Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Purpose – The National Archives (TNA) is the UK Government's official archive. It stores and maintains records spanning over a 1,000 years in both physical and digital form. Much of the information held by TNA includes references to place and frequently user queries to TNA's online catalogue involve searches for location. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how TNA have extracted the geographic references in their historic data to improve access to the archives.Design/methodology/approach – To be able to quickly enhance the existing archival data with geographic information, existing technologies from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) have been utilised and adapted to historical archives.Findings – Enhancing the archival records with geographic information has enabled TNA to quickly develop a number of case studies highlighting how geographic information can improve access to large‐scale archival collections. The use of existing methods from the GIR doma...

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