Federated Searches - Week 12

I have finished up reviewing my initial list of Mississippi universities and colleges. There are many small historical societies in Mississippi, however, it seems the general focus tends to be government records for genealogy and local history. These organizations may be a good resource for finding supplemental information about locales but are the least likely to have resources to perform archival arrangement and description, and even less likely to have curated LGBTQ content. If more professional archival repositories lack fully-described LGBTQ relevant collections, research guides, and admit to the lack of collecting focus, amateur organizations surely will not. The final institutions were:

• Mississippi College

• Jones County Junior College

Over the final weeks, I will use the names identified through repository searches and research to do federated searches, clean up the spreadsheets, and compile a list of controlled vocabulary and keywords used to identify LGBTQ content. I began with ArchiveGrid and have a couple of other resources identified in my course reading. Since ArchiveGrid was creating by OCLC and scrapes WorldCat records, it will be my primary search resource to identify collections I may have missed.

ArchiveGrid

I cannot remember how or when I first became aware of ArchiveGrid--probably searching for repositories and weighing the potential job prospects early in my program coursework. ArchiveGrid provides a federated search of hundreds of archival repositories, providing a single platform to search millions of primary source collections. By scraping the MARC records from WorldCat and linking to EAD XML finding aids, this project connects students, institutions, researchers, and archivists around the world with unique resources. OCLC Research has made this free resource available and it continues to grow. This resource is an exciting case for the value of linked data for cultural heritage institutions.

ArchiveGrid combines records from millions of collections for a one-stop search

The site allows for the filtering of collections by repository location. Smaller repositories that are not cataloging finding aids or collections in the library catalog or creating electronic finding aids will not be discoverable with federated searches, however, the larger institutions will. Early searches have found that University of Mississippi, University of Southern Mississippi, and Mississippi State have collections in ArchiveGrid. I have also found Mississippi-related collections outside of Mississippi that will provide an interesting counter-point for descriptive metadata assigned by Mississippi archivists.