Most Excellent! It's an Archive Grid

RedLightGreen has started an excellent site called ArchiveGrid, to aggregate information about collections in archives, museums, etc. It's free through May 31, and will stay free longer if RLG can get additional grants or funding. You can try it at http://archivegrid.org. Almost a million collection descriptions are available through this site's search engine.

Just going to the front of the site is a little overwhelming. You can browse a list of contributors at http://archivegrid.org/web/jsp/contributorlist.jsp just to get an idea of what's here -- it's extensive. You can also browse a partial list of available topics at http://archivegrid.org/cgi-bin/ag/lp.pl.

Once I looked through this I had a better idea what to search for and I went back to the front page and the search box at the upper left. I did a search for Asian anthropology. I got 225 results, with the option to sort them by relevance (default), date, title, archives, or locations. The main results included the title of the collection, institution, brief description, and snippet for an extended description. If you click on the title of the collection, you'll get additional information including more extensive institution information, extensive description of the collection, and the topics covered by this archive. On the right side of the original results page you'll also find a list of institutions represented in the search results, and a list of locations represented in the search results.

I really like this idea, and I like the search. There are a couple more things I'd like to see. First is some kind of alert for new search results as other archive collections are added to the grid. How about an e-mail alert or an RSS feed? And would there be any way to filter results for archives which have x% of the collection available online? Or if you don't mind doing offline work, how about all institutions within an x mile radius of a given city or zip code? ArchiveGrid is well worth looking at; these are just a couple of suggestions for improvement.

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