The digital archive of the Swedish East India Company, 1731‐1813: a joint project of a university library and a history department

The article describes a digitisation project in which Göteborg University Library, Sweden, is publishing a collection of eighteenth century manuscripts on the Internet, in collaboration with its history department. The aims of the project are to make one virtual collection of documents owned by different institutions, to give free and open access to the collection, to save heavily used documents from wear and tear, and to let users enrich the collection by subject indexing and by their own research findings. The texts are the scattered remains of the archives of the Swedish East India Company (1732 ‐1813). These documents, which are in great demand by academic users as well as by the general public, are being digitised as high quality images. Instead of text encoding, indexing is used to provide searchable entries for words in document titles, names of people, and subjects.