First Monday, Peer Reviewed Journal on the Internet
Publication Year
1997
Volume
2
Issue
9
Critical Arguements
CA "As the digital revolution moves us ever closer to the idea of the 'virtual library,' repositories of primary sources and other archival materials have both a special opportunity and responsibility. Since the materials in their custody are, by definition, often unique, these institutions will need to work very carefully with scholars and other researchers to determine what is the most effective way of making this material accessible in a digital environment."
Phrases
<P1> The matter of Internet access to research materials and collections is not one of simply doing what we have always done -- except digitally. It represents instead an opportunity to rethink the fundamental triangular relationship between libraries and archives, their collections, and their users. <P2> Digital information as it exists on the Internet today requires more navigational, contextual, and descriptive data than is currently provided in traditional card catalogs or their more modern electronic equivalent. One simply cannot throw up vast amounts of textual or image-based data onto the World Wide Web and expect existing search engines to make much sense of it or users to be able to digest the results. ... Archivists and manuscript curators have for many years now been providing just that sort of contextual detail in the guides, finding aids, and indexes that they have traditionally prepared for their holdings. <P3> Those involved in the Berkeley project understood that HTML was essentially a presentational encoding scheme and lacked the formal structural and content-based encoding that SGML would offer. <P4> Encoded Archival Description is quickly moving towards become an internationally embraced standard for the encoding of archival metadata in a wide variety of archival repositories and special collections libraries. And the Digital Scriptorium at Duke has become one of the early implementors of this standard. <warrant>
Conclusions
RQ "Duke is currently involved in a project that is funded through NEH and also involves the libraries of Stanford, the University of Virginia, and the University of California-Berkeley. This project (dubbed the "American Heritage Virtual Digital Archives Project") will create a virtual archive of encoded finding aids from all four institutions. This archive will permit seamless searching of these finding aids -- at a highly granular level of detail -- through a single search engine on one site and will, it is hoped, provide a model for a more comprehensive national system in the near future."
