Website Wednesday

Sometimes, I just like to get lost in a website and roam there until the next daily task rears its less attractive head. (Now, there’s a fractured idiom for you.) Other times, I’m out of a website in a flash. Nothing there; thank you; let’s move on.

However, the one I’ve chosen for today is one for which you make the popcorn, get the comfy slippers, and plan to stay a while.

http://www.archive.org/index.php

Their welcome says: The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

That sounds so dry, but it is so good.

I first came across this site by goggling “free public domain movies online.” Under their feature films (a collection of more than 150,000 films which is updated daily) , they have a large collection of public domain movies.

It’s fascinating to see the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, or the recently added Iron Mask with Douglas Fairbanks and narrated by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Many of the feature films are just interesting “dogs” but even they are worth the historic look. In The Death Kiss, a 1930's movie with Lugosi in a non-Lugosi type role, I saw an iceman (ok, an actor playing an iceman) take the block of ice up to a little door in the outside back wall of a house. He opened the door and put in the ice because the kitchen icebox was connected to that little door. I didn’t know they could do that. Or in another 30's movie where an actor said, in a throw away line, that everyone in his neighborhood was sick and he got the shot. What shot? Did they have flu shots back then?

However, this site is so much more than cheesy old movies. They also have live music, audio, and text sections with 60,000+ live concerts, 300,000+ audios and more than a million texts. The entire site is searchable for keywords.

The texts section has Flip Book feature where you see a clear, large picture of each page. (I found this very useful in reading books from the past to young children.) I enjoyed flipping through a 1843 knitting book and discovering this pattern: Cast on any even number of stitches. Bring the wool forward, knit two together alternately, to the end of the row. Every row is the same.

That’s *YO, K2tog* across row for every row. It’s still used today and makes a lovely pattern.

The site is also home to the Wayback Machine. This archives websites from 1996 to the present which are no longer on the internet. So if you come upon a site with that dreaded: Oops! The site you are looking for no longer exists, try the Wayback Machine.

Well, gotta go. On their movie site, under “This Just in” they’ve added all the episodes of Holt of the Secret Service. I’ve never heard of Holt but I’m sure he must be an early day Indiana Jones.

Enjoy the site.