


A Gallery of Fantastical Alchemical Drawings

I once had to tell a ten-year-old that the Harry Potter book series was not a historical literary classic but a recent publishing phenomenon that occurred in my lifetime. She was amazed, but she wasn’t silly for thinking that the books might date from a faraway past. They do, after all, make frequent reference to figures from centuries when alchemy flourished in Europe, and magicians like Paracelsus and Nicholas Flamel (both of whom appear in Potter books and spin-offs) plied their solitary craft, such as it was. Should we call it magic, early science, occult religion, outsider art, or some admixture of the above?

We can call it “black magic,” but the term was not, as the Christians thought, a reference to the devil, but to the soil of the Nile. “Derived from the Arabic root ‘kimia,’” writes the Public Domain Review, “from the Coptic ‘khem’ (referring to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta), the word ‘alchemy’ alludes to the dark mystery of the primordial or First Matter (the Khem).”


Finding this first substance constitutes “the alchemist’s central goal – along with the discovery of the Stone of Knowledge (The Philosopher’s Stone) and the key to Eternal Youth.”

In the description above, we can see the roots of Rowling’s fictions and the origins of many a world-shaping modern myth. Alchemists study and change matter to produce certain effects – just as early scientists did – and it may surprise us to learn just how fervently some well-known early scientists, most especially Isaac Newton, pursued the alchemical course. But the essence of alchemy was imagination, and the artists who depicted alchemical rituals, magical creatures, mystical symbols, etc. had no shortage of it, as we see in the images here, drawn from Wellcome Images and the Manley Palmer Hall collection at the Internet Archive.

The images are strange, surreal, cryptic, and seem to reference no known reality. They are the inspiration for centuries of occult art and esoteric literature. But each one also had practical intent — to illustrate mysterious, often secretive processes for discovering the foundations of the universe, and profiting from them. If these techniques look nothing like our modern methods for doing the same, that’s for good reason, but it doesn’t mean that alchemy has nothing to do with science. It is, rather, science’s weird distant ancestor. See more alchemical images at the Public Domain Review.

via Public Domain Review

Related Content:

How the Brilliant Colors of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made with Alchemy

Videos Recreate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alchemy Experiments: Watch Silver Get Turned Into Gold

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Mythical ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Digitized & Put Online (Along with His Other Alchemy Manuscripts)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Browse a Huge Collection of Prison Newspapers: 1800-2020

“By the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the gloomy festival of punishment was dying out… Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process.” — Michel Foucault

The study of crime in the late 1800s began with racist pseudoscience like craniometry and phrenology, both of which have made a disturbing comeback in recent years. In his 1876 book, Criminal Man, the “father of criminology,” Cesare Lombrosco, defined “the criminal” as “an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior of animals.” Lombrosco believed that certain cranial and facial features correspond to a “love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood.” That such descriptions preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula by several years may be no coincidence at all.

No such thing as a natural criminal type exists, but this has not stopped 19th century prejudices from embedding themselves in law enforcement, the prison system and the culture at large in the United States. Outside of the most sensationalist cases, however, we rarely hear from incarcerated people themselves, though they’ve had plenty say about their humanity in print since the turn of the 19th century, when the first prison newspaper, Forlorn Hope, was published in New York City on March 24, 1800.


“In the intervening 200 years,” notes JSTOR, “over 500 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons.” A new collection, American Prison Newspapers: 1800-2020 – Voices from the Inside, “will bring together hundreds of these periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women-only institutions.”

The U.S. incarcerates “over 2 million as of 2019” — and has produced some of the world’s most moving jail and prison literature, from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” The newspapers in this collection do not often feature a similar level of literary bravura, but many show a high degree of professionalism and artistic quality. “Next to the faded, home-spun pages of The Hour Glass, published at the Farm for Women in Connecticut in the 1930s,” writes JSTOR Daily’s Kate McQueen, “readers will find polished staples of the 1970s like newspaper The Kentucky Inter-Prison Press and Arizona State Prison’s magazine La Roca.”

Many, if not most, of these publications were published with official sanction, and these “cover similar ground. They report on prison programing, profile locals of interest, and offer commentary on topics like parole and education” under the watchful gaze of the warden, whose photograph might appear on the masthead. “Incarcerated journalists walk a tightrope between oversight by administrations — even censorship — and seeking to report accurately on their experiences inside,” the collection points out. Prison newspapers gave inmates opportunities to share creative work and hone newly acquired literacy, literary, and legal skills. Those periodicals that circulated underground without the authorities’ permission had no need to equivocate about their politics. Washington State Penitentiary’s Anarchist Black Dragon, for example, took a fiercely radical stance on every page. Nowhere on the masthead will one find the names of correctional officers, or even a list of editors and contributors, or even a masthead.

Whether official, unofficial, or occupying a grey area, prison periodicals all hoped in some degree to “poke holes in the wall,” as Tom Runyon, editor of Iowa State Penitentiary’s Presidio wrote — reaching audiences outside the prison to refute criminological thinking. Arizona State Prison’s The Desert Press, led its January 1934 issue with the pressing headline “Are Convicts People?” (likely after Alice Duer Miller’s satirical 1904 “book of rhymes for suffrage times,” Are Women People?)  Lawrence Snow, editor of Kentucky State Penitentiary’s Castle on the Cumberland, picked up the question with more formality in a 1964 column, asking, “How shall [a prison publication] go about its principal job of convincing the casual reader that convicts, although they have divorced themselves temporarily from society, still belong to the human race?” Given that the United States imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, the question seems more pertinent — urgent even — than ever before. Enter the American Prison Newspapers collection here.

via Kottke

Related Content: 

On the Power of Teaching Philosophy in Prisons

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Patti Smith Reads from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the Love Letter He Wrote From Prison (1897)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Harvard’s Digital Giza Project Lets You Access the Largest Online Archive on the Egyptian Pyramids (Including a 3D Giza Tour)

Nothing excites the imagination of young history-and-science-minded kids like the Egyptian pyramids, which is maybe why so many people grow up into amateur Egyptologists with very strong opinions about the pyramids. For such people, access to the highest quality information seems critical for their online debates. For professional academics and serious students of ancient Egypt such access is critical to doing their work properly. All lovers and students of ancient Egypt will find what they need, freely available, at Harvard University’s Digital Giza Project.

“Children and specialized scholars alike may study the material culture of this ancient civilization from afar,” Harvard’s Metalab writes, “often with greater access than could be achieved in person.” The project opened at Harvard in 2011 after spending its first eleven years at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston with the goal of “digitizing and posting for free online all of the archaeological documentation from the Harvard University—Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition to Giza, Egypt (about 1904–1947),” notes the about page.


The Digital Giza Project was born from a need to centralize research and artifacts that have been scattered all over the globe. “Documents and images are held in faraway archives,” the Harvard Gazette points out, “artifacts and other relics of ancient Egypt have been dispersed, stolen, or destroyed, and tombs and monuments have been dismantled, weather-worn, or locked away behind passages filled in when an excavation closes.” Other obstacles to research include the expense of travel and, more recently, the impossibility of visiting far-off sites.

Expanding far beyond the scope of the original expeditions, the project has partnered with “many other institutions around the world with Giza-related collections” to compile its searchable library of downloadable PDF books and journal articles. Kids, adult enthusiasts, and specialists will all appreciate Giza 3D, a reconstruction with guided tours of all the major archeological sites at the pyramids, from tombs to temples to the Great Sphinx, as well as links to images and archeological details about each of the various finds within.

For a preview of the multimedia experience on offer at the Digital Giza Project, see the videos here from project’s YouTube channel. Each short video provides a wealth of information; young learners and those just getting started in their Egyptology studies can find lessons, glossaries, an overview of the people and places of Giza, and more at the Giza @ School page. Whatever your age, occupation, or level of commitment, if you’re interested in learning more about the pyramids at Giza, you need to bookmark Digital Giza. Start here.

Related Content: 

Who Built the Egyptian Pyramids & How Did They Do It?: New Archeological Evidence Busts Ancient Myths

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

Does turning the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 million pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Internet Archive, using Scribe, a specialized scanning machine invented by Archive engineers over 15 years ago. “Listening to 70s and 80s R&B while she works,” Wendy Hanamura writes at the Internet Archive blog, “Eliza spends a little time each day reading the dozens of books she handles. The most challenging part of her job? ‘Working with very old, fragile books.”

The fragile state and wide variety of the millions of books scanned by Zhang and the seventy-or-so other Scribe operators explains why this work has not been automated. “Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages,” says Andrea Mills, one of the leaders of the digitization team. “Our goal is to handle the book once and to care for the original as we work with it.”

Raising the glass with a foot pedal, adjusting the two cameras, and shooting the page images are just the beginning of Eliza’s work. Some books, like the Bureau of Land Management publication featured in the video, have myriad fold-outs. Eliza must insert a slip of paper to remind her to go back and shoot each fold-out page, while at the same time inputting the page numbers into the item record. The job requires keen concentration.

If this experienced digitizer accidentally skips a page, or if an image is blurry, the publishing software created by our engineers will send her a message to return to the Scribe and scan it again.

It’s not a job for the easily bored; “It takes concentration and a love of books,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. The painstaking process allows digitizers to preserve valuable books online while maintaining the integrity of physical copies. “We do not disbind the books,” says Kahle, a method that has allowed them to partner with hundreds of institutions around the world, digitizing 28 million texts over two decades. Many of those books are rare and valuable, and many have been deemed of little or no value. “Increasingly,” writes the Archive’s Chris Freeland, “the Archive is preserving many books that would otherwise be lost to history or the trash bin.”

In one example, Freeland cites The dictionary of costume, “one of the millions of titles that reached the end of its publishing lifecycle in the 20th century.” It is also a work cited in Wikipedia, a key source for “students of all ages… in our connected world.” The Internet Archive has preserved the only copy of the book available online, making sure Wikipedia editors can verify the citation and researchers can use the book in perpetuity. If looking up the definition of “petticoat” in an out-of-print reference work seems trivial, consider that the Archive digitizes about 3,500 books every day in its 18 digitization centers. (The dictionary of costume was identified as the Archive’s 2 millionth “modern book.”)

Libraries “have been vital in times of crisis,” writes Alistair Black, emeritus professor of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, and “the coronavirus pandemic may prove to be a challenge that dwarfs the many episodes of anxiety and crisis through which the public library has lived in the past.” A huge part of our combined global crises involves access to reliable information, and book scanners at the Internet Archive are key agents in preserving knowledge. The collections they digitize “are critical to educating an informed populace at a time of massive disinformation and misinformation,” says Kahle. When asked what she liked best about her job, Zhang replied, “Everything! I find everything interesting…. Every collection is important to me.”

The Internet Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. Enter the collection here.

Related Content: 

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Classic Children’s Books Now Digitized and Put Online: Revisit Vintage Works from the 19th & 20th Centuries

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

The phrase “opening of Japan” is a euphemism that has outlived its purpose, serving to cloud rather than explain how a country closed to outsiders suddenly, in the mid-19th century, became a major influence in art and design worldwide. Negotiations were carried out at gunpoint. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry presented the Japanese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to surrender. (The Japanese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innumerable historical ironies, we have this ugliness to thank for the explosion of Impressionist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japanese prints and owned a large collection) as well as much of the beauty of Art Nouveau and modernist architecture at the turn of the century.

We may know versions of this already, but we probably don’t know it from a Japanese point of view. “As our global society grows ever more connected,” writes Katie Barrett at the Internet Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human history is just one click away. Yet language barriers and physical access still present major obstacles to deeper knowledge and understanding of other cultures.”


Unless we can read Japanese, our understanding of its history will always be informed by specialist scholars and translators. Now, at least, thanks to cooperation between the University of Tokyo General Library and the Internet Archive, we can access thousands more primary sources previously unavailable to “outsiders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Barrett, “our Collections team has worked in tandem with library staff to ingest thousands of digital files from the General Library’s servers, mapping the metadata for over 4,000 priceless scrolls, texts, and papers.” This material has been digitized over decades by Japanese scholars and “showcases hundreds of years of rich Japanese history expressed through prose, poetry, and artwork.” It will be primarily the artwork that concerns non-Japanese speakers, as it primarily concerned 19th-century Europeans and Americans who first encountered the country’s cultural products. Artwork like the humorous print above. Barrett provides context: 

In one satirical illustration, thought to date from shortly after the 1855 Edo earthquake, courtesans and others from the demimonde, who suffered greatly in the disaster, are shown beating the giant catfish that was believed to cause earthquakes. The men in the upper left-hand corner represent the construction trades; they are trying to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuilding from earthquakes was a profitable business for them.

There are many such depictions of “seismic destruction” in ukiyo-e prints dating from the same period and the later Mino-Owari earthquake of 1891: “They are a sobering reminder of the role that natural disasters have played in Japanese life.” 

You can see many more digitized artifacts, such as the charming book of Japanese ephemera above, at the Internet Archive’s University of Tokyo collection. Among the 4180 items currently available, you’ll also find many European prints and engravings held in the library’s 25 collections. All of this material “can be used freely without prior permission,” writes the University of Tokyo Library. “Among the highlights,” Barrett writes, “are manuscripts and annotated books from the personal collection of the novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an early manuscript of the Tale of Genji, [below] and a unique collection of Chinese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the collection here.

Related Content: 

Watch the Making of Japanese Woodblock Prints, from Start to Finish, by a Longtime Tokyo Printmaker

Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get Brought to Life with Artificial Intelligence

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

Download Vincent van Gogh’s Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create “the Art of the Future”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

A Digital Library for Bartenders: Vintage Cocktail Books with Recipes Dating Back to 1753

So, um… you look like you could use a drink… or another drink, or five…. I’ve given it up, but I can still mix a mean cocktail. How about a Stomach Julep (Julepum Stomachicum). No white suit or veranda required. It’s a “saffron syrup made with sherry, spirit rectified with mint, and a non-alcoholic mint distillate” among other “fascinating ingredients.” Yes, this is a recipe from a 1753 pharmacology textbook, but in 1753, one’s bartender might just as well also be the local alchemist, pharmacist, and captive audience. Fearing a resurgence of plague and other maladies, lacking proper healthcare or clean water, the Early Modern British fortified themselves with booze.

The New English Dispensatory might seem like an odd text, nonetheless, to include in an online library for bartenders, but it is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the EUVS Digital Collection, an appreciable sampling of manuals, cocktail menus, recipe books, and historical ephemera related to “a profession that has rediscovered a justifiable sense of pride and purpose.”


This sense does seem to vary greatly between establishments, but the collection does not discriminate, though it does display a particular fondness for Cuba in its current state of digitization—now up to a few dozen titles spanning the years 1753 to 1959. More books will be coming online soon out of a physical collection of “over 1,000 volumes.”

It may be hard to imagine earning a bartending Ph.D. but one could certainly find a dissertation topic in the impressive breadth and depth of the collection, even in its limited state. Or, more likely, one could put together a uniquely imaginative cocktail menu that no one else in town can boast of. Bartending is both art and science. In his 1892 book The Flowing Bowl, New York bartender William Schmidt, also known as “The Only William,” comments:

Mixed drinks might be compared to music: an orchestra will produce good music, provided all players are artists; but have only one or two inferior musicians in your band and you may be convinced they will spoil the entire harmony.

To the bartender’s list of supplementary roles in the lives of their customers, we can add another: conductor. William first came to prominence in the profession in Hamburg, Germany before emigrating to Chicago, then Manhattan. His tastes, in music and liquors, remained European. “The finest mixed drinks and their ingredients are of foreign origin. Are not all of the superior cordials of foreign make?” he wrote. Clearly he knew nothing of bourbon.

The Only William did know that fine art requires showmanship and style. He was “renowned for his acrobatic bartending feats: throwing flaming and non-flaming drinks in graceful arcs.” The EUVS Digital Collection presents William as a kind of bartending folk hero, a larger-than-life figure who was said to have invented a new drink daily. If this is so, it may not be so surprising. William was not only totally devoted to his art, but he was also a scholar, “credited with an encyclopedic knowledge of the classics.”

The Flowing Bowl contains Schmidt’s “history of various beverages, descriptions of historic Greco-Roman banquets, sample menus with beverage pairings, plus a lively selection of poetry readings whose focus is on drink.” One gets the sense he represents the ideal patron of The Bartender’s Library. What would such a model bartender do during the pandemic? I think he’d hit the books, especially given that so many, like his own, are free online. And given the ever-present possibility of plague and other calamities, I guess he’d offer spirited remedies to the people locked down at home with him.

Note: One commenter on the Cocktail archive site left these comments, which might prove handy:

Here is a list of conversions, with Imperial measurements (from the U.K), as well as few British ones–as both are found in many classic cocktail books and can be mighty confusing.

1 quart (Imperial) = 40 ounces

1 quart = 32 ounces

1 bottle = 24 ounces

1 pint (Imperial) = 20 ounces

1 pint = 16 ounces

1/2 pint (Imperial) = 10 ounces

1/2 pint = 8 ounces

1 gill (Imperial) = 4.8 ounces

1 gill = 4 ounces

1 dram = 1/4 tablespoon (found in the British metric system or English recipes before approx. 1972)

1 wineglass = 2 ounces

1 jigger = 1 1/2 ounces – 1 1/4 ounces

1 pony = 1 (fluid) ounce = 2 tablespoons

1 tablespoon = 1/2 (fluid) ounces

1 teaspoon = 1/16 fluid ounces

A dash is a tricky one. When applied to bitters, a “dash” makes sense: it’s what comes out the top of the bottle. But if you find a recipe calling for “dashes of syrup,” check out similar drink recipes and use your judgment in how much you need.

Related Content: 

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A New Digitized Menu Collection Lets You Revisit the Cuisine from the “Golden Age of Railroad Dining”

The Recipes of Famous Artists: Dinners & Cocktails From Tolstoy, Miles Davis, Marilyn Monroe, David Lynch & Many More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe

What shall we read before bed?

Georgia O’Keeffe was a fan of cookbooks, telling her young assistant Margaret Wood that they were “enjoyable nighttime company, providing brief and pleasant reading.”

Among the culinary volumes in her Abiquiu, New Mexico ranch home were The Fanny Farmer Boston Cooking School CookbookThe Joy of CookingLet’s Eat Right to Keep Fit and Cook Right, Live Longer.

Also Pickups and Cheerups from the Waring Blender, a 21-page pamphlet featuring blended cocktails, that now rests in Yale University’s Beinecke Library, along with the rest of the contents of O’Keeffe’s recipe box, acquired the night before it was due to be auctioned at Sotheby’s. (Some of the images on this page come courtesy of Sotheby’s.)


In addition to recipes—inscribed by the artist’s own hand in ink from a fountain pen, typed by assistants, clipped from magazines and newspapers, or in promotional booklets such as the one published by the Waring Products Company—the box housed manuals for O’Keeffe’s kitchen appliances.

The booklet that came with her pressure cooker includes a spattered page devoted to cooking fresh veggies, a testament to her abiding interest in eating healthfully.

O’Keeffe had a high regard for salads, garden fresh herbs, and simple, locally sourced food.

Today’s buddha bowl craze is, however, “the opposite of what she would enjoy” according to Wood, author of the books Remembering Miss O’Keeffe: Stories from Abiquiu and A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Wood, who was some 66 years younger than her employer, recently visited The Sporkful podcast to recall her first days on the job :

…she said, “Do you like to cook?” 

And I said, “Yes, I certainly do.” 

So she said, “Well, let’s give it a try.” 

And after two days of my hippie health food, she said, “My dear, let me show you how I like my food.” My first way of trying to cook for us was a lot of brown rice and chopped vegetables with chicken added. And that was not what she liked. 

An example of what she did like: Roasted lemon chicken with fried potatoes, a green salad featuring lettuce and herbs from her garden, and steamed broccoli.

Also yogurt made with the milk of local goats, whole wheat flour ground on the premises, watercress plucked from local streams, and home canning.

Most of these labor-intensive tasks fell to her staff, but she maintained a keen interest in the proceedings.

Not for nothing did the friend who referred Wood for the job warn her it would “require a lot of patience because Miss O’Keeffe was extremely particular.”

The jottings from the recipe box don’t really convey this exacting nature.

Those accustomed to the extremely specific instructions accompanying even the simplest recipes to be found on the Internet may be shocked by O’Keeffe’s brevity.

 

Perhaps we should assume that she stationed herself close by the first time any new hire prepared a recipe from one of her cards, knowing she would have to verbally correct and redirect.

(O’Keeffe insisted that Wood stir according to her method—don’t scrape the sides, dig down and lift up.)

The box also contained recipes that were likely rarities on O’Keeffe’s table, given her dietary preferences, though they are certainly evocative of the period: tomato aspic, Maryland fried chickenFloating Islands, and a cocktail she may have first sipped in a Santa Fe hotel bar.

The Beinecke plans to digitize its newly acquired collection. This gives us hope that one day, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum may follow suit with the red recipe binder Wood mentions in A Painter’s Kitchen:

This was affectionately referred to as “Mary’s Book,” named after a previous staff member who had compiled it. That notebook was continually consulted, and revised to include new recipes or to improve on older ones…. As she had collected a number of healthy and flavorful recipes, she would occasionally laugh and comment, “We should write a cookbook.”

Related Content: 

Explore 1,100 Works of Art by Georgia O’Keeffe: They’re Now Digitized and Free to View Online

Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life in Art, a Short Documentary on the Painter Narrated by Gene Hackman

The Art & Cooking of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent Van Gogh & More

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Follow her @AyunHalliday.

The Internet Archive Will Digitize & Preserve Millions of Academic Articles with Its New Database, “Internet Archive Scholar”

Open access publishing has, indeed, made academic research more accessible, but in “the move from physical academic journals to digitally-accessible papers,” Samantha Cole writes at Vice, it has also become “more precarious to preserve…. If an institution stops paying for web hosting or changes servers, the research within could disappear.” At least a couple hundred open access journals vanished in this way between 2000 and 2019, a new study published on arxiv found. Another 900 journals are in danger of meeting the same fate.

The journals in peril include scholarship in the humanities and sciences, though many publications may only be of interest to historians, given the speed at which scientific research tends to move. In any case, “there shouldn’t really be any decay or loss in scientific publications, particularly those that have been open on the web,” says study co-author Mikael Laasko, information scientist at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. Yet, in digital publishing, there are no printed copies in university libraries, catalogued and maintained by librarians.


To fill the need, the Internet Archive has created its own scholarly search platform, a “fulltext search index” that includes “over 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents” preserved on its servers. These collections span digitized and original digital articles published from the 18th century to “the latest Open Access conference proceedings and pre-prints crawled from the World Wide Web.” Content in this search index comes in one of three forms:

  • public web content in the Wayback Machine web archives (web.archive.org), either identified from historic collecting, crawled specifically to ensure long-term access to scholarly materials, or crawled at the direction of Archive-It partners
  • digitized print material from paper and microform collections purchased and scanned by Internet Archive or its partners
  • general materials on the archive.org collections, including content from partner organizations, uploads from the general public, and mirrors of other projects

The project is still in “alpha” and “has several bugs,” the site cautions, but it could, when it’s fully up and running, become part of a much-needed revolution in academic research—that is if the major academic publishers don’t find some legal pretext to shut it down.

Academic publishing boasts one of the most rapacious legal business models on the global market, and one of the most exploitative: a double standard in which scholars freely publish and review research for the public benefit (ostensibly) and very often on the public dime; while private intermediaries rake in astronomical sums for themselves with paywalls. The open access model has changed things, but the only way to truly serve the “best interests of researchers and the public,” neuroscientist Shaun Khoo argues, is through public infrastructure and fully non-profit publication.

Maybe Internet Archive Scholar can go some way toward bridging the gap, as a publicly accessible, non-profit search engine, digital catalogue, and library for research that is worth preserving, reading, and building upon even if it doesn’t generate shareholder revenue. For a deeper dive into how the Archive built its formidable, still developing, new database, see the video presentation above from Jefferson Bailey, Director of Web Archiving & Data Services. And have a look at Internet Archive Scholar here. It currently lacks advanced search functions, but plug in any search term and prepare to be amazed by the incredible volume of archived full text articles you turn up.

Related Content:

The Internet Archive Makes 2,500 More Classic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adventure, and Others

Libraries & Archivists Are Digitizing 480,000 Books Published in 20th Century That Are Secretly in the Public Domain

The Boston Public Library Will Digitize & Put Online 200,000+ Vintage Records

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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