The next phase of Discovery, our new catalogue, has launched with the addition of a delivery service for digitised documents. David Thomas, Director of Technology at The National Archives, explains why we’ve built a new catalogue and how it will help us provide more access to our records than ever before.
Fri 11 May at 11:26 am
Er – It doesn’t work…
“Sorry, an error occurred while processing your request”
or “Error 404″
Fri 11 May at 11:36 am
Hi Patrick, thanks for reporting this – there was a temporary issue and Discovery should be working now. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Ruth
Sat 12 May at 3:29 am
Dear Sir, congratulation for this improvement, I miss NA, I was there on 2004 and 2006.
Any idea if I wish to do my sabatical there on 2013 ?
Regards,
ROHANI HJ. AB GHANI
GENERAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT
ARTS AND SCIENCES COLLEGE, NORTHERN UNIVERSITY OF MALAYSIA
06010, SINTOK, KEDAH,
MALAYSIA
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Fri 18 May at 8:04 pm
What a dreadful ‘system’. After over half an hour, I am still unable to locate documents which took just seconds to search for with Documents Online.
Has this been service tested by anybody? Has it received any positive feedback?
Sat 19 May at 12:23 am
Surely there must be an easier way to find what was previously so simple. Documentsonline was two clicks, now I don’t know where to start. Was this actually designed with the ordinary user in mind?
Sat 19 May at 7:55 am
Who thought up this pile of junk? I cannot find any war diaries or medal rolls in it whereas I can go stright to them in the Catalogue.
Please either make this worable or keep the current systems.
Sat 19 May at 3:02 pm
A serious step backwards. The old Documents online and Catalogue searches were much simpler to use, they displayed the results in an easy to sort and view manner whereas Discovery is a real mess. Very disappointing!
Sat 19 May at 7:36 pm
You have changed a straightforward and reasonably workable system for one that is complicated and time wasting. Clearly it has been ill thought out. If you want to improve the search facility then put the effort into adapting the hard copy catalogue to make it more responsive to online searches.
Sun 20 May at 9:11 pm
How come when I type in Wiltshire Regiment in the search box it tells me that its found nothing? I just don’t believe it. I want a lot of material from the archives over the next year or so. I foresee a lot of frustration ahead.
Mon 21 May at 5:28 pm
Thanks for your feedback and apologies for the issues you encountered.
Here is some more specific feedback:
Stephen Nulty & A L Jones
To find digitised records within Discovery, you can use the “Online collections” tab on the search box or use the new Online collections pages to do guided searches.
We have done a wide variety of user experience work on Discovery and will continue to work to improve the service as we move forward.
We will look at making this guidance clearer on Discovery.
G Phillips
To find war diaries or medal rolls, you can enter the reference (WO95, WO372 etc) into the search box, search for keywords like names or places, include “medal roll” or “war diaries” in your search term or go to the new Online collection pages which have guided searches for both medal rolls or war diaries.
J Davey
The results in Discovery are returned by relevancy, which is different to the Catalogue and DocumentsOnline. The results can be filtered by date and department to refine results returned. We continue to look to improve Discovery as we move forward.
Charles Messenger
We are continuing to develop Discovery and considering how to move from paper catalogues to online as part of this.
Edwin Astill
If you search for “wiltshire regiment”, it returns a number of results. You can use the filters to refine the search results.
Hope this helps.
Emma Bayne
Head of Systems Development
The National Archives
Mon 21 May at 7:08 pm
Thanks for the instructions. But I still feel that it is quite telling that the Head of Systems Development has to tell us (mostly experienced) researchers, how to use the system.
It’s hardly the most intuitive development, is it?
I estimate that some of my previous searches (War Diaries, MIC’s) which could be undertaken with two or three ‘clicks’ now require at least twice that number.
Wed 23 May at 6:42 pm
Emma
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, it does not help.
The medal rolls (not the Medal Index Cards in WO 372) are in WO 329 and are not digitised while there are only 178 out of 5500 digitised at the moment.
Using the Catalogue, I simply need to enter a Regiment name e.g. Warwickshire and a reference of WO 95 and I get all the war diaries for the Warwickshire Regiment.
To replicate that in the new search, I have to go to an Advanced Search, find the Search Within option, click on Current Reference (notice how retrograde this process is already becomng?) enter the reference and I get 0 results.
And I can download the Catalogue results in a spreadsheet.
An awful lot of work, it not a complete redesign, needs to be done before this can even be considered close to being a beta replaceent for the Catalogue.
Mon 28 May at 3:13 pm
Hi there. Iwas in the archives the other day, and had to wait ages to see one of the staff on the desks. One of the other users told me that they were busy dealing with lots of problems with your new Discovery service, which was apparently throwing up all sorts of random and misleading results. Is someone sorting this out? I certainly hope so, as I would hate to see anything affecting the quality of service you normally get here.
Lottie
Tue 29 May at 10:44 pm
On a visit to the National Archives today, I found that the link to Documentsonline has been removed. Searching Discovery for the online record which I knew was available for download (a PCC Will) did not find it. I just entered the surname into the search and got around 15 hits, none of which was the one I wanted. In the end, I Googled Documentsonline which gave 35 hits for the surname, including the one I wanted. Why remove the Documentsonline link when the new system is obviously not working properly?
It’s become over-complicated. Whilst I appreciate that new users may need to be guided through the process, more experienced users do not, so instead of going straight to the record required in a matter of seconds, it took me 20 minutes to find what I wanted.
Fri 8 Jun at 6:04 am
Like other bloggers above, I find the Discovery systemn almost unusable, and cannot belive that it has been allowed to be released. The results of a search appear to be in a random order. They should be in date order within series. A computer, however clever, cannot decide what is relevant or not. That decision has to be left to the researcher. The idea is a complete waste of time and needs to be removed as a concept.
I suspect that the development team did not include historical researchers, and only used IT specialists. They broke the first rule of program design. I used to teach IT in secondary schools and we always said that the “client” had to be in at all stages of developing a new program. The IT specialist should produce a product that does what the client wants, not what they think he needs. The client makes the decisions about the end result. The IT specialist only provides suitable and efficient ways to get that end result.
To remove the old catalogue before all the many faults of the Discovery searches are corrected should be considered a criminal act.
As the senior historical archive of the country your reputation has been dented badly. Get it sorted out, quickly.
The only good point is that the ordering of free documents in the MH12 series is simpler than in the old catalogue.
This “improved” search is a great obstacle to historical research. The professional experts may eventually find ways round the system, but it will put off amateur researchers who normally do a very good job in developing ideas in local history.
Tue 12 Jun at 11:12 pm
Some good news regarding the impending loss of the Catalogue
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/721.htm
I’ve just tried the new search engine and it is at least returning some results based on the search I mentioned above – some of the wrong series but it is an improvement on how bad Discovery is.
Wed 27 Jun at 8:13 am
I visited National Archives yesterday and was forced to use the new discovery system. I found that pre1800 wills did not appear on the system even though I had located them on the old system at home. I was advised by a member of staff to use the google button on the home page and come back into the national archives site on the old system and as if by magic the older wills appeared and I was able to print copies. I also found the new viewing system of wills very difficult to read as previously one just scrolled the wills whereas now a ripple effect takes place which makes it very difficult to follow where you have reached on the document.
Thu 19 Jul at 8:25 pm
I am not a fan of Discovery as it returns searches in such a haphazard way, there is a method, it might help if Guy Grannum’s talk on Discovery was put on the website besides Discovery to help us. The returns are over the place and the old catalogue is much better as you can see all of the hits in a department or organisation without using the filters, I don’t buy into the argument that researchers didn’t know which series to check as the largest would have been returned first on the old catalogue. One of the few advantages I can see to Discovery is not having only up to 3000 hits viewable at one time, but that could surely have been overcome. there are inconsistencies, eg there are 109 ‘missing at transfer’ records for Treasury in the old catalogue but 160 in Discovery!, if someone could explain that I would be glad.
Those of us who have been cataloguers and researchers also have problems finding what we want and the bottom line is that is if it not catalogued correctly or at all in the old catalogue it won’t be much better if at all on Discovery. TNA have now removed the subject heading ‘Weapons’ from entries for Cannon Street and Cannon Row in London (but Discovery should not have been releaesd with them in), but others are still odd or not added at all when it would be useful. It is strange to be able to order a copy of a document in Discovery even when the file is ‘missing in department’!.
Tue 19 Mar at 8:28 pm
Just an update – Discovery is still difficult to use, produces inconsistent results and is a backward step.
But good to see that TNA are patting themselves on the back about it.
Customers, eh? What a nuisance they are
Tue 19 Mar at 9:30 pm
Today was not the best day today at Kew with both Discovery and the catalogue so slow, it would have nothing to do with upgrades would it as it seems every upgrade causes problems.
Sat 6 Apr at 8:16 pm
I have sat here nearly all day trying to download free items from this site, either by direct download or via the shopping basket, THEY DO NOT WORK, you deserve an award, an award for the site that offers so much and delivers so little. Thank you.
Tue 9 Apr at 3:35 pm
Dear David,
We’re sorry that you had a poor experience when using Discovery over the weekend. We had a few technical issues which affected the downloading of some documents. You should now be able to download free documents from our catalogue. Thank you for your feedback.
Fri 26 Apr at 10:00 pm
I have been using the searching faciltiy for many years now, and dreading the discovery facility. Now its up and running , my fears have been totally justified. It is the most un user friendly search engine I have ever used. I find ‘No results” a common reply on what was such an easy task before. Thousands of hits come back only to have to filter and filter…
If i want a name only and know its a WO. piece…there is no easy way around…And searching for a war diary is ridiculous…
REALLY DISAPPOINTED PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THE WORLD IS USING THIS!!! not just me !!
Im just glad i kept the old links on my faves !
Mon 29 Apr at 10:04 am
In my personal experience (I haven’t been directly involved in the development of the new system), for war diaries the key thing to remember (which hasn’t changed from catalogue/Docsonline) is that battalion numbers are given as cardinal numbers, rather than ordinals (ie 2 Battalion, not 2nd Battalion). Searching on (for example):
WO 95 “1 battalion” surrey
very quickly gets you the relevant hits for the East Surreys and Queen’s. You can also use [war diary] or [war diaries] in place of [WO 95], but then you’ll pick up Second World War hits as well.