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Life & fun · February 9, 2016

How Will We Explore Books in the 21st Century?

How Will We Explore Books in the 21st Century? launched on February 9, 2016 with 16 votes, #1,934 of 4,386 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 10 years on.

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In plain words

This blog post explores methods for discovering knowledge within the Internet Archive's book collection beyond traditional card catalog and full-text search approaches. Written by an engineer at the Internet Archive, it examines how users might better find information in books when conducting broad or ambiguous searches. The piece reflects on challenges in surfacing relevant content from vast digital collections and considers what new discovery technologies could help users uncover human knowledge stored in books more effectively.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

I love working with the Internet Archive’s collections, especially the growing book collection. As an engineer and sometimes scholar, I know there’s a lot of human knowledge inside books that’s difficult to discover. What new things could we do to help our users discover knowledge in books? Today, most people access books through card catalog search and full-text search — both essentially 20th century technologies. If you ask for something broad or ambiguous, because you don’t know what you’re looking for yet, any attempt to present a short list of the most relevant results is likely to be overly narrow, not inspiring discovery or serendipity. For the past few…from blog.archive.org

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