Beautiful Books: Brecknock

A gorgeous title page from 1809:

Beautiful Books: A Dainty Authoress

It may just be me, but I love the author photos of the women who created a number of our most genealogically-valuable books. What strikes me most is that the male authors tend toward very stoic portraits of them in waistcoat with chain, while the women seem to opt for being shown with their weapon of choice: their pen.



From: Biographical History of Cloud County, Kansas (1903).

Beautiful Books: Nebraska's Resources

Not sure what this is all about, but it did catch my eye:



Could be there because the book was sponsored in a way by the Nebraska Farmer Company.

From: A Condensed History of Nebraska (1903).

Beautiful Books: A Bright Legacy

Another in the line of donation/collection stickers that would be of interest to genealogists:



I wonder if the scholarship is still in effect?

From: A History of Preston County, West Virginia, Part One (1914)

ed.: Apparently, this scholarship is still in effect, along with a slew of other ancestral-related scholarships!

Beautiful Books: An Enduring Tribute

One of the most genealogically-interesting (if not also beautiful) donation/collection tags I have seen:

.

Found in: An Outline History of Orange County (1846).

The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft

Prolific writer Hubert Howe Bancroft was a master historian of the West, and many of his works are on Google Books. Trying to ascertain what, exactly, is online, can be very confusing, so I took the time to compile the following list. Six volumes of the complete works are not yet online; amazingly, three of those are from the seven-volume set of California histories. (Update 2013: The remaining volumes are now online, and have been linked below. Thanks to Jeff of Comstock House History!)

(Incidentally, anyone reading the series on California would be interested in "Misrepresentations of Early California History Corrected", published by the Society of California Pioneers. The book stems from their 1893 effort to oust Bancroft as an honorary member of the society, and outlines some supposedly grievous character assassinations committed in his works. It also gives an interesting glimpse into the difference between the first and second editions of some of Bancroft's California histories, in which major changes are made in text about some of the major figures discussed.)

The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft:


Volume I: The Native Races, Volume I
Volume II: The Native Races, Volume II (Civilized Nations)
Volume III: The Native Races, Volume III
Volume IV: The Native Races, Volume IV (Antiquities)
Volume V: The Native Races, Volume V (Primitive History)

Volume VI: History of Central America, Volume I (1500-1530)
Volume VII: History of Central America, Volume II (1530-1800)
Volume VIII: History of Central America, Volume III (1801-1887)

Volume IX: History of Mexico, Volume I
Volume X: History of Mexico, Volume II
Volume XI: History of Mexico, Volume III
Volume XII: History of Mexico, Volume IV (1804-1824)
Volume XIII: History of Mexico, Volume V
Volume XIV: History of Mexico, Volume VI (1861-1887)

Volume XV: History of the North Mexican States and Texas, Volume I (1531-1800)
Volume XVI: History of the North Mexican States and Texas, Volume II (1801-1889)

Volume XVII: History of Arizona and New Mexico (1530-1888)

Volume XVIII: History of California, Volume I
Volume XIX: History of California, Volume II (1801-1824)
Volume XX: History of California, Volume III
Volume XXI: History of California, Volume IV (1840-1845)
Volume XXII: History of California, Volume V (1846-1848)
Volume XXIII: History of California, Volume VI (available at archive.org)
Volume XXIV: History of California, Volume VII (1860-1890)

Volume XXV: History of Nevada, Colorado and Wyoming (1540-1888)
Volume XXVI: History of Utah (1540-1886)

Volume XXVII: History of the Northwest Coast, Volume I (1543-1800)
Volume XXVIII: History of the Northwest Coast, Volume II (1800-1846)

Volume XXIX: History of Oregon, Volume I
Volume XXX: History of Oregon, Volume II (1848-1888)

Volume XXXI: History of Washington, Idaho and Montana (1845-1889)
Volume XXXII: History of British Columbia (1792-1887)
Volume XXXIII: History of Alaska
Volume XXXIV: California Pastoral, 1769-1848
Volume XXXV: California InterPocula
Volume XXXVI: Popular Tribunals, Volume I
Volume XXXVII: Popular Tribunals, Volume II
Volume XXXVIII: Essays and Miscellany
Volume XXXIX: Literary Industries: A Memoir

Survivor Accounts of the Lusitania [Tidbits]

Tomorrow is the 84th anniversary of the sinking of The Lusitania, so why not read some eye-witness and survivor accounts over at Internet Archive?

More Scholarly Resources Online [Tidbits]

More resources for free online scholarly journals of interest to genealogists:

* The History Cooperative includes links to journals like "The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography" and "Journal of American Ethnic History"

* Jurn.org is a search-engine specifically searching online e-journals with "free or substantially free" content. Seems to search Historycooperative.org and Thefreelibrary.com, as well as many individual journal sites.

* Questia in a paid-subscription site that does offer some free access to journals and books

Getting Into Google Books II [Lessons]

On Monday we covered how to set up a personalized Google Books library, done with the aim of getting us to take better advantage of this digitized resource.

Today, I want to cover using the iGoogle Google Books gadget as a portal to your personalized library. If you use iGoogle as your homepage (or even if you don't) the gadget provides a handy access point for your library that is never more than a few clicks away. Let's get started.

Getting the Gadget

To get the gadget, you should be logged into your Google Account and have an iGoogle page setup. (If you don't have an iGoogle page already, you can check out my post on how to get one. The look of iGoogle pages has changed since that post, but the basics are the same). You can get the Google Books gadget here.

Once installed the gadget will look something like this (assuming you have added enough books to your library to generate recommended reads):



The Bigger The Better

Clicking on the maximize button (the little window shade in the top right corner of the gadget) will expand your gadget to full-size, taking up the full real estate of your iGoogle page, like this:



A fine, expansive palette upon which your genealogy-research masterpiece can be wrought.

Benefits and Drawbacks

First, the benefits. With the increased real estate of the gadget, you can now access your personalized library (and other books within Google Books) from within the gadget.... meaning you don't have to go to the Google Books site in order to search or browse books (the embedded API of the book is cut off a little in the pic below, but you get the idea):



Note that you can search within any given book (using the search field noted by the arrow, above) within the context of the gadget. You're deep into Google Books functionality at this point, but still on your own iGoogle page:



You can also browse all books within your library from the gadget, and preview suggested titles that are generated by Google Books' algorithms.

Unfortunately, there are some aspects where the Google Books gadget falls a little short, at least for now. Remember all those neat tags we attributed to our books in our last lesson? Well, for now, those tags are non-existent within the world of the iGoogle gadget. Add that absence to the hopeless cover view of the gadget, and your personalized library can get VERY difficult to browse once you have hundreds of titles accumulated.

On top of that, you cannot (within the gadget) refine a search to range only within the contents of your library; this is an option that is available on the Google Books site. This means that any "Search Books" term search you run through the gadget will default to searching the entire Google Books library... useless if you are trying to find something you have already placed within your own library, or if you are fishing for a term within a specific set of books you have in your library.

Despite those two problems (which I imagine will be remedied in future gadget releases), the iGoogle Google Books gadget is a great way to incorporate the world of digitized books into your research rotation. This way you can stuff your bookshelves full and still have room for more!

Getting Into Google Books I [Lessons]

I know that even if you haven't been using Google Books with regularity up until now, you've made it your New Year's Resolution to be better about it. I know this, not because of my Carnac-like pyschic skills, but because I know you know how useful Google Books is for every researcher.

If you haven't delved into Google Books, this lesson should be enough to get you into the mix. In it, we'll initiate your library, then quickly learn how to add and organize the books you find of use in Google Books.

In the next post, coming this Friday (January 9th), I'll discuss using the iGoogle Google Books Gadget and what it can do for you. First things first... let's build our library!

Setting up Your Library

In order to get started, you'll need to obtain a Google ID and log in to your account. To get started, go to Google Books.

The first thing we'll need to do is add some books to your library to get you started. [If you already have books added to your library, you can skip this section and move on to the next one below.] We'll add two books of general interest for the purposes of completing this lesson.

Run the following search: "Genealogy: A Journal of American Ancestry". You should see the following at the top of your results:



Add these two books to your library using the "Add to my library" links as shown above. When you click on the first link, you'll see a box with information about the privacy settings on your library, and you'll be prompted to enter a nickname. Click "Save", then "Add" to the following prompt to save the book to your library. You will not have to repeat this process with any other books you add to your library.

After adding the second book to your library, click on the "My Library" link in the upper-right hand corner navigation to go to your library homepage.

Organizing Your Library

On your "My Library" page, you'll see the books you've added to your library. The page isn't pretty, and, to be honest, still isn't as functional as it could be, but with the recent addition of the labeling feature we are about to use, it has become EXPONENTIALLY better in terms of usability.

Here's my current example library:



What we're most interested in is the "Add labels" link beneath the books you have added to your library. Using this link, we can begin labeling and organizing the books in our libraries to make them easier to browse and use.

You can use whatever system you feel most comfortable with, and whatever system you feel will allow you to find what you're looking for in the most efficient manner. In my personal library, I've chosen to use state, county, and city names for many books. For more general books, I label them with terms such as "memoirs", "railroads" "guides" and "directories", along with a geographic term that narrows down their areas of concern.

Here's a shot of my example library with my labels in place:



Notice that the labels we've added are visible in green underneath each book, and that they are listed in alphabetical order along the left side of the page. The labels in this left-hand section serve as a keyword navigation for your library; clicking on a certain label (such as "journals") will bring up all books you have labeled with that term. Parenthetical numbers show how many books have had each label applied to them.

Get Busy

That's the very easy basics on building your Google Books library. For Friday, go ahead and spend some time on the Google Books site and add to your library books that you feel would be of use to you in your research. If you need some ideas, you can use the Google Books Index on my website, which lists full-view books of genealogical interest.

In Friday's post, we'll talk about maximizing the use of your library via the Google Books Gadget on your iGoogle page.

Public Domain Sherpa [Quick Tip]

As a quick follow-up to a previous post on determining copyright status of a particular work, I wanted to note the very handy, very user-friendly calculator with a very cool name, The Copyright Sherpa! Almost fun to use, and totally worth giving it a try.

Also, the Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki has a list of other useful public domain calculators for many countries including the United States here.

Enjoy!

New Online Book Resource [Site Review]

Background
Recently launched, Hathi Trust bills itself as the "shared digital future", being a common digital repository that already has over 2 million volumes and 700+ million pages on its servers. According to their site, "HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system to establish a repository for these universities to archive and share their digitized collections."

Using Hathi Trust
This site is relatively new, and at the moment there is no single search-interface for works digitized under this cooperative, but their site mentions that this is an ultimate goal. For now, users have to use the search engines of various participating institutions (like the University of Michigan)to find some content, or can browse some of the collection through the Digital Library Interface, also particular to UMich.

Poking around, I found some interesting titles just by running a few easy subject word searches. A search on cemeteries yielded 164 results, including some monument transcriptions from Eastern Europe, and death records of European deaths in Southeast Asia. Numerous volumes record transcriptions from graveyards along the Eastern seaboard. Public domain volumes are full-text, those volumes not in the public domain are "search only", meaning they are not browsable:



Unfortunately, the results shown for intra-text searching on restricted, "search only" items, are uniquely unhelpful (note that you can't see the search results in situ at all):



The breadth of the collections seem to be interesting, and will be of use to most researchers. A quick search on Oakland, California yielded me (among other things) a 1910 report on the urban park system in Oakland California... this from the UMich library! Therefore, even if you don't see an institution from the exact areas of your geographic concerns, you should make an attempt to check out what you can of Hathi Trust to see what you can find. You may be pleasantly surprised.

In Conclusion

It's clear from Hathi Trust's site and the lack of a centralized searching function, that this project is in its early stages, and is first and foremost crafting shared digital depository practices for its central users, Universities and Archives. However, as the ultimate goal is to make the repository "available, to everyone, anywhere, any time", this is a site to watch, and one which, if successful, could give Google Books a serious run for its money.

Copyright? Or No Copyright? [Site Roundup]

As genealogists, copyright is something of interest to us. Whether we are doing transcription or abstraction work, writing a family history, or collating information on resources available for our research area, the copyright status of various works is often important to our work. To that end, I wanted to give a short roundup of what is available online for your use when copyright questions arise.

• Stanford SULAIR Copyright Renewal Database covers renewal records for 1923-1964, a key period for many genealogy works. The database offers simple and advanced searching by keyword, title, author and registration dates.
  
• U. S. Copyright Office has online copyright renewal records from 1978-present. The search options are comprehensive.
  
• WorldCat Copyright Registry is a new resource, currently in Beta, which allows for collaborative input on copyright status for different works. The site is mainly geared toward library and institutional use, but anyone with an interest in the copyright status of a particular work, and a free WorldCat account, can add information to the item pages.
  

(As an aside, one of the most comprehensive tables on copyright status I have found is at Cornell's website. Very comprehensive, and covers the thorny foreign work/author/renewal issues.)

What's In Your Library?

What with the recent spate of fires, floods, and, of course, notorious hurricanes, keeping valuable items like photos, documents, files, and heirlooms safe has been on the mind of many genealogists. But what about one resource you may take for granted? One resource that possibly surrounds you in your home, but for which you may have no printed record or inventory?

I'm talking, of course, about your books!

As a true bibliophile and recovering English major, I happen to have a full catalog of my books, including a listing of just about every book I have read since I was 16 years old. For most purposes, this list is a vanity thing. I learned years ago, however (when one of my closes friends experienced a fire in his Haight-Ashbury apartment building and lost alot of his possessions) that libraries are very difficult to replace if you don't know what it is you are trying to replace. Without a comprehensive list of the books you own, should disaster strike, and you lose your books, you may find yourself reaching for elusive volumes for years to come, only realizing what you have lost when you need it most.

To that end, I present two online websites dedicated to cataloging your home library. One I have tried exclusively for this post. The other I use for my general literature. I will present a little bit of information on both sites, as well as the positive and negative aspects of each, to allow you to make a decision on which site to try.

Library Thing

LibraryThing is a big thing with the litgeek types, and rightfully so: it provides an extensive database of books, ease of input, active community involvement and a pretty straight-forward, easy-to-use interface. It is here that I have cataloged my general library.

Once logged in to the site, the home page features items about your library, as well as a lot of community-oriented panels, like recent recommendations, site announcements, active forum topics, etc.:



The panel view for your own library is where the action takes place (browsing, updating, sorting and generally petting your collections):



Pages for individual books show tons of information, include links to reviews on LibraryThing, links to book discussions, and average ratings:


Some Good Points

• Uploading books is easy, as you can enter books by author, title, or ISBN. The site mainly uses Amazon and the Library of Congress as its major databases to pull covers and publication information based on what you enter; it is rarely stumped.
  
• The site is popular, and active, which makes it interesting to use for those who enjoy a social-aspect to their websites. To that end, you can browse other people's libraries, compare libraries, engage in discussions about individual books, and even leave comments on other people's book pages.
  
• The site uses tagging, which makes browsing across genres, books and users incredibly easy.
  

Some Not So Good Points

• Only the first 100 books are free to add to your library. After that you can pay a yearly fee or a single lifetime fee. The rates aren't that bad... it's sliding scale, honor system, and yearly fees start at $6.00, lifetime fees at $19.00. The rates are so modest I hesitate to call this a "bad" point, but my inner-frugality insists that I make mention of this point.
  
• You can only upload books to LibraryThing, which means that if you want to catalog DVDs, Videos, CDs or anything else, you are out of luck.
  

GuruLib

I have been trying out GuruLib as a catalog tool for my genealogical collections, and am so far decently happy with the results. Entering books via ISBN makes additions snap-simple and the database seems to be fairly extensive, on par with LibraryThing.

The main page of the site defaults to your profile page when you are logged in. This page has the typical coverview of your library contents:



This screenshot makes clear where GuruLib really shines: you can catalog more than just books, and can include multimedia, and even documents! This could be a huge boon to genealogists whose collections include CDROMs and various software (I cataloged my CDROMs under software, for simplicity sake); the upload of documents could be very handy for printouts, research guides, etc.

Individual book pages are pretty sparse, without alot of the information seen on LibraryThing:



Some Good Points

• As mentioned above, GuruLib lets you catalog more than just books; software, music, movies and games are also part of your potential catalog.
  
• You can also upload documents like PDF, DOC, PS, PPT or XLS files, up to a 5MB per file limit. (It's not clear what the overall limit is).
  
• GuruLib is free free free to use.
  

Some Not So Good Points

• The GuruLib interface is.... lacking, and the design leaves alot to be desird.
  
• The navigation is confusing at times, and it can be difficult to figure out how to get to what you want.
  
• The site doesn't have the social function of a site like LibraryThing (note the book detail page, which does not have links to other users who have the same or similar catalogs). This could be a drawback for individuals looking to see what people with similar research interests have in their libraries, and also eradicates the possibility of finding new titles of interest.
  
• The site lacks tagging outside of some automatically generated genre tags.
  
• It would be great if the various categories were expanded, and if the document-upload feature were more prominently displayed.
  

A Choice

Overall, both sites perform the same function. If you are interested in cataloging your books for the sake of having an offsite record of what is in your library, then either may be right for you. In fact, while LibraryThing presents a host of social and organizational tools, the stripped down interface and lack of clutter on GuruLib may be just right for a no-nonsense cataloging project. If you want to interact with your collection and with others, though, then LibraryThing would be the site for you. In the end, both are fun to use, and cataloging can become strangely addictive. The thrill of watching your library go digital can be enjoyable in and of itself, making what could be a chore a fun hours-long project.