Historical Agricultural News topic‐specific search tool responds to the challenge of what has come to be known as “big data”: the overwhelming amount of information that often inundates the searcher. The digitization of primary sources has changed the face of archival research, bringing new opportunities—and new challenges—to scholars and laymen alike. Whether someone is working on an academic history or a family genealogy, materials can often be found as close as a laptop or tablet. But while availability of materials has increased exponentially, the ability to easily utilize these materials has not kept pace.

Historical Agricultural News hopes to achieve several purposes: to make the Chronicling America database more accessible to those interested in agricultural history; to demonstrate a new customizable search algorithm, which could be used for different topics in future search engines; and to make transparent the participation of newspapers in distributing and embedding new paradigms in agricultural science and technology.

Источник описания: ag-news.net.