Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
pean Union's Framework Program 6, but here again it was essential that
our partners in the QVIZ project included the National Archives of Es-
tonia and of Sweden; the name is a shortening of “query visualization.”
14
With the obvious exception of archives with map collections, ar-
chives have very limited interest in coordinate data, but they have a large
interest in geographical names, especially the names of administrative
units. One consequence is that archivists are one of only two professions
within the cultural heritage sector to systematically catalog by geogra-
phy. Archaeologists systematically catalog finds by location but are well
served by mainstream GIS software and will not be further discussed
here. In a systematic survey in 2009 of British archives by the Name Au-
thorities and Indexing Working Group, part of the UK Archives Discov-
ery Network (ADN), out of eighty-four archives replying, 77 percent said
they maintained some form of place-name index, and most maintained
one covering individual files or documents, not just broad collections.
15
Unlike libraries, archives hold unpublished documents, generally
created by organizations rather than identifiable individuals. The single
most important catalog information for an archival document is there-
fore the identity of the organization that created it. National archives are
primarily concerned with the records of national governments and their
interactions with other nations. In the UK at least, the best-organized
system of archives is the network of local record offices. Local govern-
ment bodies are required by law to maintain an archive containing, as a
minimum, their own most important records, and one of the functions
of the UK's National Archives is to inspect these local record offices,
which, generally speaking, exist for counties and for the largest cities,
other districts depositing their records with the relevant county office.16
16
In other words, archives catalog their records by the organizations,
or “corporate bodies,” that created them; but the most important cor-
porate bodies they are concerned with are national and local govern-
ments, which are defined by and usually named after the geographical
areas they govern. Further, in most countries and certainly in Estonia
and Sweden as well as the UK, much the largest group of archive users
are not academic historians or government officials but ordinary people
researching the history of their families. As well as being the most nu-
merous group of users, family historians are economically important to
