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March 06, 2006, 02:38 PM ET
Indexing Scholarly Materials
Even in an era of search engines and digitization projects, scholarly ephemera can be tough to locate. Armed only with Google, how quickly could a researcher track down magazines from the Dada movement? How many authentic treatises on alchemy could be found?
A new online database called ArchiveGrid aims to make digging for that kind of material quicker and more fruitful. The service collects detailed data on the holdings of thousands of libraries, museums, and other archives and makes the information searchable online.
The database's creators say it could help researchers identify museums that have prized collections in certain fields and locate jewels lurking in unlikely collections.
“ArchiveGrid allows researchers to discover important content that might normally be hidden when searching on the open Web,” said Ricky Erway, manager of digital resources at RLG, the consortium that designed the database, in a press release. RLG is a nonprofit consortium of some 150 libraries, museums, and other collections.
The new database is an expanded version of an earlier collection-searching product, called RLG Archival Services, that the consortium made available only to institutions that paid subscription fees. ArchiveGrid will be free to all Web users until the end of May; it will cost researchers a one-time fee of $200 thereafter.
Much of the material on the site will be of interest chiefly to professors and graduate students. But officials of the consortium are hoping that it will also attract the interest of amateur genealogists, with its data on birth and death records, cemetery plots, and ships' logs.
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