MSc students at Aberdeen have developed a new search platform, experimenting with different search functions and displays

“Team Delta”, one of the student groups tasked to carry out a client-focused project as part of the MSc Information Technology course, worked with the Aberdeen Burgh Records Project and the Aberdeen City Archives in winter-spring 2023. The group members were Samuel Lawal, Zixiang Tang, Shahbaaz Hussain, Emmanuel Boamah, Yan Zhang, and Layek Ahmad.

The challenge for the team was to develop a search platform based in an application other than Ruby on Rails, and to develop search facilities that would assist researchers with identifying occurrences of personal names, and with identifying numbers of entries of courts of different types. Team Delta built the new search tool in Python and Django.

The new platform is called ‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’, and it is linked from here.

During the second semester, the team met regularly with Jackson Armstrong who represented the Aberdeen Burgh Records Project as the client. The challenge to create a way to search for courts proved to be the most successful element of the exercise: the courts heading division in the ARO XML corpus is searched specifically for particular strings of text, and the new tool then counts up entries following each heading which is returned in the result, as in the example below. This is a useful way for researchers to quantify how ‘busy’ different types of courts were, with the number of entries representing the cases heard after each heading in the registers.

The challenge to search for names, or groups of names (such as those in the ‘Working List of Provosts, Bailies and Sergeands’) proved more difficult, and the resulting name search facility functions as a keyword search across the whole ARO corpus. This is powerful but non-specific. For both new search facilities, ‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’ includes a graph feature which displays results visually, as number of occurrences by year. The example below shows occurrences for the search term ‘james’:

‘Enhanced Search 1.0 for ARO’ is available via ARO Resources and Publications linked from the ARO website. It is hosted for the time being on pythonanywhere.com.

One highlight of the project was Team Delta’s visit to the Charter Room at the Aberdeen City Archives to see the original council register volumes, to meet with City Archivist Phil Astley, and to demonstrate the new search tool.

The new trail blazed by Team Delta with ‘Enhanced Search 1.0’ is a great pathway for future development of new versions and features of the tool, and new ways for the ARO to be searched and presented.

The Aberdeen Burgh Records Project thanks all of Team Delta, and Bruce Scharlau who coordinated the MSc IT project course.