Another in
the series on sessions I attended at the NGS 2014 Family History Conference.
T260 (R) Diving into Archives: Uncovering ArchiveFinder and
ArchiveGrid, D. Joshua
Taylor, MA, MLS, Syllabus page 283
The talk
was great in reminding us how many archives there are in the world and also the
enormous task that archives are faced with in terms of identifying what they
have and making their materials accessible to the public.
Recently, an
archivist had mentioned ArchiveGrid to me. I
did play around with it a bit though I didn’t appreciate using the “summary
view” vs the “list view” mode as described by Joshua and that is the way I will
look at results in the future. A long
list of results was tedious to go through and it lacked contextual information;
not so when using the summary view mode.
Searching on “wake county” ledger brought up 14 results now
characterized in a much easier-to-digest mode (see graphic above). Finding aids, if available from the
participating institutions, are included in the search.
Joshua also
suggested subscribing to the ArchiveGrid
blog, which I have just done, to keep current on new collections. The most recent post was about 13 newly
registered institutions from Australia
and New Zealand
I was
unfamiliar with ArchiveFinder (Proquest) and that might be more explained
by it being available only to institutional subscribers. ArchiveFinder is a current directory which
describes over 220,000 collections housed in repositories in the US , UK
and Ireland
I was also
unfamiliar with the Library
of Congress Authorities list. Since
many libraries, archives and other repositories use this system as the basis
for their cataloguing. Having an
understanding of what headings/references have been catalogued can help you
better search in any catalogs that you come across.
So, two news
tools in my genealogical research arsenal.
The
associated syllabus pages provide a lot of detail about what you might find in
each of these resources and how to best search the contents to identify possibly
relevant archival material.
Editor’s Note: This series is not
presented in any particular order.
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