The digital archive of the Swedish East India Company, 1731-1813: a joint project of a university library and a history department

• Published in: Online information review Vol. 27; no. 5; pp. 328 - 332
• Main Author: Benner, Margareta
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bradford MCB UP Ltd 01.01.2003; Emerald; Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subjects: 18th century; Academic libraries; Applications (e.g. Digitizing,...); Archives; College Students; Cultural history; Departments; Diaries; Digital archives; Digital libraries; Digitization; Documents; Exact sciences and technology; Gothenburg University; Image processing systems; Indexing; Information and communication sciences; Information and communication technologies; Information science. Documentation; Information technologies: storage media, equipment; Internet; Internet access; Museums; Projects; Sciences and techniques of general use; Studies; Subject indexing; Sweden; Swedish; Swedish East India Company; Sweden; Asia; Europe; India; Document image processing; Sweden; Internet; Digital storage; Indexing; Project; Digitizing; Information retrieval; Digital archive; Old document; Firm
• ISSN: 1468-4527; 1468-4535
• DOI: 10.1108/14684520310502289

The article describes a digitisation project in which Göteborg University Library, Sweden, is publishing a collection of eighteenth century manuscripts on the Internet, in collaboration with its history department. The aims of the project are to make one virtual collection of documents owned by different institutions, to give free and open access to the collection, to save heavily used documents from wear and tear, and to let users enrich the collection by subject indexing and by their own research findings. The texts are the scattered remains of the archives of the Swedish East India Company (1732 -1813). These documents, which are in great demand by academic users as well as by the general public, are being digitised as high quality images. Instead of text encoding, indexing is used to provide searchable entries for words in document titles, names of people, and subjects.