The project to add a description of every archival collection at Hoover to the Online Archive of California is complete, with the OAC now containing descriptive overviews of all Hoover's 5,725 collections, as well as detailed container lists for about twelve hundred of those collections.
Previously researchers had to visit both the OAC and Stanford’s online catalog, Socrates, to obtain all the descriptive information about Hoover’s archival collections. Because the collections described in Socrates are hidden from web indexing services such as Google, researchers searching the Internet or the OAC missed many of our collections. During the past year, however, Hoover staff members have been converting the Socrates records to the special XML format used by the OAC and uploading those XML files to the OAC. Some cleanup work remains, but the main project is complete.
In the future, descriptions of new collections will be added to both Socrates and the OAC. Hoover staff will continue creating detailed container lists for the collections that need them; those lists will be added to the OAC and noted on the Hoover website.
