ArchiveGrid
ArchiveGrid is a collection of millions of archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web.
ArchiveGrid provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions such as documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives. It also provides contact information for the institutions where these collections are kept.
This application is supported by OCLC Research as an experiment in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces, and it provides a foundation for OCLC’s collaboration and interactions with the archival community.
The majority of archival material descriptions in ArchiveGrid are from WorldCat and primarily represent archival collections held by institutions in the United States. This reflects the contribution patterns for descriptions of materials under archival control in WorldCat.
Background
ArchiveGrid was offered as an OCLC subscription-based discovery service from 2006 until it was discontinued in 2012.
In 2012, OCLC Research released this freely available ArchiveGrid interface that shares some of the same attributes as the original subscription service.
Although it is not a full production service, researchers can expect to use it for discovery of archival materials, and archives can work with OCLC Research to have their materials represented in the aggregation in a reliable and persistent way.
Impact
From our work with ArchiveGrid, we expect to share the results of MARC and EAD tag analysis, provide discovery system analytics for contributors, document investigations of text mining and data visualization, participate in community working groups pursuing improvements to description and discovery, and more. To support those interests and objectives, we'll continue to build this extensive and current aggregation of archival material descriptions, within the constraints of OCLC Research's committed and on-going support for this project.
Updates
The ArchiveGrid index is updated quarterly with a fresh extraction of MARC records from WorldCat and with finding aids that we harvest from contributor websites.
This is largely due to the ongoing support of the archival community adding their material descriptions to WorldCat—which forms the basis of most of ArchiveGrid’s content—and, in some cases, supplementary finding aids that are directly harvested into ArchiveGrid.
Outputs
Application
Publications
EAD Analysis: Findings from the Building a National Archival Finding Aid Network Project
30 May 2023
Bruce Washburn, Merrilee Proffitt, Chela Scott Weber
Analyzes a corpus of EAD encoded collection descriptions provided by regional finding aid aggregators in the US to assess existing EAD data as raw material for building a national finding aid aggregation.
Thresholds for Discovery: EAD Tag Analysis in ArchiveGrid, and Implications for Discovery Systems
14 October 2013
Marc Bron, Merrilee Proffitt, Bruce Washburn
The paper analyzes a large collection of over 120,000 Encoded Archival Description (EAD) documents within the ArchiveGrid discovery system. It evaluates how well these documents support online discovery and establishes criteria for completeness and consistency. The study reveals that while the EAD standard and encoding practices have limitations for comprehensive online discovery, emerging trends, such as updates to the EAD standard and the use of new encoding tools, offer promising improvements for the future.
Social Media and Archives: A Survey of Archive Users
16 August 2013
Bruce Washburn, Ellen Eckert, Merrilee Proffitt
This report details findings from a survey of users of archives to learn more about how researchers find out about systems like ArchiveGrid, and the role that social media, recommendations, reviews, and other forms of user-contributed annotation play in archival research. It will be of interest to those working with archival discovery services, or those investigating the utility of social media in discovery environments.
Previous Team
Bruce Washburn
Jeff Mixter