n.a discovery service from OCLC that provides access to archival collection descriptionsRiley and Shepherd 2009, 93A second model of intentional sharing of archival data is exemplified by OCLC’s ArchiveGrid (formerly RLG Archival Resources), where EAD-encoded finding aids are harvested by agreement between institutions and the ArchiveGrid service, and aggregated together with HTML-encoded inventories and collection-level descriptions.OCLC 2009Starting in 2004 RLG began redesigning the RLG Archival Resources database, to make it more useful for researchers working with primary source materials. . . . ¶ The result, ArchiveGrid, launched in March 2006.Michalko 2011Those of you in the archive or research library world may be familiar with ArchiveGrid, a database and discovery service that grew out of RLG’s Archival Resources service which leveraged all the collection level descriptions in the union catalog and aggregated the encoded finding aids that institutions made available for their collections. For many years ArchiveGrid was a subscription service and it has continued as such within the OCLC environment. ¶ Although ArchiveGrid is currently available as a subscription service at archivegrid.org, it will eventually become a free discovery system. To facilitate this transition, OCLC Research is developing a new ArchiveGrid discovery interface that is now freely available.Bron, Proffitt, and Washburn 2013ArchiveGrid is an aggregation of nearly two million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It is supported by OCLC Research as a corpus for experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces. Archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives are represented in ArchiveGrid.Sweetser and Orchard 2019, 375, fn. 2Nimer and Daines note that ArchiveGrid, OCLC’s international union catalog for archival material, is populated using both EAD and MARC records.Roke and Tillman 2022, 191Another team member, Bruce Washburn of OCLC, added a Schema.org-based descriptive profile to ArchiveGrid, the OCLC research project aggregating over five million records describing archival materials.Allison-Bunnell 2022, 563ArchiveGrid harvests data from finding aids that are hosted by either aggregators or individual contributing institutions.ArchiveGrid 2023ArchiveGrid includes over 7 million records describing archival materials, bringing together information about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more. With over 1,400 archival institutions represented, ArchiveGrid helps researchers looking for primary source materials held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies.
Notes
ArchiveGrid, formerly RLG Archival Resources, was launched in March 2006 as a subscription service after Research Libraries Group (RLG) merged with OCLC. In January 2013, ArchiveGrid changed to a free and open access model.
