I’m experimenting with the Hathi Trust’s Digital Library to see how its list features might be used for teaching and research.  Apparently it is possible to make a list and then do full text searching within that collection of digital texts.  To see how it works, I’ve compiled a list of descriptions of Ireland.

When I saw the search capability, I thought the results might all appear together, but it is still a multi-step process.  When you perform a word search, you get a list of the books where that word appears, no indication of the frequency, and you then select each book in turn and hit the “find” key.  However, the resulting information is a very nice little snippet that shows the word in context.

A search for “criminal” brought up a list of books; this is the result for John Carr’s A Stranger in Ireland (1806).

I think this will be a very useful tool though it would have been nice if all the “criminal” snippets from all the books in the collection were displayed together.

Information on Hathi Trust:     Hesburgh Libraries: Hathi Trust FAQ http://eresources.library.nd.edu/databases_docs/hathitrust_FAQ.shtml