Over at our brother blog Opening the Catalogue: State Records NSW’s Open Data Project our colleague Richard Lehane is asking for your help.
State Records NSW is now inviting our regular users to trial http://api.records.nsw.gov.au as a new search tool for accessing the State Archives collection.
If you have tried this new search tool, and have feedback to give, we would love to hear it. We are actively developing the tool and would like to make it as useful and as intuitive as possible. So please post any feedback you have as comments to this blog post
Category: Digital 2.0
enno says:
I like it. Seems to work well. Its as difficult as ever to find files concerning people called “New”.
Mick Reed says:
I like using it. It’s easy and all that stuff. But how accurate is it?
An example, searching ‘donnithorne’ in the API brings up two probate packets and nowt else.
The same search term in the usual Keyname Search brings up one CSreLand, and two unassisted arrivals, but no probate packets.
Archives Investigator just spits the dummy.
Overall, the concept is very good.
BTW ‘Donnithorne’ relates to the alleged source of Dickens’s Miss Havisham and her father. Almost all that is written on this is nonsense, (what am I saying ‘almost all’ – I mean everything) so if there is any other Donnithorne material that neither search facility throws up, Fiona, I’d love to know.
Cheers
Mick
Richard Lehane says:
Hey Mick
Thanks for this feedback.
*At the moment* the new search tool only covers material that is catalogued in Archives Investigator. This does not include the indexes which are searched by Keyname Search. So at this stage unfortunately yes you do need to do multiple searches – the new search tool + the online indexes – to be comprehensive. This is something we hope to fix this year.
cheers
Richard