Everything old is new again, even in digitized books

Over a year ago I wrote about the efforts of universities in the Triangle to digitize old books and put them online in the Internet Archive. Ever since then I've been following the increase of one collection -- NCSU's -- via the Internet Archive's RSS feed.

One thing that astonished me about the book collection is how topical it can be. When you think of old books you might think of ancient history, dry directories, things that have nothing to do with 2009. But go visit the NCSU Internet Archive page at http://www.archive.org/details/ncsulibraries and see what's available. On the RSS feed I watched lots of books on gardening come up. But what really got me were the chicken books!

It seems like not a week goes by that I don't see something on the news about hearings for homeowners to raise chickens in Durham. And of course there's the Tour D'Coop, which took place in Raleigh last May and spotlighted chickens being raised decidedly "in town", in places like Five Points and Oakwood. And what do I see in my RSS feed? No less than 19 books about poultry, including such interesting titles as "Twenty lessons on poultry keeping; an elementary treatise prepared under the direction of the American Poultry Association", and "Open-air poultry houses for all climates; a practical book on modern common sense poultry housing for beginners and veterans in poultry keeping" and "Productive poultry husbandry; a complete text dealing with the principles and practices involved in the management of poultry".

These books are out of copyright so are past a certain age. They should not be relied upon for the latest and greatest information on poultry management. But they can get you started with some ideas (poultry houses!) and they are of course free -- just download the PDFs.

It's too bad that there's not a way to automatically tap the books flowing into the Internet Archive for topical relevance. Just NCSU's collection alone contains over a thousand books on gardening or plants. Wouldn't it be great if even generalized news topics could also point to free relevant books online?