Great idea, though of course bound by the “who decides what is in and out” parameters that endanger all information these days.
Search engine collects historical resources
by Mark Ward
A search engine is being created to help historians find useful sources.
The Connected History project will link up currently separate databases of source materials.
Once complete, it will give academics or members of the public a single site that lets them search all the collections.Once completed the search engine will index digitised books, newspapers, manuscripts, genealogical records, maps and images that date from 1500-1900.
“There are a number of electronic resources that have been created by universities and by commercial providers,” said Professor Robert Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield which is heading the project. “They are all available, and all separate and some require subscriptions.”
“What we are trying to do is join them up to create an integrated search facility so you do not have to conduct more searches than necessary,” Professor Shoemaker told BBC News.
“We are creating a kind of sophisticated Google for those selected range of resources that we know are of high quality,” he said.
Much of the work involved in the Connected Histories project will be tagging and annotating entries so classification systems are standardised.
“We want to provide a level of structured searching by names, places and dates,” he said. “That information is provided on some databases and in some cases we’ll have to identify it ourselves.”
In general, said Professor Shoemaker, the different collections possess different types of materials so there is little overlap between them.