Explore Historic Research with Wiley Digital Archives
Curated subject-based archives for historical research
Wiley Digital Archives is an ongoing initiative to partner with the world’s leading societies and libraries to digitize the rare and often unique primary sources behind the research content we publish today.
Inspiration Starts Here
Although a journal article provides a deep dive into theory, methodology and results, primary sources unveil the backstory, from the historical context that shaped the study, to the mindset and musings of the authors themselves. In many cases, access to the archives of societies gives researchers an opportunity to view materials that were previously unpublished, unavailable or difficult to access. And that changes everything. With primary sources, researchers get a window into the thinking of those who came before them, so they can intimately understand the formation of the concept and track its evolution through content, such as notes, drawings, photos, correspondence. This access not only shapes the way researchers interpret research and develop and formulate their own ideas and theories, but opens their eyes to information they may never have known existed before. Until recently, the only way to get a full view into learned society archives was to physically travel to their locations, a costly and time-consuming proposition. After combing through a mass of boxes and files, there was still no guarantee that researchers would actually find what they needed. Even if it was a successful trip, only one or two researchers benefited from the experience and travel expenditure.
Wiley Digital Archives Today & Beyond
800 Years of content (1200’s-2000’s)
Printed and written material in over 40 Languages (and counting).
Thousands of manuscript maps, reflecting centuries of exploration and discovery.
A growing gallery of photographs and drawings, documenting people, places, flora, fauna and the environment.Extensive presentation of statistical tables, gathered from field notes, reports, books and papers that are exportable into fielded Excel format.
Everything about Wiley Digital Archives is designed to meet modern archival research needs.
- Intuitive interface
- Full-text searchability for printed documents
- Visual search results and image galleries
- Enhanced metadata (catalog information is supplemented with additional metadata derived from text)
- Downloadable optical character recognition (OCR) text
- Term clouds, term frequency, popularity and clustering tools
- Exportable, fielded datasets for charts, tables, statistics from printed or handwritten sources
- Geo-tagged maps and place of publication data, for visual searching and browsing
- Textual analysis tools for concordance, collocation and frequency distribution of terms
- Headers - names, places, and dates - and core metadata have been manually keyed-in
- Collections are browsable at archive, collection, box and folder levels
- Print, download, save and share documents
Case Study
Dr. Nichols discusses the benefits that digital archives offer to research and teaching with primary sources.
Dr. Catherine Nichols, who holds a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, is an Advanced Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies within the Department of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago. Her work focuses on the study of anthropological specimen exchange between museums in the late nineteenth century, particularly by the Smithsonian Institution. She teaches on a wide range of subjects, including the process of researching museum collections, and has a particular interest in the digitalization of archives.
For Dr. Nichols and her students, a key benefit of digital archives is its ease of access.
“For my own research, I need to prioritize visits to physical archives that I know will be of interest,” says Dr. Nichols. “I tend to visit large repositories that I’m fairly certain will contain the archives I’m looking for. Organizing visits to multiple archives in one trip – particularly if I’m traveling to a different country – can create real logistical problems and can be expensive. Also, time slots are restricted so it’s not always possible to extend a visit or request records held offsite without advance notice.”
Discover Digital Archives
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