The Big UK Domain Data for the Arts and Humanities project was funded by the AHRC to build on the work we started in AADDA, but to work much more closely with individual historians by providing bursaries to support their direct engagement with us and with our search service.
During this process, I expanded our indexing capabilities, with the lessons learned and feedback from the AADDA project being used to further develop our indexing software, and to scale the index itself up to 3.5 billion resources (1996-2013).
More importantly, during this process I started to understand how this historical research use case different from traditional search and information retrieval models. This has significant consequences not only for how we index our archives, but all the way back through the life-cycle of the content, changing the way we crawl the web.