Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine

Internet Archive is Middlebury Special Collections' primary repository for digital content, containing a wide and ever-expanding variety of historical objects: scanned books, photographs, newspapers, A/V materials, and more!

All objects can be viewed in a web browser, or downloaded in many different formats, including special formats for use with assistive technologies. When possible, Special Collections uploads our best, high resolution "master" copies to the Archive, in order to provide users with the widest range of downloadable formats and options for reuse.

We also assign Creative Common Attribution licenses to items not already in the Public Domain, so they can be freely reused, remixed, and shared.

You can start by visiting Middlebury Special Collections & Archives at the Internet Archive (go/IA), or by following one of the links to our subcollections listed further down on this page.

Enter your search terms using the search bar on the left side of the page. Below the the text box are two radio buttons that let you decide what type of search to perform:

• When the metadata option is selected, the search engine will look for your terms in item catalog records only. This is especially useful when you want to find items of a certain type ("photographs", "letters", etc.) or on a particular subject ("Alumni", "Baseball", "Student activities", etc.)
   
• Selecting text contents lets you perform a full-text search, to find your terms in the actual text content of print (and some handwritten) items. Most print publications in our collection - such as the Campus, Middlebury Magazine, and Kaleidoscope - are full text searchable. A limited selection of handwritten documents, which have been transcribed for Special Collections, are also full-text searchable.

You can use quotation marks with either type of search to look for an individual’s name or an exact phrase. For example, “Joshua Bates” or “Old Chapel”.

If you want to narrow your search to a specific year, use the menu on the left side of the screen. Click “more” to see an expanded list of dates. The numbers to the right of each year indicate the number of items in your search that match the selected option.

Similar options allow you to filter your search results by subject / keyword, media type, and other facets.