The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time weeding out material that isn’t academic in nature. That could be changing now that Internet Archive Scholar is on the horizon.
Internet Archive Scholar is a new project from the Internet Archive. It is focused on providing access to academic articles and journals from the 18th Century through today. Internet Archive Scholar is very new. It’s so new that it’s labeled as being “in alpha” and when you visit it there is a message warning you that there may be several bugs and that it has not been “officially announced.” None-the-less, I gave it a try and made a video about it. Here’s my video overview of Internet Archive Scholar.
Applications for Education
As I mentioned in the video above, Internet Archive Scholar has the potential to be a good alternative and or complement to Google Scholar. Like Google Scholar, Internet Archive Scholar could provide high school and college students with some good resources to consult that they would not find through a Google or Bing search.
