This fall, the Weinberg Memorial Library is one of 14 institutions participating in a mass digitization pilot project. The program is headed by PALINET, a network of more than 600 libraries, archives, and museums in the mid-Atlantic region, with a goal of making electronic copies of interesting books available to the public via the internet.
So far, we’ve had six local history books digitized by Internet Archive. All six were written before 1923, which means means that they’re in the public domain – so we can post them on the internet without violating anyone’s intellectual property rights. What’s fantastic about the digitized books is that:
- they’re now accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime (while the physical books are only available to people who visit the WML Special Collections library in person, during limited hours), and
- they’re full-text searchable!
Check out our books on the Internet Archive website here. You can browse through the books using the “flip book” viewer, and you can also download PDF copies of each book. If your family is from the area, be sure to use the full text search box in the flip book viewer to search for your last name – the books are great resources for genealogists. Or just look at the great pictures, like this 1882 line drawing of the proposed design for the Lackawanna County Courthouse from “Memorial of the Erection of Lackawanna County” (if it looks a bit different from what you see on the Square today, it is!) —
I wish the courthouse actually looked like the proposed plans.
It would be the scariest spot in Pennsylvania during Haloween – I see no difference between these plans and a mansion located at the top of a steep mountain, accessible only by a single windy dirt path, located in Transylvania (lightning in the background optional).