Metadata

Individual document descriptions are enhanced by index terms for significant places, names, and topics, and reference National Archives document numbers. Annotations on the documents themselves sometimes reference other documents.

Technical platform & interface

This material is included in the Adam Matthew Archives Direct suite of collections from The National Archives of the UK, sharing a portal platform with several other archival collections.

A potential advantage of the Archives Direct portal interface is that it supports cross collection searches, displaying results from all digitized collections whether or not the local institution subscribes. Results are grayed out for those archival collections not accessible locally. On the other hand, it is potentially confusing because one must use the advanced search page in order to narrow a search to one collection. Even from what appears to be the home page of the China collection, basic search covers all of the archival collections, which are not necessarily related thematically (collections include British, American, and Middle Eastern topics).

Searches include full text and index terms. “Popular searches” are actually browse lists of index terms for places, people, and topics. The full document browse lists for each of the three chronological sections of the collection display data very clearly and can be sorted by document number, title, or date.

The document display is a standard PDF interface. The PDF page images are good quality and legible. The help sections are detailed, clear, and include screen shots.

Some features of the interface could use improvement:

• Although easy citation export is provided to RefWorks/EndNote, there is no Zotero support. Furthermore, no general view of a preferred citation format is provided, which might present some challenges for undergraduates who have limited experience citing these types of materials. Instead, under the “Teaching” sub-section of the “Help” section, users are advised to consult various standard guides for formatting citations.
• Although selecting a place or topic from the document description metadata uses the database indexing to retrieve a relevant passage (just as a search would), the results display will only show one retrieved page, without highlighting the designated keyword, and always reads “Results: 0 documents with 0 instances”. This is misleading. Also, because these documents are in their “raw” form it is difficult to scan them for keywords without the benefit of the highlighting display available when using the actual search function.
• Contextual navigation prompts are not obvious at first observation, and only advance one level at a time – potentially slowing down the userʼs advance between documents, from the document view back to the document description, back to search results, or back to the document browse list.