[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Common portal for Archives information



A few options:

ArchivesUSA
http://archives.chadwyck.com/
"Access to holdings and contact information of more than 5,400 repositories. Indexes to over 118,000
special collections."

RLG's Archival Resources
http://www.rlg.org/arr/index.html
570,290 catalog records and 19,151 finding aids as of last count

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)
http://lcweb.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/
Perhaps too obvious, and already mentioned, but certainly serves as a database of information about
what's in archival repositories.

There are also a number of collaborative projects that don't include all repositories in the world but
do serve as integrated databases, such as:

American Heritage Virtual Archive Project
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/amher/

Online Archive of California
http://sunsite2.berkeley.edu/oac/

These and others are described at
http://www.loc.gov/ead/eadsites.html#coop

Conventional search sites are also very important.  I would agree with the sentiment that presence in
existing popular search services should be a high priority, since this is how the majority of people
find out what's available on the Internet.  We should ensure that their databases contain at least
links to our collections if not even deeper links to lower levels of description.  Ideally (much
easier said than done), they would be able to jump to a description of the materials of interest
directly from a commercial search engine without having to navigate down the (often very complicated
and confusing to a non-archivist) structure of a finding aid.

=========================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan
 School of Information
 Phone: 734-647-0505
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
 "How can I know what I think because I forgot what I said?"
                                         - Karl Weick, 1979

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>