Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Illinois Harvest goes out of state

Recent additions to Illinois Harvest may be useful to Midwestern researchers outside the Sucker State:

Pryor & Co.'s Stillwater City Directory, 1876-7 (Stillwater, Minnesota: Pryor & Co., 1876)

The Civil War Literature of Ohio, by Daniel Joseph Ryan (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1911)

Pioneer History of Milwaukee, from the First American Settlement in 1833..., by James Smith Buck (Milwaukee: Swain & Tate, 1881-1890), volume 1, 1833-1841.

Note to readers who have either (a) a deep interest in 19th-century Milwaukee or (b) an unimaginable amount of spare time: I know I saw three other entries for this book -- presumably the three remaining volumes -- but I've been unable to find them using Illinois Harvest's search function. If you type in a title, it's supposed to find only works containing all the words, but in fact it produces thousands of irrelevant results. In this case, the top two hits of 1,694 for "pioneer history of milwaukee" were a WPA publication on pioneer life in Illinois and an image of a building at Racine and Milwaukee in Chicago!

Hey, it could be me -- a free year's subscription to this blog to anyone who can reconcile their description of their search system with its actual performance.

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