Free Online Archive

[Jerseyman]

The following information may not be news to many members, but I recently discovered this online archive and have found it very useful.

https://archive.org/

I did a site search and can see that JeffS posted about the site in 2019 specifically to bring attention to the Wayback Machine for finding old material no longer online. But it is worth noting that there is also a great deal more to the site.

It has the most extraordinary breadth of material available. There are a lot of 19C and early 20C works on arms and armour. It also has many ethnographic monographs and anthropological material that may benefit the serious researcher.

I joined hoping to find a copy of Cato's 'Moro Swords' which unfortunately has not yet been digitised by anyone (I did however find that in the Wallace Collection Library if anyone makes it down to London and is interested), but I have found other very interesting publications.

The process is to set up a free account which was simple, at which point you have access to everything. Some works can be downloaded freely, others which remain in copyright can be 'borrowed' by the hour. You read for an hour, and then the link ceases. At any point you can then click to 'take the book out' again for another hour, as many times as you like.

I highly recommend the site as a tool for searching for those out of print publications that never seem to make it to the market. You may be lucky and find something you've wanted to read for a while.