting. To have images and texts of such books freely available online may upset some business sectors, but it is an enormously valuable resource for people living far from any good libraries.

Brother Anthony
Sogang University, Seoul
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/

Brother Anthony