How the search engine came to the historians

Abstract

The Chair for the History of Technology at ETH Zurich has been using the search engine Opensenamticsearch as a shared search engine for historical sources, research literature and excerpts since 2018. In our presentation we will review the process that took several years and led to this implementation. We point out various surprises lurking in research projects that make digital research data and historical research interact in order to obtain meaningful data. We suggest that historians aim for research workflows and environments that are free for experiments, errors and exchange between researchers. Henrike Hoffmann, Moritz Mähr and Daniela Zetti are working with historical sources from various archives (Federal Archives Berne, University Archives Geneva, ETH Archive Zurich, PTT Archive Berne, CSCS Lugano). They deal with the issue on how the sources can be collected, analyzed, processed and made reusable. The sources are in German, French, Italian and English. They comprise documents that were written between 1960 and 2000. Most of the documents stem from public archives, some are publicly available, but a small number are within the protection period, i.e. accessibility is restricted. The research team is cooperating with technical, archival, legal and academic partners in Switzerland.