The Archival Research Catalog

The Archival Research Catalog (ARC) is the National Archives online finding aid resource. Rather than using XML to markup finding aids (such as EAD) the National Archives chose to create a database for descriptions of all their holdings. Currently 58% of the National Archives holdings are described in ARC and more descriptions are added every two weeks.

The ARC home page contains a keyword search box, and links for more advanced searching options.The basic search function performs a keyword search across all the holdings, and displays the results at the series level.The method of display leads to confusion. As an example, I searched for “Democratic National Committee” (knowing that I entered a description for the records of the DNC a few weeks ago). As you can see from the image, the first two hits are “Organizational, Research, and Campaign Records” and “1960-campaign.” Of these two results, one is for records created by the DNC and the other is the congressional papers of John F. Kennedy. For a user to know this he or she has to look to the fifth line “Level of Description” – which is not very intuitive.

One would assume that clicking on the “Show Hierarchy” button would expand the listed results and place them in the context of the hierarchy. However, this is not the case. Clicking this button takes one to a new page with collection level descriptions in a different order. For instance, when I clicked this button the first listing was not for the parent collection of the “Organizational, Research, and Campaign Records” series, rather it was for the records of the district courts – something that has little to do with my search topic.

The site’s goal is to provide the public with access to the descriptions of records held at the National Archives. This demands that search and retrieval be intuitive, easy, and efficient. Currently, ARC requires some knowledge of what one is looking for, and for the user to be reasonably well versed in archival description. Most people searching ARC have used search engines like Google before, and most likely expect a listing with a brief description of the contents. Making the site more useable would be rather easy, results could be displayed as “Collection Title -- “Series Title” – “Beginning of scope and content note.” Items such as “ARC Identifier”, “Type of Records”, and “Level of Description” could be displayed only after someone clicked on a description. Simple reorganization and revamping would allow users to more easily find what they are looking for, and presenting the results within the context of the hierarchy rather than just at the series level would be a place to start.