Questions about "Find Source"

"Find Source" searches for sources in the many thousands of archives we have published in The Digital Archives (with a few exceptions), so you can find out what kind of information is available digitally. Find source is thus a good place to start if you do not know the material you are looking for is scanned-only or searchable, or if you are new to The Digital Archives and wish to explore the scope of the sources. If you are only interested in church books , you can filter by category, or if you wish to see sources from a given date, you can filter by a date period. If you find reading source material difficult, you can filter by "form" and choose to search only for archive material that is transcribed and searchable. When you have located the source(s) you are interested in, you can browse further into these sources and explore their content more closely.

Please note that you cannot use "Find source", to search for names of individuals, unless their name happens to be a part of the source information; for example, a search for "Fridtjof Nansen", a Norwegian explorer, will generate results for the archive "Working comittee for the Fridtjof Nansen polar expedition", as well as drawings of the ship "LPG/T Fridtjof Nansen", from the Kristiansand maintainence shipyard. To find Fridtjof Nansen in archives such as census, church books and other sources, you must search the content within those sources.

"Form" denotes to what degree the archive material is digitalised. "Scanned" means that you can search for a source, but you must manually navigate and read through the pages. "Searchable" means that a source has been transcribed and made searchable, or that the archive was digitally born to begin with. "Full Text", means that entire sources has been transcribed, but the data not structured enough to make accurate searching possible. Thus it is not possible to search in full text material in the same way as transcribed material, but you can easily read the source data with no experience of gothic script.

Transcribe means "to transform writing". In The Digital Archives, the term transcribed is used to describe the data which has been created by transforming content from older, handwritten archive sources into data which can be machine read and thus made searchable.