MyHeritage Launched Collection of Old Books

There is something special about old books. Many of them are no longer in print and cannot be ordered from your local bookstore or found at your local library. Genealogy societies and organizations might have their own collection of old books, which may not be accessible to those who don’t belong to the group. MyHeritage has launched a collection of old books.

MyHeritage added a brand new collection to their MyHeritage SuperSearch. The collection of old books contains over 37 million pages in 150,000 books that are relevant to family history. The books have been digitized to make them available online to genealogists and family historians.

The digitized historical books in the MyHeritage collection include actual images of all of the books pages. It also has all of the text extracted using Optical Character Recognition. In order to get the books digitized and added to MyHeritage, a team of 50 curators was utilized. The curators examine each digitized book for relevance to family history research, and enhance its meta data if they decide to include it. This process adds approximately 250 million pages to SuperSearch each year.

The books included in the collection span the last four centuries. They include family histories, local histories, and military histories. The collection also includes city and county directories, school and university yearbooks, church and congregational minutes, and much more. Everything in the collection is sourced from various published texts that are copyright-free. The collection will be updated several times a year.

The MyHeritage Compilation of Published Sources collection is located in their SuperSearch under Books & Publications. It is free to access. You can easily search the collection by any of the following search terms: first name, last name, publication title, publication date, publication place, or keywords.

This new collection has the potential to be very useful for genealogists and family historians who use MyHeritage. Have you ever wondered what your great grandfather looked like when he was in high school? Perhaps his high school yearbook is part of the collection. If not, then make sure to check again a few months later. The collection will continue to have new resources added to it

Diane Haddad at Family Tree Magazine reports that the Compilation of Published Sources collection at MyHeritage is unique. It is not made of published items that came from the FamilySearch books digitized collection and did not come from Mocavo or any other similar sounding resource.

Image by David Flores on Flickr.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:‘

* FamilyHistory Books & Family Trees

* What to Do to Preserve Those Old Books & Documents

* Untapped Project Gutenberg and Google Books