Whilst trying to write biographies on WikiTree, a free online platform for building family trees, I found myself constantly bemoaning the lack of accurate birth, marriage and death dates -- a problem that could be solved very easily if only I could find a solid and reliable source for biographical information online.
Let's face it: Wikipedia can be weak -- very weak sometimes. Citing Wikipedia does not inspire confidence in one's audience. Every student in high school these days is scolded repeatedly for using Wikipedia as a source.
Most teachers insist on real library research, and they want to see solid sources. Translation: books. Go get books!
But of course that would require getting out of one's comfy chair. Wouldn't want to do that.
Where to find reference books and solid sources online? Archive.org of course. There are tons of books there, all of them scanned from real-live books in real-live libraries and free to view or download or share. In many ways, they are more searchable than the dead-tree books at libraries themselves.
Searching digitally saves wear-and-tear on precious old volumes.
Best of all, the books at Archive.org are link-able. When you are citing your source on a website like WikiTree, Archive.org allows you to hyperlink to the page of the book itself.
It's a fantastic tool for throwing books at people. You can quite literally put the entire book itself into a reader's hands with a simple click. When it comes to biography and family history, that's what people want: To see your source for themselves. If they can hit a link, and jump right into an old-fashioned biography that seemingly confirms the information that you have given in your own writing, they are satisfied.
They shouldn't be of course. Because (sorry to shock the high school teachers of America by saying this) even the book writers and editors at Oxford University Press can err.
Ironically, there are so many e-book writers publishing online today that the "book" format itself provides no guarantee whatever of factual accuracy or rhetorical lucidity. Nor did killing trees in the 20th century guarantee that your source was a Boy Scout. People have been known to lie on paper before, and to blot their copy books.
What one really wants is an honest writer, or a company of writers known to be reliable. For biography, history or family history, one wants lucid, careful, well-trained writers who make a very serious effort at fact checking.
Toward this end, the writers of the 19th Century certainly seem a little more reliable: They certainly had press clippings from the past that are long lost, and insofar as they are much closer in time to some of the subjects of their biographical efforts, there is a presumption that they see their subjects all the more clearly.
Indeed if one's reader wants an authoritative source from the 18th, 19th or 20th Century, they will most likely be satisfied with the books at Archive.org. They will also be happy with the option to download.
By right-clicking on a page, readers of the reference books at Archive.org may download any page they want. One may "save image as" to store the page on one's hard drive or any other memory device of choice. Archive.org also offers the option to download entire books in several different e-book formats.
To solve my own source-hunting problems, then, I knew I wanted to go to Archive.org.
What I wanted, I concluded, were concise and downloadable biographies from Archive.org that could be used as links for the "sources" section of my own writing, the short biographical sketches I was writing as life-summaries for each individual on the family trees at Wikitree. I wanted old-school encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries that could provide short and sweet one-page profiles.
"There must," I reasoned, "be some very good and reliable biographical dictionaries buried beneath that big, messy heap of digital books that calls itself Archive.org."
Sure enough, after fishing around on Archive.org, I discovered a wonderful resource -- a truly fantastic resource -- for free: The Dictionary of National Biography, first published between 1885 and 1901 in 66 volumes, then republished in 1908, published again in 1921 by MacMillan, and published again in 2004.
The DNB is a reliable, rock-solid source that covers more than 1500 years of world history, and some poor devil (God bless their worn out hands) took the trouble to scan every single page in more than 66 huge volumes. What a prodigious feat!
The older editions looked especially yummy, because they are free and downloadable and "public domain" under the copyright laws of the United States. No worries about republishing on a platform like Wikitree -- no one will whinge or come after you with a stick, especially if you cite your source and link to the book itself.
These biographies were composed slowly and carefully by professional teams of scholars back when people did not type with their thumbs and knew how to think. The 66 volumes contained in the 1898 edition of the DNB collection represent the life's work of more than 1,000 people, and the well-written gems contained between the DNB covers are truly a national treasure.
Some of the best scholars at Oxford put the best years of their lives into this collection.
But as with all things 21st Century (digitize and forget, scan and forget), the results are a mess. F.U.B.A.R. The problem with Archive.org is that its search engine offers so much material that the user is immediately confronted with "overchoice" -- too many options on the menu at once, and a menu that is genuinely confused by poor sorting and filtering options.
There is almost no way to sort the 66 volumes of the 1898 DNB into perfect A-Z order. The filters tabs at Archive.org simply refuse to do that. All that work scanning, and then they dumped it into an unsorted and unsortable heap. Amazing!
This blog is an attempt to correct that nonsense. It's meant to be a simple links blog that puts the 66+ volumes of the free (and copyright-free) 1898 Dictionary of National Biography at Archive.org back into A-Z order. An effort will be made to separate and sort the 1909 and 1921-22 editions as well.
Ultimately, the goal is to make the free online copies of DNB usable and browseable -- perhaps for the very first time. You'll see the results parked in the links list at the right: A list of links that will take you directly to any particular A-Z volume that you want to browse.
It is the kind of "Favorites List" tool that I certainly intend to use often myself, and since it takes a good deal of effort to build such a links list, why not share it?
For your convenience, I would suggest that you can make this blog portable simply by saving this blog link to your Favorites. Then it will provide you a simple and free sorting tool, whenever you want to use the DNB at Archive.org.
If the coffee is strong enough, then I will construct the links lists with few errors: the links should take you strait to the title page of the volumes you want. When possible, I will also add links to index volumes, to help speed your efforts to find names.
To their full credit, I would point out that the folks at Archive.org have done something incredibly right: Their search engine, in the upper right-hand corner of the Archive.org website, now has a capability to search within the text of every book they've scanned.
Hover over their search engine, watch for the drop-down menu options offered, and choose the radio button that allows you to search within the text.
That may speed you right to the DNB biography you want, without using filters or this links blog at all. Plus it may bring up several related volumes as well. But (I cannot emphasize this enough) even the best results generated by the search engine at Archive.org can be messy and confusing at times.
If what you want is simply to browse the old-fashioned way, browsing A to Z, and page-to-page, choosing for yourself whether you want to browse the volumes of the 1898, 1908 or 1921 editions, then I am certain this blog will be of service.
It makes finding the volume you want, if not the subject you want, much more simple. It also makes the Index volumes much more easy to find.
Enjoy, and as always, happy hunting.
Let's face it: Wikipedia can be weak -- very weak sometimes. Citing Wikipedia does not inspire confidence in one's audience. Every student in high school these days is scolded repeatedly for using Wikipedia as a source.
Most teachers insist on real library research, and they want to see solid sources. Translation: books. Go get books!
But of course that would require getting out of one's comfy chair. Wouldn't want to do that.
Where to find reference books and solid sources online? Archive.org of course. There are tons of books there, all of them scanned from real-live books in real-live libraries and free to view or download or share. In many ways, they are more searchable than the dead-tree books at libraries themselves.
Searching digitally saves wear-and-tear on precious old volumes.
Best of all, the books at Archive.org are link-able. When you are citing your source on a website like WikiTree, Archive.org allows you to hyperlink to the page of the book itself.
It's a fantastic tool for throwing books at people. You can quite literally put the entire book itself into a reader's hands with a simple click. When it comes to biography and family history, that's what people want: To see your source for themselves. If they can hit a link, and jump right into an old-fashioned biography that seemingly confirms the information that you have given in your own writing, they are satisfied.
They shouldn't be of course. Because (sorry to shock the high school teachers of America by saying this) even the book writers and editors at Oxford University Press can err.
Ironically, there are so many e-book writers publishing online today that the "book" format itself provides no guarantee whatever of factual accuracy or rhetorical lucidity. Nor did killing trees in the 20th century guarantee that your source was a Boy Scout. People have been known to lie on paper before, and to blot their copy books.
What one really wants is an honest writer, or a company of writers known to be reliable. For biography, history or family history, one wants lucid, careful, well-trained writers who make a very serious effort at fact checking.
Toward this end, the writers of the 19th Century certainly seem a little more reliable: They certainly had press clippings from the past that are long lost, and insofar as they are much closer in time to some of the subjects of their biographical efforts, there is a presumption that they see their subjects all the more clearly.
Indeed if one's reader wants an authoritative source from the 18th, 19th or 20th Century, they will most likely be satisfied with the books at Archive.org. They will also be happy with the option to download.
By right-clicking on a page, readers of the reference books at Archive.org may download any page they want. One may "save image as" to store the page on one's hard drive or any other memory device of choice. Archive.org also offers the option to download entire books in several different e-book formats.
To solve my own source-hunting problems, then, I knew I wanted to go to Archive.org.
What I wanted, I concluded, were concise and downloadable biographies from Archive.org that could be used as links for the "sources" section of my own writing, the short biographical sketches I was writing as life-summaries for each individual on the family trees at Wikitree. I wanted old-school encyclopedias or biographical dictionaries that could provide short and sweet one-page profiles.
"There must," I reasoned, "be some very good and reliable biographical dictionaries buried beneath that big, messy heap of digital books that calls itself Archive.org."
Sure enough, after fishing around on Archive.org, I discovered a wonderful resource -- a truly fantastic resource -- for free: The Dictionary of National Biography, first published between 1885 and 1901 in 66 volumes, then republished in 1908, published again in 1921 by MacMillan, and published again in 2004.
The DNB is a reliable, rock-solid source that covers more than 1500 years of world history, and some poor devil (God bless their worn out hands) took the trouble to scan every single page in more than 66 huge volumes. What a prodigious feat!
The older editions looked especially yummy, because they are free and downloadable and "public domain" under the copyright laws of the United States. No worries about republishing on a platform like Wikitree -- no one will whinge or come after you with a stick, especially if you cite your source and link to the book itself.
These biographies were composed slowly and carefully by professional teams of scholars back when people did not type with their thumbs and knew how to think. The 66 volumes contained in the 1898 edition of the DNB collection represent the life's work of more than 1,000 people, and the well-written gems contained between the DNB covers are truly a national treasure.
Some of the best scholars at Oxford put the best years of their lives into this collection.
But as with all things 21st Century (digitize and forget, scan and forget), the results are a mess. F.U.B.A.R. The problem with Archive.org is that its search engine offers so much material that the user is immediately confronted with "overchoice" -- too many options on the menu at once, and a menu that is genuinely confused by poor sorting and filtering options.
There is almost no way to sort the 66 volumes of the 1898 DNB into perfect A-Z order. The filters tabs at Archive.org simply refuse to do that. All that work scanning, and then they dumped it into an unsorted and unsortable heap. Amazing!
This blog is an attempt to correct that nonsense. It's meant to be a simple links blog that puts the 66+ volumes of the free (and copyright-free) 1898 Dictionary of National Biography at Archive.org back into A-Z order. An effort will be made to separate and sort the 1909 and 1921-22 editions as well.
Ultimately, the goal is to make the free online copies of DNB usable and browseable -- perhaps for the very first time. You'll see the results parked in the links list at the right: A list of links that will take you directly to any particular A-Z volume that you want to browse.
It is the kind of "Favorites List" tool that I certainly intend to use often myself, and since it takes a good deal of effort to build such a links list, why not share it?
For your convenience, I would suggest that you can make this blog portable simply by saving this blog link to your Favorites. Then it will provide you a simple and free sorting tool, whenever you want to use the DNB at Archive.org.
If the coffee is strong enough, then I will construct the links lists with few errors: the links should take you strait to the title page of the volumes you want. When possible, I will also add links to index volumes, to help speed your efforts to find names.
To their full credit, I would point out that the folks at Archive.org have done something incredibly right: Their search engine, in the upper right-hand corner of the Archive.org website, now has a capability to search within the text of every book they've scanned.
Hover over their search engine, watch for the drop-down menu options offered, and choose the radio button that allows you to search within the text.
That may speed you right to the DNB biography you want, without using filters or this links blog at all. Plus it may bring up several related volumes as well. But (I cannot emphasize this enough) even the best results generated by the search engine at Archive.org can be messy and confusing at times.
If what you want is simply to browse the old-fashioned way, browsing A to Z, and page-to-page, choosing for yourself whether you want to browse the volumes of the 1898, 1908 or 1921 editions, then I am certain this blog will be of service.
It makes finding the volume you want, if not the subject you want, much more simple. It also makes the Index volumes much more easy to find.
Enjoy, and as always, happy hunting.
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