Searching Archival Finding Aids: retrieval in Original Order?

Abstract

Archival principles as Provenance (keeping material from the same creator together) and its corollary Original Order (keeping the order of creation intact) could help improve access to the archival materials. We investigate the importance of relevance ranking and ‘Original Order’ when searching finding aids in EAD using XML Retrieval. Our experiment shows that relevance ranking is of paramount importance, although Original Order may help the retrieval of the first few results because these tend to cluster within the original order.