25,000 Historical Book Titles Now Free Online

The following was written by FamilySearch:

FamilySearch Digital Preservation Initiative Hits a Milestone

Salt Lake City, Utah—FamilySearch International reached a milestone today with the digitization of its 25,000th publication online. It began the initiative in 2007 and is ramping up to do even more—and faster. The effort targets published family, society, county, and town histories, as well as numerous other historical publications that are digitally preserved and made accessible for free online. The digital publications can be searched at www.FamilySearch.org (Go to FamilySearch.org, then click Search Records, then click Historical Books).

The 25,000th digitized publication was A History of Lewis County, in the State of New York, from the Beginning of Its Settlement to the Present Time by Franklin B. Hough. The book was published in 1860. The lengths of titles digitized to date vary in length, but the average is about 350 pages. There are even publications in Spanish, German, French, and Russian.

FamilySearch has nearly a million publications in its famous Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, and there are millions of similar publications elsewhere in the United States. “The problem with the collection [of out-of-print titles] is limited access,” said Ransom Love, FamilySearch senior vice president of Strategic Relations. “To view the publications, patrons have to travel to Salt Lake City or one of FamilySearch’s affiliate libraries. If you are lucky, you might be able to order a microfilm copy, but then you have to wait for it to arrive at your local family history center. And there’s the inconvenience of having to read it on a film reader,” added Love.

FamilySearch aims to change all of that. Working with volunteers and select affiliate libraries, it plans to create the largest digital collection of published histories on the Web. It is targeting a wide range of historical publications—for example, users might be pleasantly surprised to find digital copies of Hawaii Sugar Planters Association Filipino Laborer files (1909-1949), medieval family history resource titles, and oral history abstracts (mostly from Hawaii), and numerous gazetteers.

“These are publications that were usually limited in the number originally printed and therefore only accessible in a few libraries or special collections worldwide. Yet there can be some great information of genealogical significance in the publications that only a few people would have access to prior to now,” said Love.

Through its Records Access Program, FamilySearch is digitally preserving a copy of the publications and making them available online for the masses. Once digitized, the collections have "every word" search capability, which allows users to search by name, location, date, or other fields across the collection. The search results are then linked to high quality digital images of the original publication.

FamilySearch is not stopping with its own collection either. Over the past year, it announced that it is also helping to digitize and publish collections from the Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University—Hawaii Joseph F. Smith Library, Allen County Public Library (ACPL) in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Houston Public Library, in Houston, Texas, and Mid-Continent Public Library Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, Missouri. When all is said and done, there will be over a million publications in the digital collection online. It will be the largest free resource of its kind.

Comments

[Paul Kelly]

Dick,

With respect to A History of Lewis County, in the State of New York, I have ancestors from that county, namley the Bichet family of France. I have found good information from several of Hough's works, (including this one) since he had published a lot of information on many counties in New York State.

On another note, in searching on this web site, I found an interesting book relating to another surname in my tree, namely the Huber family of Switzerland (http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/FH33&CISOPTR=851&REC=2). I did not find a direct link to my Huber family, but I am hopeful that I will find one some day.
I downloaded .pdf copies of this and other works for future reference.

Thanks so much for letting us know about this!

Paul

[Ben Franklin]

I thought after it surpassed Heritage Quest's 22K books, that it was ALREADY the largest collection of its kind - that would defining "its kind" as an online collection of full-text genealogy books.

So two questions: Is there a larger collection that I have overlooked? Do we have to add the word "free" to the qualifications?

Good article, by the way, but the collection began long before 2007. I've been tracking its size since Mar 2005 when they already had 1000 books. You are correct (as usual) that in Nov 2007 the collection started to grow quite rapidly - about 1000-1500 books per month.

Thx,

Ben

[Dae Powell]

C'mon guys. I'm reminded about looking gift horses in the mouth. I'm just grateful for the access to these historical works. Keep it up FamilySearch! And bless you for your efforts.

Happy Dae.
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Barbara Snow]

I am thrilled with the site and quantity of books posted. As always, we can be nothing but grateful for the resources made available by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

I am having trouble understanding how the index works though. Sometimes I get hits that don't contain the information searched; is it looking for near spellings? The scope of and relationship between the surname and keyword boxes eludes me. If you are ever so inclined, I would appreciate a post that describes the search options. I've read the explanation on the site, but I still can't get a clear picture of how it works.

[Janet Hall]

I use Mozilla Firefox as my default browser and rarely have a problem accessing content on websites, including fammilysearch.com. However, when I go to look at Historical Books, I can only get the table of contents and the first page. No amount of clicking can get me past that first page. After a bit of fuming, I realized the problem was probably with the browser, which turned out to be the case. So for those of you who prefer Firefox, just be aware that you need to switch to Internet Explorer for Historical Books, at least for the near future.

Janet

[Jeff]

Janet,

The Historical Books website seems to be working fine for me in Firefox. Have you updated to the newest version?