Major Search Engines

Why search in multiple areas for media when the major search engines are so intuitive and easy to use? While our digital collections are google searchable at the University of Idaho, the majority of digital archives for universities, cultural institutions and libraries are not. This comes from the push and pull of archives wanting to make things available for researchers but not so much for bots engaging in web scraping.

Table with large plates of odd, antiquated dishes from the 1950s — Fort Lewis buffet featuring pickles, aspic desserts, gourds and cake,RSS-127, Richards Studio Photographic Slides (Collection 2.1.1), Northwest Room at Tacoma Public Library,

The Tacoma Public Library Northwest Room is an example of this type of database asset management platform. If I wanted to find this specific photo in their archive , searching Jello desserts in 1950’s Tacoma , Google’s algorithms are ineffective with these keywords. Even if I implement Boolean quotes around the exact description , we don’t have access to the image through Google (although we are pointed to the general collection in the text search .)

This all means that a huge amount of copyright free media is available, if you know where to look for it.

Fair Use, etc. How to Use These Resources