March 6, 2006
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.
Comments
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Google is not the only online search engine, yet you are almost implying that it is. /robots
— Sam Mar 6, 09:19 PM #
Thank you for this article and for the wonderful description of our new service offering. I would like to clarify one point in the article. Pricing for an individual following the free trial period has not yet been determined. If additional funding does not allow us to keep this service free beyond May 31, we plan to offer both institutional and individual subscriptions at reasonable and affordable pricing.
The $200 figure that you cite for an individual may have come from our web site that describes our online institutional subscription services start-up fee of $200.
Hope this clarifies things for your readers. And again thanks for the story. We are very excited about this offering.
Anne Van Camp
RLG, Manager, Member Services
— Anne Van Camp Mar 7, 02:02 PM #