The archive I chose to examine and utilize for this session is the British & Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries database from Alexander Street Press. The layout is intuitive and easy to navigate; even if one isn’t certain what a particular category in the navigation bar means, the hover menu elaborates on the contents and is in general very helpful. The search feature is excellent, particularly the Advanced Search that allows the user to select specific terms from pop-up lists instead of relying solely on “keyword”-style searching that may or may not be accurate. The presentation of the resources themselves is very clean and minimalist, with the documents themselves occupying the majority of the screen real estate. This is particularly beneficial for users who are searching the archive on a small netbook-sized screen.
One of the problems I found with the presentation, however, is that the page titles for individual results are generic “Table of Contents results” and do not specify what the search terms were or what the title of the document is. This is especially frustrating for people like myself who have a tendency to open multiple tabs at once and without the feedback (or in-depth knowledge of the authors to be able to determine at a glance what the search might have been) in the title bar it is often confusing and may hinder searching.
Changing the page title to more accurately reflect the page’s content would be one way to make searching easier. Another way would be to organize by subject terms and make each subject term appearing in a given bibliographic record a link to a page containing a list of all other documents categorized under that term. The subjects are already listed on the bibliographic record pages and to make them links would, I feel, increase resource discovery tremendously.
A research and writing project I could conduct with this archive could be a comparative analysis of British women’s letters home as they traveled in current colonies as opposed to former colonies in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. It would be interesting to investigate the paternal (or maternal) language of imperialism used by these women as they traveled and whether or not it changed depending on the country’s status as a current or former colony. While such a project might be embarked upon at a print archive, the amount of resources available in a given print archive would naturally be smaller than those available in a database the size of the BIWLD. Also, resource discovery is necessarily harder in a print archive than in an electronic one where further research on a topic that pops up during other research is much faster and easier than when one is limited solely to print.
While Google Books would certainly not replace the database or archive, it would serve as a sort of complement. I could potentially use it to read or check first editions of print copies of the collections of letters that exist in the database, or to make comparisons between editions. However, that also presents the problem Geoff Nunberg discussed about the accuracy of Google’s metadata. While the resources I found were all secondary sources that did not appear to have any consistency issues, the potential for inaccuracies would increase dramatically for comparisons of editions of original works as mentioned.
Google Books’ advanced search function is not nearly as helpful as that of the database and makes Boolean less intuitive. However, as I discussed earlier, Google Books does provide a multitude of secondary sources that are not available through this particular database. In this context Google Books provides both access to the secondary sources themselves as well as ideas for further research. In the end it would be more sensible to rely on the database than Google Books, although there is the potential for both to work together harmoniously.
Allison & the New Media 