Digital Center
Over 119,000 digitized items in the Allen County Public Library Collection from the Allen County Public Library are on the Internet Archive website. Many of their ebooks are scattered throughout our site particulary on our Allen County Resources, City Directories, eBooks, and Fort Wayne pages.
Donald Weber digitizes fire department photographs at the Allen County Public Library downtown.
Library transforms photos into history Frank Gray February 4, 2016 The Journal Gazette newspaper now archived on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
Wednesdays will usually find Donald Weber at the Allen County Public Library downtown, scanning old pictures into computers and loading them into a digitized photo album of the city of Fort Wayne, complete with information on where and when the photo was taken and the names of people pictured.
Weber had his own photography business years ago. He took school photos. He was also a Fort Wayne firefighter, and in 1973, using historic photos, assembled the first history of the fire department. Then there were the photos he took himself.
[ Fire Fighter Photographs in the Allen County Public Library Digital Collections at the Allen County Public Library]
Those old photographs, whether you realize it or not, are part of history, and Weber, as a volunteer for the library, is helping preserve that history.
Over the years, Weber has scanned thousands of old photographs into the library’s computer system. He says he’s working on No. 12,500 or so right now.
It’s important to save the old photos.
But a lot of them never get saved. People die, and relatives, sifting through what they have left behind, often find and just throw away piles of photos of people who lived long, long ago, and places as they were long, long ago.
Weber tells the story of another firefighter who had over the course of his career taken thousands of photographs of fires and firefighters on the job. The photos and the negatives were carefully stored in boxes.
Weber heard about the hoard of old pictures and looked up the man’s widow.
She told him she wished he had come by a couple of years ago, Weber said. After the man’s death, she had tried to find anyone who was interested in the pictures. No one was interested. After awhile she just put it all in the trash.
Most every household has stacks of old photographs sitting around in boxes or trunks. Some of them might seem dull and pointless, photos of old buildings, photos of people lined up, staring at the camera. In one way, they are terrible photos.
But as time goes on, those terrible old photos get interesting, fascinating actually. They are the closest thing we have to time travel.
So the library is also inviting the public to offer up their old photographs to become part of a community photo album. They can drop off CDs with pictures or USB drives. They can even offer up original photographs.
“They contact the library, the library contacts me, and I get together with them,” Weber says. “They get the pictures back,”
Melissa Tennant, assistant manager of the genealogy department, said: “Anyone can donate material or lend it to the library. It will be forever preserved for future generations.”
But one thing the library would like to have with those old pictures – information: When was the photo taken, where is the place pictured, and who are the people in the photos.
December 9, 2021 discussion on digitizing local information on True Fort Wayne Indiana History on Facebook
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February 24, 2023 post by Allen County Public Library on Facebook:
Did you know, nestled in the lower levels of the Main Library, production to digitize public-domain materials, such as yearbooks from the 1920s, a collection of books dating back to the 1880s and old photographs is in full swing? This effort is led by a group of full-time volunteers who scan donated materials like family history logs and old newspapers for genealogy research, making them easily accessible in a community album, no matter your location. These detailed processes require handling materials dating back over one hundred years, which helps ultimately provide direction to researchers looking for a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.
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April 7, 2023 post by Allen County Public Library on Facebook:
The Genealogy Center is active in several initiatives to make significant public domain portions of its collection available online! This includes a partnership with Internet Archive.
View thousands of digitized materials from our collection at this link: https://archive.org/details/allen_county?tab=collection
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August 28, 2023 post by the Genealogy Center on Facebook:
The Genealogy Center is active in several initiatives to make significant public domain portions of its collection available online. This includes a partnership with Internet Archive. We now have over 118,000 items digitized from our collection, that you can search and view from home!
View thousands of digitized materials from our collection at this link: Allen County Public Library collection
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December 11, 2023 post by Internet Archive on Facebook:
Interested in researching your family history? Learn how genealogist Taneya Y. Koonce uses the Internet Archive's vast collections of digitized yearbooks, newspapers, location histories & government records to piece together her family’s story:
Genealogist uncovers family histories with help of Internet Archive
- There are thousands of ebooks online depending on how you search such as City of Fort Wayne, Indiana with over 15,000 city documents, Fort Wayne Indiana with over 20,000 ordinance documents, Fort Wayne Americana 20,000 more items, and Allen County Indiana over 55,000 items including non-Allen County "stuff" online at Archive.org.
- Links to some of those books are also organized by publication date or subject on our Timeline, People, and Places pages.
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10 minute video Midwest Regional DigitizationCenter by Kay Gregg & Caitlin Crowley Publication date 2015-12-15
Discribes the Internet Archive operation digitizing various Allen County Public Librarybook collections.
Guess what we find in books? A look Inside our Midwest Regional Digitization Center
by Jeff Sharpe posted on March 11, 2016 by Wendy Hanamura on the Internet Archive Blog. -
The Internet Archive - a chat with Brewster Kahle and a little look inside its book archive October 1, 2012 GrabMore on YouTube
A little peek inside the Internet Archive and a chat with Brewster Kahle broadcast Dec. 2011. The Internet Archive is at http://archive.org/ -
January 25, 2013 post by the Internet Archive on Facebook:
"Archive" is a documentary focused on the future of long-term digital storage, the history of the Internet and attempts to preserve its contents on a massive scale. Jonathan Minard, its creator, shared a section of it with us that features the Internet Archive. Take a look!
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November 17, 2023 post by The Library of Congress on Facebook:
A new, 4,000-square-foot Digital Scan Center employs sophisticated equipment to help staff digitize the Library's vast and remarkable collections. One fully automated machine turns book pages as high-resolution scanning proceeds. Another, designed especially to avoid damage to rare and fragile books, requires volumes to open only to 60 degrees to capture images using a prism.
Read more in the latest issue of the Library of Congress Magazine: http://go.loc.gov/Zz0Z50Q79oa
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April 17, 2024post by the Internet Archive on Facebook:
At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book. We do this so that everyone, everywhere has access to a great research library. #digitization #preservation
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The Wayback Machine, a time machine for the web
Web pages typically last about 100 days before being changed or deleted. Since 1996, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved nearly 900 billion pages, making them accessible to all. https://cbsn.ws/4ebzsWV
Posted by CBS Sunday Morning on Saturday, June 8, 2024Saturday, June 8, 2024 video post by CBS Sunday Morning on Facebook:
The Wayback Machine, a time machine for the web
Web pages typically last about 100 days before being changed or deleted. Since 1996, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has preserved nearly 900 billion pages, making them accessible to all. https://cbsn.ws/4ebzsWV
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Did you catch the segment about the Wayback Machine on CBS Sunday Morning? 🌞 Watch now!
Posted by Internet Archive on Sunday, June 23, 2024Sunday, June 23, 2024 post by Internet Archive on Facebook:
Did you catch the segment about the Wayback Machine on CBS Sunday Morning?
Watch now! The Wayback Machine, a time machine for the web David Pogue