The Internet Archive has launched a new open-access web resource for scholars, students and the general public. Called Internet Archive Scholar (scholar.archive.org), it drives search over “25 million research articles and scholarly documents” including digitized copies of journals back to the eighteenth century – in addition to the massive archive of public web content archived in the Wayback Machine.
A piece in VICE last year detailed how open-access journals and research papers have been vanishing from the internet, and many more are at risk. Digital technology has brought a massive increase in information, but also introduced new fragilities: things can disappear if an institution changes servers or stops paying for hosting. Part of what powers Internet Archive Scholar is Fatcat, a Wikipedia-like catalog meant to index the scholarly web.
In contrast to digital resources for research like JSTOR, you don’t need any kind of login to use Internet Archive Scholar. This also means the results, depending on what you’re looking for, won’t be as comprehensive or will be more idiosyncratic, due to the totally different type of copyright access Internet Archive Scholar has. A sample search I tried for Herman Melville, for example, brought up only 14 hits.
But, a search for “uptown chicago” (which I recently researched for a project) brought up 1,749 hits, with all kinds of interesting stuff I wouldn’t otherwise have turned up including a report on a public health center from the 1970’s (link) and digital microfilm access to “Health Rights News” from the same era.
This is definitely a research tool to watch, and keep in mind as a way to access a massive public electronic archive that might be better for accessing ephemera than others – or even just more surprising and unpredictable in its results.
