Archives Unbound is a big collection of Primary Source archives. The best way to search them is on the GRC platform - this gives you to browse the collections and then do focused research across the whole database.
Browse the available collections within a pre-filtered research topic by selecting from the Explore Topics list on the homepage. You will then be directed to the Explore Collections page where you can select a specific collection or narrow your results using the filter options.
Archives Unbound offers a wide range of search indexes and limiters to construct searches that best suit the user’s needs. Users can search across indexes such as keyword, author/creator, document title, and manuscript number, and can add rows to search against more than one index at the same time. The search filters available from advanced search offer the ability to narrow focus to parameters such as certain date ranges, content types, and languages across collections. Also note that users can submit advanced searches without search terms, but just specifying limiters, which enables the user to explore different slices of content.
This digital humanities tool enables users to explore the frequency of one or more search terms in the content over time, which can suggest the changing importance of particular concepts over the years. It enables users to pose new questions of historical data, e.g., is there a connection between "bread" and "revolution"? Does the frequency of the word "Empire" coincide with the rise of the term "tragedy" and "comedy" in popular discourse?
Users can discover related terms that commonly occur in relation to their own search term, which helps uncover hidden connections, or can be a helpful starting point in the early stages of research. The term cluster for "disaster" might bring up related topics such as "Mining Disaster," "Fire," or "Earthquake," prompting users down different research paths.
