Developing a software system for intelligent search of a scholarly archive of digital data, representing the stream of recorded events of a personal scholarly life.

The rapidly falling cost of computing, scanning, and data storage had made it feasible—indeed easy—to save in digital form the "recorded" events of a personal life. The so-called "digital revolution" is founded upon these economics, and can lead to very large collections of institutional and personal information in searchable on-line form. But the Special Collections of research and university libraries have not yet moved to this place in the digital world, though we all envision that they will. Why, and what will help?

The first problem is lack of salient examples that are highly regarded—i.e. role models. The second is the need for a methodology that is well worked out, one that can be readily followed or adapted. The third. which is an adjunct to the second, is the need for software (hopefully free and open source) that can assist the job. This software should be at the leading edge of practice in information technology, archiving practice, and historical research methods.

This research will create a software system for intelligent search of a scholarly archive of large amounts of digital data, representing the stream of recorded events of a personal scholarly life: notes, papers, books, photos, letters, memos, e-mail messages, audio and video recordings, and others. These will be organized in a Web-like digital data base, a Historinet. The access and search tool for this Historinet is the Advanced Digital Archive Assistance (ADAA).

The main experimental testbed will be an archive in the Stanford Libraries Special Collections. The proposed work may be important for: a) founding a world-class Stanford collection in the science of Artificial Intelligence (a science now approaching its 50th birthday); and b) forging a "digital on-line" path for other Stanford Special Collections and archive projects that are in the pipeline.

Core personnel:

• Dr. Edward A. Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus
• R. McCool, Research Programmer