You Can't Get There From Here

A few days after posting History On Line more items showed up in my news reader describing online archives of various flavors. I started thinking about problems I've had with other online archives. Rather than explain it, I'm going to ask you to do it.

Let's start with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive, a web site containing images of the scrolls put up by he Israeli Antiquities Authority.  Go to the archive and search on the "The Damascus Document".  Let's pretend you can actually read the text on the photos of these ancient documents. Why? Because the relevant portion of this discussion isn't nearly as cool as Dead Sea Scrolls.  I"ll get to that in a minute.

Now go to Google and search for "Dead Sea Scrolls."  Notice that the archive we just looked at is the second result, right under the Wikipedia article on the same.

Finally, do a Google search for "The Damascus Document."  Notice what you didn't find.  The Israeli archive is nowhere to be seen.  I clicked through five pages of search results and never found the Israeli archive.  I don't know if Google's results are the same at all times and all places, so your results may vary. I think my results demonstrate the point.

I put a premium on source materials. I hope I don't need to explain why. Even in the age of Google, you may not find source materials unless you can guess what web site might have it. This problem isn't confined to databases of ancient history.  More often than I'd like, finding the right answer to something means finding the right database.

Let me give you some every day examples. Who owns the derelict property down the street? Turns out, it's owned by a paper corporation.  Who really owns the paper corporation? Can I do a background check on someone without paying for it? Maybe. Do you have time to find all the databases you need to check in all fifty states, then check all those databases individually? (On reflection, this last example might be a good thing. It keeps casual snoopers from poking around my records.)

The phenomenon I demonstrated with the Dead Sea Scrolls archive is one I first observed while searching property records and doing background checks. To find what I was looking for I had to first find the correct database.  Expand this to anything you want to learn or prove.  Want to show, for example, the religious beliefs of the founding fathers? You need their actualy writings.  An article by a historian, or worse, a blow-hard pundit isn't enough. 

What would be nice would be to search engine that find repositories rather than text strings.