Bracers (III): System Review and Querying the Topic_Text Field
Kenneth Blackwell · Russell the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies · 1995
he Bertrand Russell Archives Catalogue Entry and Retrieval System has amassed a textual database of 60,400 records describing Bertrand Russell's correspondence.I At the time of writing over 59,000 had been proofread, revised and corrected by specialists.Supplementing the formal descriptions of letters are 42,000 lines of text, precis and commentary in the Topic_Text field.It is impossible to say in advance of BRACERS' completion how many letters are preserved in the Bertrand Russell Archives, but my feeling for it is that these records represent close to 70 percent of the correspondence.2 The initial system, initiated in January 1988 by the Director of Archives and Research Collections and devised by Roland Carter of McMaster's CIS, was finalized in early 1990.3A major analysis of the system was undertaken in February 1992.4Later that year I published a users' guide to the syscem, called Searching BRACERS.In January 1993 I For an early progress report, see my "BRACERS: the Bertrand Russell Archives Catalogue Entry and Retrieval System"; Russell n.s. 10 (1990): 158-64.2 Such item-Jevd descriptions are not covered in standard archival computer manuals, and much of what follows had to be invented independently (of RAD, for example).3 At the same time there was a shift in software that affected table integrity.Up to 1,000 records were lost (the exact number is undetermined, because the old system used different record numbers for additional Topic_Text lines).4 "Maintaining Progress in BRACERS" (internal report).