Introducing the Discovery service
The National Archives holds over 11 million historical government and public records, one of the largest archive collections in the world. From Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, our collection includes paper and parchment, electronic records and websites, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.
Our Catalogue, one of the first of its kind, provides a free online search facility for the collection, but has its drawbacks. A certain level of knowledge - whether of the subject matter or record series itself - is currently required to successfully search the Catalogue, which can make it difficult for new users to find what they are looking for without assistance.
We are in the process of developing a replacement system for the Catalogue: Discovery. The Discovery service will make it easier to search and use our collection for everyone, from first-time users to experienced researchers.
What this means for online users
We have already released a beta (test) version of the Discovery service, which will eventually replace our online Catalogue. The beta version features new ways to search our collection, in line with the raised expectations of today's web users. Discovery allows users to explore and browse our collection in new ways that do not require any prior knowledge of our collection, such as map-based geographical searches.
In time, Discovery will also replace several of our other online systems, such as DocumentsOnline, our digitised document delivery service. This will make it easier for customers to search for records and order digitised copies (if available), all in one place.
Discovery is available now on the Labs section of our website, which is where we release new online services for customers to trial and give feedback. We are adding new features to Discovery on a regular basis - the latest release includes advanced search functionality, as well as fixing some of the bugs and glitches from earlier releases.
The Discovery service will not replace any other services or functionality until it is fully tested and approved.
Future developments
We're also developing a feature to enable our users to enhance our collection by annotating and tagging our records. We have already started to explore different ways of doing this, both on our website and on other established social websites. Earlier this year we published some Colonial Office photographs on Flickr as part of our Africa Through A Lens project, and invited customers to add descriptions and geographic locations to images that we previously knew little about. We hope to eventually add this information to record descriptions in the Discovery service, making a distinction between official catalogue descriptions and user-generated content while allowing users the flexibility to describe records in new ways.
To receive regular updates on new additions and developments to the Discovery service, sign up to our free monthly enewsletter or follow @UKNatArchives on Twitter, using the hashtag #TNADiscovery.
