Searching Archival Collections

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March 4

At this point in this series we have discussed quite a bit of background material. Now we can shift gears to practical skills to use when searching archival collections!

As you may recall, archival research is a bit different from other types of research. Many researchers are familiar with Google's search function or maybe even with searching library databases, and in some ways our archival collections search functions similarly. We often search our collections for keywords based on our research interests and what collections we have. Each library and archive will differ, but in our case, the results generated are based on algorithms and priorities that systems determine. While these systems can aid in searchability and discovery, it is important to understand that the first result is not necessarily the best result for your research.

Unlike Google which will pull results from across the Internet, the results generated by our archival search functions depend solely on what is contained within our collections. These collection entries are indexed as machine-readable documents which can then by queried and then presented to the searcher based on "relevance" or "scoring" (Apache Solr, n. d.). Scoring is dependent on how documents are indexed and how the query was entered (Apache Lucene, 2013).

There are sophisticated tools in our search functions for refining your search. You can filter your results by date range, library, type, people or language, and there are a few ways to add additional search terms. Learn more about conducting archival searchers at the University of Maryland Special Collections and University Archives by watching the video below. Searching for some types of materials in our collections such as Rare Books and Digital Collections varies from this tutorial… stay tuned for more on that!

Scotty Beland is a student in the Masters of Library and Information Sciences program and Student Assistant with the Instruction and Outreach team at UMD.