African Folktales at Internet Archive: Spreadsheet

I've got something different to share today here, which is a work in progress: a spreadsheet listing African folktales with links to the specific pages of books and articles at the Internet Archive. I hope you will find it useful!

Right now there are appx. 3800 stories linked there from appx. 140 sources, and I'm adding more each day; I'll provide updates here periodically about my progress. Here's the spreadsheet: African Folktales at the Internet Archive.

As you can see it has an overview sheet with some basic information, and then a sheet with the story links.

This is a copy of a spreadsheet that I'm using for my own purposes where I have additional columns for the project-specific information I'm tracking about these stories. I'll be adding some of those other columns to the public spreadsheet later; for right now, I'm just focusing on the basics in this public version: title of each story, title of the book it comes from, plus a link to that page at the Internet Archive. There's also a column that lets you sort the stories based on the order in which they appear in the book. To sort the books in order like that, sort first on the seequence column, then sort by author/title. That will give you a sheet sorted by book and in order within each book.

More about the Internet Archive links

Some of the stories are in public domain books which are always available at Internet Archive, while other links go to pages in books that are available with Controlled Digital Lending. With CDL, you just need to log in with your Internet Archive account (free! yay!) and then you can click the blue "borrow" button to access the book for one hour (renewable if no other patron is requesting that book). After you click on the borrow button, it will return you to that same page, automatically, so everything really is just a click away!

I've been admittedly inconsistent with the view style used for the links: some of the pages are in single-page view, others are two-page view, and many of the links are in full-screen (theater) view. You can always adjust that view  yourself using the options at the bottom of the Internet Archive browser.

Once of the best things about Internet Archive is that each of these pages, and even each view-style, is part of the URL, which means you can create bookmarks like this, page by page.

If the book you are viewing is in the public domain, that means you can also download your own PDF copy of the book; just use the download options in the lower right-hand portion of the screen, below the book viewer.

More about the spreadsheet

Anyone can view the spreadsheet online, and also search and sort, without being logged in at Google. 

You can even create your own filter views. For example, if you want to create a spreadsheet view that has stories with the word "spider" in the title, you can do that! Eventually I hope to add a keywords column that will help in creating more accurate filter views; titles are not the most reliable representation of a story's contents... but it's better than nothing! So, for example, spider:

If you've never worked with data filter views in Google Sheets, here are some tips: Sort and Filter Your Data.

To make your own copy so that you can add additional columns of your own, edit the contents, etc., you'll need a Google account; if you are logged in at Google, you will see the "copy" option under the File menu.

Final thoughts...

I'm hoping people will find this useful; it just takes a few minutes for me to paste the contents of my own spreadsheet to this public spreadsheet to share with others. I've reached this "linking" phrase of my own research, and I will have many more links to share in the next couple months — several hundred more sources at Internet Archive and thousands more stories!

And if you're a teacher, just think of how powerful this can be for your students: you can create a spreadsheet of your own recommended readings with links to the Internet Archive like this. Even better: you can make your students co-editors of the spreadsheet, inviting them to help you develop your "online class library," while also teaching them some valuable digital skills. You might need to show them just how to use a spreadsheet along with some guidance in parsing the Internet Archive URLs, but that's class time well spent in my opinion because students can then apply these same skills to other projects of their own.

Yes, I LOVE SPREADSHEETS. Can you tell? Simple databases for specific projects: no programming required. :-)