Bringing our Internet Archive collection back home: A case study from the University of Mary Washington

Abstract

The Internet Archive is a great boon to smaller libraries that may not have the resources to host their own digital materials. However, individual items uploaded to the Internet Archive are hard to treat as a collection. Full text searching can only be done within an item. It can be difficult to direct patrons to local resources. Since 2010, the University of Mary Washington has uploaded over two thousand digitized university publications, including the student newspaper and the yearbook, to the Internet Archive. Taken together, these represent almost 100 years of UMW history. Using Apache Lucy, we built a search interface, Eagle Explorer, that treats our Internet Archive collection as a cohesive whole. Patrons can use Eagle Explorer to full-text search within the collection and to filter by date and publication. This article will describe how we created Eagle Explorer, the challenges we encountered, and its reception from the campus community.