ANALYSIS DIGITISATION PROJECT CONNECTS HISTORY
Researchers have a new resource for carrying out federated searches across a wide range of British historical sources. Sharon Howard describes the Connecting Histories project and gives advice to people undertaking similar projects
T
ime is precious when you are a researcher. Running repeated searches of separate resources is extremely time-consuming. In addition to this, researchers have to navigate differing
types of search facilities and technologies, so it can be diffi cult to search for resources systematically. Moreover, researchers need to record information about the sources they fi nd, not least for citation purposes, and will fi nd varying options for saving relevant results and exporting metadata. When researchers fi nd links between the materials they uncover within different resources, they will almost certainly have to record those links manually. And, where resources are behind a paywall, it is often diffi cult for non-subscribers even to evaluate their potential usefulness for particular research projects. These are perhaps particularly acute problems for historians, who tend to use a wide range of different types of source material. A team of specialists from the
universities of Hertfordshire, London and Sheffi eld in the UK has been working on a resource to help historians overcome some of these issues. Connected Histories, a project funded by JISC, is a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth- century British history. In developing the user interface, we needed
to understand how users were likely to interact with the site, and what features they would be likely to use. The website now brings together 11 different major historical web resources – allowing, for instance, Parliamentary Papers to be searched in combination with the records of all the Middlesex county sessions papers. The site removes the initial barriers to
cross searching and allows people to search in a more structured way.
10 Research Information JUN/JUL 2011 The facility to save ‘Connections’ makes
it easy for researchers to record links they fi nd, and the export functions allow them to transfer information easily into their own databases or other software for analysis. Connected Histories cannot give non- subscribers access to restricted sites but it does display snippets of text in search results, so helps researchers to decide whether the resource is worth obtaining access to. Although it is not immediately obvious
to users, Connected Histories uses an API architecture that means that the search
engine and data can be used and re-used independently of the website. This facilitates future expansion, but it will also be of interest to researchers interested in pursuing large- scale data mining projects. My advice for those planning similar projects is threefold. Firstly, always allow plenty of time for getting agreement from source providers, and use whatever support and advice is available from your institution. Generally, try to build good relationships with source providers and engage them in the process as much as you can. We included representatives from several source providers on our advisory panels and invited them to the launch. Secondly, be prepared for processing and
storing massive amounts of data. The size of some datasets rather took us by surprise, and we had to fi nd much more server and storage space than we originally anticipated. In addition, good quality metadata and documentation from providers, especially for complex structured datasets, can make the job much easier.
Thirdly, make the most
of available software and tools to aid collaboration between partners in the project. For example, we used Basecamp extensively for project communication and storage of fi les, and a wiki for writing background pages collaboratively for the website.
We do not know what kind of historical research will be undertaken using Connected Histories, but it has been built intentionally to facilitate both cross-resource searching and all the new methodologies associated with text and data mining
We do not know what kind of historical research will be undertaken using Connected Histories, but it has been built intentionally to facilitate both cross-resource searching and all the new methodologies associated with text and data mining. It will certainly make it easier to discover links between, say, Parliamentary Papers and newspaper reports, and to more fully incorporate images and ephemera into our research; but we also hope it will allow historians to more effectively work together, to interrogate the ever-expanding archive of online data in new ways.
Sharon Howard is project manager at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of Sheffi eld
www.researchinformation.info
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