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Discovery: our new catalogue
Introducing Discovery
The National Archives holds over 11 million historical government and public records, one of the largest archive collections in the world. From Domesday Book to modern government papers and digital files, our collection includes paper and parchment, electronic records and websites, photographs, posters, maps, drawings and paintings.
Our current Catalogue, one of the first of its kind, provides a free online search facility for the collection, but has its drawbacks. A certain level of knowledge - whether of the subject matter or record series itself - is currently required to successfully search the Catalogue, which can make it difficult for new users to find what they are looking for without assistance.
We are in the process of developing a replacement system for the Catalogue: Discovery. Discovery will make it easier to search and use our collection for everyone, from first-time users to experienced researchers.
Read our Frequently Asked Questions about Discovery.
What this means for online users
We have already released a beta (test) version of Discovery, which has been available for a several months to allow users to provide feedback on the service to enable us to develop it further. Discovery features new ways to search our collection, in line with the raised expectations of today's web users. Discovery allows users to explore and browse our collection in new ways that do not require any prior knowledge of our collection, such as map-based geographical searches.
Discovery will be released initially to run alongside the Catalogue and our digitised document delivery service, DocumentsOnline. Discovery will eventually entirely replace our current Catalogue and our DocumentsOnline service. This will make it easier for customers to search for records and order digitised copies (if available), all in one place.
We are adding new features to Discovery on a regular basis - the latest release includes advanced search functionality, as well as fixing some of the bugs and glitches from earlier releases.
New features available
We're also developing a feature to enable our users to enhance our collection by tagging our records. We have already started to explore different ways of doing this, both on our website and on other established social websites. Last year we published some Colonial Office photographs on Flickr as part of our Africa Through A Lens project, and invited customers to add descriptions and geographic locations to images that we previously knew little about. We hope to eventually add this information to record descriptions in Discovery, making a distinction between official catalogue descriptions and user-generated content while allowing users the flexibility to describe records in new ways.
To receive regular updates on new additions and developments to Discovery, sign up to our free monthly enewsletter or follow @UKNatArchives on Twitter, using the hashtag #TNADiscovery.
