Archive Discovery: A How-To Guide

What is the distinction beween a digital archive and a digital exhibit, and why does it matter?

Digital exhibits:

• Items are cherry-picked from one or multiple archives.
• Items are put certain together in a certain order to tell a story or convey a message.
• Items are accompanied by interpretive text that further reinforces the story the curator wants to tell.
• Thus, the exhibit has a greater potential to be colored by the curator’s interpretation and the exhibit’s overall context, purpose, and goal.

This does not imply that all exhibits have “bad” goals or that all curators have a negative bias. But they must always make a choice about the story they wish to tell. Therefore an exhibit is inevitably a more mediated experience than an archival collection.

Archive collections:

• Are more "raw," designed simply to make materials available to researchers in an unbiased way.
• Lack the interpretive "middleman" standing between you and the sources.
• You are given more freedom to order and interrelate the sources yourself.
• You can draw your own interpretations from the sources without being influenced by someone else's intrepretation.

 A digital exhibit can be a discovery tool for finding an archive.

• Look for the exhibit's credits or acknowledgements page.
• Find the names of archives and institutions which contributed to the exhibit.
• Dig deeper into those institution websites in search of an actual digital archive, or finding aids / collection descriptions if the collection is not digitized.
• If the collection is not digitized and you are relying primarily on textual descriptions of the contents, you might refer to individual digital pieces in the exhibit as examples of why you believe the physical collection's contents will contribute to your proposed research project. 

In a nutshell -- The exhibit may be a useful tool, but going back to the original archive collections is always a better research tactic.

Anatomy of a Digital Archive:

1. Starts with instructions for use, not a story.
2. Prominently placed search box.
3. Bonus tip: Pages that mention "ContentDM" in the footer are usually digital archives, because this is one of the major software products used to house digital archives.

Anatomy of a Digital Exhibit:

1. Pages begin with headings like you would see in an essay.
2. Contains long passages of text like an essay.
3. Contains a few small historical images, but they are treated as less important than the text.
4. Bottom of pages includes links such as "Continue to next page," like a tour that goes in order.