Indexing, metadata and archival discovery: the role of the digital ‘trace’ in online collections of government records
Fabio Antonini – Development Editor for Digital Resources, Taylor & Francis
For many historians, moments of serendipitous discovery often lie at the heart of the research experience, be it through browsing the open shelves of a subject library or leafing through the pages (both printed and digital) of an archival catalogue. Since the earliest development of record keeping institutions as centres of historical research, the organisation, presentation and accessibility of data about a collection has played a crucial role in shaping scholarly accounts of the past, with the technologies through which this data is portrayed having undergone a substantial evolution from the manuscript catalogues of the monastic library to the printed calendars of the national archives.
With the advent of new digital technologies for the classification, cataloguing and even reproduction of archival documents, the question of discoverability and the role of the record keeper in facilitating research has once again come to the fore. For some commentators, the rise of the automated search process – in which the printed catalogue or open shelf library is replaced by the blank search bar as the first point of entry into a collection – has precipitated a decline in the contextual knowledge and immersive reading of sources, one of the central tenets of the historian’s method. In the era of the text-searchable document, how can we reconcile the ease of discoverability with a thorough interrogation of the source and its provenance?
Using the example of Routledge’s recently released digital resource, Secret Files from World War to Cold War, this paper will assess how digitisation, and the creation of new surrounding metadata, can serve as the continuation of a document’s ‘archival afterlife’ – the centuries-long process of preservation, classification and accessibility through which it crosses the threshold from historical agent to historical artefact. It will consider the ways in which new digital ‘traces’ can be created around a collection of archival facsimiles, as well as the role which these can play in reproducing the immersive – and even serendipitous – experience of archival research in an online environment.
Last updated: 30 January 2017
