“Finding Finding Aids on the World Wide Web” Review

• Tibbo, Helen R. and Lokman I. Meho. "Finding Finding Aids on the World Wide Web," American Archivist 64 (2001): 61-77.

This article surveys the findability of archival finding aids on the World Wide Web. The authors note that multiple standards (MARC-AMC, EAD) have been developed for placing finding aids on the web in some form or fashion. They point out that many believe that mounting finding aids on the web makes them inherently more findable. This belief is common despite the fact that the various search engines on the web use a variety of different algorithims and methods of indexing. The authors wanted to test whether or not this was actually the case.

To test the findability of web based finding aids, the authors searched among nearly two-thousand archives listed on the University of Idaho Special Collections site. To be included in the project, an archive had to have at least 4 complete HTML finding aids mounted on the web. The finding aids had to have the minimum requirements for finding aids listed in Frederic Miller's Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts. The author's finally selected a sample group of 25 institutions. They also selected six popular search engines with which to run their test. The authors tested each engine to see how it would find specific finding aids using either keywords or specific strings. They also tested to see if their results would improve if they searched multiple search engines. The researchers offer several sets of statistics on searching. Their findings are probably a bit dated by now, though. At the time of the writing of the article, they referred to Google as one of the lesser known search engines. However, their suggestions for how to improve searching are probably still valid. I would be interested to see how this same test would perform today, especially now that search engines like Google have the ability to find XML based finding aids such as EAD.