From Archive to Researcher: a Generic Tool Set

There were two major aims in the LEADERS (Linking EAD to Electronically Retrievable Sources) project:

1.To carry out research on the needs of users of archive and records collections
2.To develop a toolset to deliver finding aids, transcriptions and digital images of archives over the Internet

The Internet makes it possible for finding aids (metadata about archives) to be accessed electronically, most often using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a standard for electronic finding aids. However, few archives at present deliver electronic images or transcriptions of the material and researchers must therefore travel to the collections to use them. Within the humanities computing community more advanced XML-based methodologies for encoding and delivering full text representations of historical documents have been developed in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) project, but the TEI is relatively weak on metadata structures and at the start of our project had not been used together with the EAD in an integrated fashion.

A toolset must obviously provide the functions that users need, but we found little research on these needs. We aimed to investigate the needs of users in different kinds of archives and to build up a picture of what searches they wanted to carry out. These functions could then be built into the LEADERS toolkit. This aspect of the project was addressed by questionnaires in six archive and record offices and by three focus groups trialling the pilot software