ArchiveGrid No Longer in ELM but Still a Nice Specialized Tool

A database called ArchiveGrid is probably familiar to you as one of the ELM databases for the past few years. OCLC recently discontinued the tool as a subscription resource, although they made it freely available to serve researchers as a finding aid and archive discovery tool. Here’s a bit about ArchiveGrid from OCLC:

ArchiveGrid is a collection of nearly two million archival material descriptions, including MARC records from WorldCat and finding aids harvested from the web. It's supported by OCLC Research as the basis for our experimentation and testing in text mining, data analysis, and discovery system applications and interfaces. Archival collections held by thousands of libraries, museums, historical societies, and archives are represented in ArchiveGrid.

OCLC had offered ArchiveGrid as a subscription-based discovery service until 2012 when that subscription service was discontinued. While the new, freely-available OCLC Research ArchiveGrid interface is not a full production service, it shares some of the same attributes. Researchers can expect to use it for discovery of archival materials, and archives can work with OCLC Research to have their materials represented in the aggregation in a reliable and persistent way.

ArchiveGrid provides access to detailed archival collection descriptions, making information available about historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and other archival materials. It also provides contact information for the institutions where the collections are kept.

Because ArchiveGrid is no longer a subscription service, and is hence not a part of ELM, we have removed it from the ELM portal. But it still may prove useful to you and your researchers. Find it at http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/.