Based at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and last mentioned in the April 5, 2013 issue of The Scout Report, the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) continues its work digitizing important publications for the study of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound history. MHDL researches the copyright of all materials it digitizes to insure that they are in the public domain and can be re-used freely. Since 2013, hundreds of books have been added to the magazines and newspapers already in the collection. There are also more search tools and the website has been updated to be more easily viewed on mobile devices. The primary search tool, Lantern, allows users to search through an index of nearly 2 million pages for occurrences of their search terms on a specific page, then efficiently directs the user to the original bound volume in which the page appears. The Internet Archive provides book scanning and file hosting and preservation services to the MHDL, so after following a search to the bound volume, users will find themselves reading the online book in the Internet Archive. Another new tool for data mining and visualization, Arclight, can turn Lantern search results into graphs that outline trends in media history.
Comments