Tools: Team Two

Team two: tailored search of historical documents

Team summary

We will explore how historians approach historical search when they are looking for people, places and dates. We will look at search engines employed by archives and libraries such as the National Archives and the British Library, at search tools provided by digital resources such as British History online and at federated search tools such as Connected Histories. We will look at search tools, glossaries, and lookup tables on the MarineLives wiki. Our focus will be on how historians really work, and on how technology can be used to speed up and make more effective the day-to-day task of historical search.

An explicit goal of team two will be to understand the semantic properties of the MarineLives semantic media wiki. This wiki was implemented in May 2015 by one of our volunteers, Rowan Beentje. With four million words of full text, over 10,000 manuscript images and over 20,000 pages, improved search will have a dramatic impact for all users of the wiki. A number of potential semantic search plug-ins exist, and we would like our volunteers to specify the functionality our users need and to explore the appropriate semantic search solution.

Historians - we need your input

The MarineLives Digital Pop Up Lab team would like to interview historians about their use of different search engines.

We are seeking to develop a detailed understanding of the types of searches historians perform and wish to perform, and the extent to which current search engines meet their needs.

We would like to explore with historians the specific functionality they would like to see for the MarineLives search engine.

All input will go into our development of a new semantic based search engine for the MarineLives wiki.

The five search engines we are interested in are (1) The National Archives, Kew: Discovery search engine (2) British Library catalogue (3) British History Online (4) Connected Histories and (5) the MarineLives wiki

Please contact us if you would like to do a fifteen minute Skype interview with one of our team