When we met with some of you at our first FromThePage user group meeting at SAA in late July of 2023, we asked you to vote on features you'd like to see in FromThePage. The overwhelming winner was "Better Search", which astonished us.
We had only added it the list day before, after a discussion with Heather Wolfe at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Heather had told us that FromThePage understood full text better than most other library and archives platforms, so we should make it easier for us to search that text. Now, we've always struggled with the line between being a task-oriented crowdsourced platform and being a DAMS, and better search definitely crosses the line into DAMS. But once we started thinking about it, we realized Heather wasn't the only one who saw FromThePage as a platform for searching transcribed text.
Meg Winslow at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery had also told us she uses FromThePage to search her archives. When her executive director asks "what did the early trustees think about X", she actually does a google search with FromThePage.com and her search term to find the answer. So if one of our larger research institutions (The Folger) and one of our smaller historic sites (Mount Auburn) both are asking for search, it made sense for us to add "Better Search" to the list. And it turns out many more folks thought this was a good idea. Here's the results of the user group dot voting:
So why all this preamble? We've spent the last 6 months working on better search in FromThePage, and we'd like to invite you to a webinar where we show you the new feature and what you can do with it. We'll also talk about our motivations and how we went about designing and building the enhanced search. We're especially excited about cross-collection search: the ability to search across all of your collections on FromThePage and the possibilities of thematic cross-organization searches.
Please join us to learn more:
Searching archival collections across diverse institutions is challenging. Volunteers, genealogists, and librarians each have unique needs, from locating relevant crowdsourcing projects to tracing ancestral names or finding specific documents via metadata and call numbers. Our collections range from untranscribed scans to fully indexed texts enhanced by OCR and HTR systems, LLMs, or manual efforts.
This webinar will explain how we consolidated five distinct MySQL-backed search functionalities into a single search engine while still respecting organization scope and privacy restrictions.
Highlights include:
- Rationale: Insights from user feedback and group meetings that prompted the integration.
- Live Demo: Explore the new range of searches, from site-wide project discovery to detailed searches within an organization’s collections.
- Challenges: Addressing issues like line-spanning words, markup variations, and multilingual content.
- Emerging Issues: Adjusting to a unified search that demands detailed context for each result.
- Results and Process: How last summer’s analytics led to surprising insights, user stories, and the development of a new product requirement document.
- Future Possibilities: Opportunities for thematic, cross-institutional search portals.
Join us to discover how these changes have streamlined searches, enhancing user experience across FromThePage.
The webinar is on February 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM EST, 11:00 AM CST, and 9:00 AM PST. Signing up will send you an invitation with the details and a follow up with the recording. Sign up here.
Even if you can't attend, sign up and we'll send you the recording. Watch our past webinar recordings here.
As always, we appreciate your support. It lets us keep building and enhancing FromThePage, and engaging the public in making history.
Sara & Ben