ArchiveGrid

Last updated
ArchiveGrid
Producer OCLC (United States)
History2006 to present
Access
CostFree
Coverage
Record depthIndex & abstract
Format coveragearchival material descriptions
Links
Website researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/

ArchiveGrid is a collection of over five million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. [1] It contains archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. [2] Contribution to the system is available to any institution. [3] Most of the contributions are from United States based institutions, but many other countries are represented, including Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. [1] ArchiveGrid is associated with OCLC Research and helps to advance their goals of making archival collections and materials easier to find. [2] ArchiveGrid is described as "the ultimate destination for searching through family histories, political papers, and historical records held in archives around the world." [4]

Contents

History

Research Libraries Group (RLG) was founded in 1974 by three universities (Columbia, Harvard, and Yale) and The New York Public Library. In 1998, RLG launched the RLG Archival Resources database, which offered online access to the holdings of archival collections. RLG began to redesign the database in 2004 in order to make it more useful for researchers. [5] As a result of this redesign, RLG launched ArchiveGrid in March 2006. [6] As a result of a grant, ArchiveGrid was freely accessible until May 31, 2006. [7]

RLG/OCLC Partnership

In 2006, the RLG and the Online Computer Learning Center, Inc. (OCLC) announced the combining of the two organizations. RLG Programs was formed on July 1, 2006 and became part of the OCLC Programs and Research division. [8] ArchiveGrid was offered as an OCLC subscription-based discovery service from 2006 until it was discontinued in 2012. [9] In 2009, RLG Programs became known as RLG Partnership. The OCLC Research Library Partnership replaced the RLG Partnership in 2011. The five-year period of successfully integrating the RLG Partnership into OCLC was completed 30 June 2011. [8] In 2012, ArchiveGrid became a free system, while remaining a part of the OCLC Research project. [2]

Content and Use

ArchiveGrid provides access to material descriptions, finding aids, and contact information of many archival institutions from many countries. The materials on ArchiveGrid are described as "historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more," which users can access through a search or the map feature. [2] On the website, the content is accessible through a clickable map, where users can search in specific areas by clicking on the map or by entering a location. The collections are searchable, initially alphabetically, and can also be seen all together as a list or summary. Users can save and download item descriptions, or search through the recently added section on the homepage. [10] ArchiveGrid considers its main users to be researchers, specifically faculty, students, and genealogists, and improves the site based on the needs of that group; however, there is an increase in people who want to search through archival materials for hobbies, jobs (such as writers and filmmakers), and other personal interests. [2]

Collections are included directly from archives, and also MARC records from WorldCat which the ArchiveGrid team identifies as archival. [2] Archives who want to be included can submit a form so that the records can be harvested. Content is re-harvested and re-indexed about every six weeks so finding aids are updated. [2] Use statistics are available on the ArchiveGrid website, as well as statistics regarding contributors, through Google Analytics. ArchiveGrid includes collections from: [11]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Digital Library Program</span>

The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">JSTOR</span> Distributor of eBooks and other digital media

JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of journals in the humanities and social sciences. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. Most access is by subscription but some of the site is public domain, and open access content is available free of charge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WorldCat</span> International union library catalog

WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions, in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the OCLC member libraries collectively maintain WorldCat's database, the world's largest bibliographic database. The database includes other information sources in addition to member library collections. OCLC makes WorldCat itself available free to libraries, but the catalog is the foundation for other subscription OCLC services. WorldCat is used by librarians for cataloging and research and by the general public.

Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.

The Archives Hub is a Jisc service, and is freely available to all. It provides a cross-search of descriptions of archives held across the United Kingdom, in over 320 institutions, including universities, colleges, specialist repositories, charities, businesses and other institutions. It includes over 1,000,000 descriptions of archive materials on all manner of subjects, which represents over 30,000 archive collections. It also describes content available through topic-based websites, often created as a result of digitisation projects.

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a standard for encoding descriptive information regarding archival records.

The Research Libraries Group (RLG) was a U.S.-based library consortium that existed from 1974 until its merger with the OCLC library consortium in 2006. RLG developed the Eureka interlibrary search engine, the RedLightGreen database of bibliographic descriptions, and ArchiveGrid, a database containing descriptions of archival collections. It also developed a framework known as the "RLG Conspectus" for evaluating research library collections, which evolved into a set of descriptors used in library collection policy statements, last updated in 1997. The Library of Congress used the conspectus in 2015 in the revision of its own collection policy statement, and decided to retain this resource on its website, as a helpful scale for judging an academic collection's depth.

OAIster is an online combined bibliographic catalogue of open access material aggregated using OAI-PMH.

A finding aid, in the context of archival science, is an organization tool, a document containing detailed, indexed, and processed metadata and other information about a specific collection of records within an archive. Finding aids often consist of a documentary inventory and description of the materials, their source, and their structure. The finding aid for a fonds is usually compiled by the collection's entity of origin, provenance, or by an archivist during archival processing, and may be considered the archival science equivalent of a library catalog or a museum collection catalog. The finding aid serves the purpose of locating specific information within the collection. The finding aid can also help the archival repository manage their materials and resources. The history of finding aids mirrors the history of information. Ancient Sumerians had their own systems of indexes to locate bureaucratic and administrative records. Finding aids in the 19th and 20th centuries were paper documents, such as lists or index cards. In the 21st century, they can be created in electronic formats like spreadsheets or databases. The standard machine-readable format for manuscript collection finding aids, widely used in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and elsewhere, is Encoded Archival Description.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project MUSE</span> Online database of journals and ebooks

Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

Archival processing is the act of surveying, arranging, describing, and performing basic preservation activities on the recorded material of an individual, family, or organization after they are permanently transferred to an archive. A person engaging in this activity is known as an archival processor, archival technician, or archivist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BASE (search engine)</span> Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

Music Australia is a free national online service hosted by the National Library of Australia in conjunction with over 50 cultural organizations across Australia. It was launched on 14 March 2005. It covers all types, styles and genres of Australian music, and showcases Australia’s musical culture across contemporary and historical periods, from the 19th century. Music Australia operates with a broad definition of 'Australian music', and covers music published in Australia or music composed or performed by Australians or about Australia or Australians. Music Australia provides a ‘virtual’ Australian national music collection, with metadata aggregated centrally by the National Library but access to the resources being through the holding institution.

A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.

Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) describes the content of art databases by articulating a conceptual framework for describing and accessing information about works of art, architecture, other material culture, groups and collections of works, and related images. The CDWA includes 532 categories and subcategories. A small subset of categories are considered core in that they represent the minimum information necessary to identify and describe a work. The CDWA includes discussions, basic guidelines for cataloging, and examples.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Memory Net</span>

Global Memory Net (GMNet) is a world digital library of cultural, historical, and heritage image collections. It is directed by Ching-chih Chen, Professor Emeritus of Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s International Digital Library Program (IDLP). The goal of GMNet is to provide a global collaborative network that provides universal access to educational resources to a worldwide audience. GMNet provides multilingual and multimedia content and retrieval, as well as links directly to major resources, such as OCLC, Internet Archive, Million Book Project, and Google.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archival research</span> Type of research using evidence from archival records

Archival research is a type of research which involves seeking out and extracting evidence from archival records. These records may be held either in collecting institutions, such as libraries and museums, or in the custody of the organization that originally generated or accumulated them, or in that of a successor body. Archival research can be contrasted with (1) secondary research, which involves identifying and consulting secondary sources relating to the topic of enquiry; and (2) with other types of primary research and empirical investigation such as fieldwork and experiment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trove</span> Australian online library database aggregator

Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.

The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources for research communities. Called a groundbreaking partnership, NYARC also provides a framework for collaboration among art research libraries.

The Australian Web Archive (AWA) is an publicly available online database of archived Australian websites, hosted by the National Library of Australia (NLA) on its Trove platform, an online library database aggregator. It comprises the NLA's own PANDORA archive, the Australian Government Web Archive (AGWA) and the National Library of Australia's ".au" domain collections. Access is through a single interface in Trove, which is publicly available. The Australian Web Archive was created in March 2019, and is one of the biggest web archives in the world. Its purpose is to provide a resource for historians and researchers, now and into the future.

References

  1. 1 2 "ArchiveGrid". OCLC Research. Retrieved 21 November 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "ArchiveGrid -- About ArchiveGrid". beta.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2018-11-21.
  3. ↑ Making Archival and Special Collections More Accessible. 2015. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/2015/ oclcresearch-making-special-collections-accessible-2015.pdf
  4. ↑ "RLG Announces Archivegrid". Advanced Technology Libraries. 35 (1): 1, 10. January 2006.
  5. ↑ "RLG Archival Resources Redesign for ArchiveGrid". OCLC. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  6. ↑ "RLG Launches ArchiveGrid". EContent Magazine. 2006-03-07. Retrieved 2018-11-21.
  7. ↑ "RLG Launches ArchiveGrid". Advanced Technology Libraries. 35 (4): 1, 11. April 2006.
  8. 1 2 "History of the OCLC Research Library Partnership". OCLC. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  9. ↑ "ArchiveGri". OCLC. Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  10. ↑ Falk, Patricia K. (2017-03-20). "ArchiveGrid". Technical Services Quarterly. 34 (2): 218–219. doi:10.1080/07317131.2017.1286855. ISSN   0731-7131. S2CID   219643519.
  11. ↑ "ArchiveGrid". beta.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2018-11-27.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.