Access to Archival Finding Aids: Context Matters Junte Zhang, Khairun Nisa Fachry, and Jaap Kamps University of Amsterdam Abstract. We detail the design of a search engine for archival finding aids based on an XML database system. The resulting system shows results—which can vary in granularity from individual archival items to the whole fonds—within the context of the archive. The presentation preserves the archival structure by providing important contextual in- formation, and all individual results can be “clicked”, warping the user to the full finding aid with the selected part in focus. 1 Introduction An archival finding aid describes a particular archive in a long and complexly structured document, which is now commonly available in XML using the En- coded Archival Description (EAD) standard. It is an open question how to provide access to the information in such archival finding aids. Previous re- search [1,2] found that users are getting lost in the hierarchical structure of (archival) finding aids, and argued for a user interface that could provide con- textual navigation. This supports users by providing both the local detail and a global view of the relevant information. More generally, information access to structured text in a realistic use case is identified as an important open problem in [3]. We address these problems by experimenting with archival finding aids col- lected from the International Institute of Social History, the Archives Hub, and the National Archives of the Netherlands. We have implemented a prototype of the README (Retrieving EADs More Effectively) system, based on MonetDB with the XQuery front-end [4] and the retrieval models of PF/Tijah [5]. The re- sults are directly post-processed for generating our presentation in HTML/CSS. 2 README Approach We have identified the following key requirements for the README system: Preserving Provenance. Our system ranks and retrieves the XML elements separately, but we group results from the same archival description. The hit list in Fig. 1 for the query “onderzoek vereniging armoede bestrijding ” (in English, research association poverty prevention) presents query-sensitive re- sults grouped per finding aid, and the text nodes with keyword highlighting. B. Christensen-Dalsgaard et al. (Eds.): ECDL 2008, LNCS 5173, pp. 455–457, 2008. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008