Wanted Entities

The types of questions already indicate whether the user primarily seeks archival or non-archival materials or factual information. The wanted entity therefore represents the entity which is primarily referenced by either the wanted archival or non-archival materials or by the wanted facts. The wanted entity indicates the perceived immediate ontological interest of the inquiry but not necessarily its general research interest. In this respect, the wanted entity is a compound statement derived from the type of question stating whether resources of any kind, resources of a specific type, a specific item, or factual information is wanted, as well as the entityprimarily referenced by the wanted resource or fact.

For example, if the type of question is “specific item” and the wanted entity is “person relation” then the user is seeking one or more specific archival or non-archival documents that refer to a person and their direct or indirect relationship(s) with other actors; for example, the membership of the person in a political party. Note that these wanted entities are of course aggregations of more specific wanted entities that were subsequently subsumed into a shared and more abstract yet also more inclusive category during the analysis.

The referenced wanted entities are grouped into seven principal categories, which emerged iteratively from the analysis. They compriseActors (including persons and groups)Activities / Events(including unintentional events and activities),Documents,Things,Places, andGeneral Topics. Each category contains one or more sub-categories which specifically denote the nature or context of the wanted entity.

Table 2– Wanted Entities

Actor Description

personorgroup A broad or unspecified amount of any kind of (biographical) factual information or documents eitherabout,by, orgenerally relatedto a person or group. A typical principal example is a request for all information about the life and fate of a particular person. If the interest of the inquiry can be determined more specifically then one of the following sub-types is applied.

-by personorby group In few cases the question specifically and exclusively asks for documents byan actor as the creator or keeper of those documents.

-person identityor group identity

Facts or documents related to an actor focusing onwhoperformed or participated in an activity, theexistenceof an actor, thenameor iden-tificationof an actor, including, as a special case, the responsibility or mandateof an actor. For example, the designation of a German police battalion in Norway during the Second World War, the proper name of a particular person, the name of a particular surveillance agency in the Weimar Republic, who negotiated, which battalion was in Norway, which organization had been responsible in the GDR for organizing journeys abroad.

-person activityor group activity

Facts or documents related to an actor in relation to an activity focusing onwhatan actor did, orif,how, andwhyan actor did something; the behaviour and role of an actor, or the motivation and aims of an actor in relation to an activity, or the personal contribution of an actor to an activity with multiple participants. For example, whether an actor did or did not conduct or participate in an activity; whether a person has lived in a country or has been at a particular place, applying for citizenship, having participated in a demobilization or negotiations, having performed guard duty, whether it is true that Adenauer sent his son to Bordeaux to act as a defender, whether the church intervened, about the actions of a police battalion; How did they get to the UK?

Why did so many desert? How did the state act regarding criminal prosecution? In what way did the FRG stir the investigations? Why did no chancellor visit Oradour? What was the position of the SED towards the ideological changes? How did a specific organization make decisions?

-person perceptionor group perception

Facts and documents related to an actor and his or her perception, reception, assessment, attitude, or judgement. For example, how did authorities in the GDR perceive UN politics?

-person relationor group relation

Facts and documents related to various kinds of direct or indirect rela-tionships between actors such as family and membership relarela-tionships, including meetings. Examples are questions regarding whether two per-sons knew each other or whether a person was the member of a political party, held a specific citizenship, a particular nationality, or belonged to a particular district command.

-person placeorgroup place

Facts and documents related to an actor and a place. For example, the place where a particular police garrison was stationed in Norway during the Second World War, or the places where a particular police battalion was in Norway during the Second World War.

Event Description

event Facts or documents generally related to an event such as an aircraft accident.

activity Facts or documents generally related to an activity such as the minutes of the parliamentary sessions of the Reichstag.

-activity role Facts or documents related to an activity and whether and how that activity occurred; that is, its principle existence or role, ramifications, or general history. For example, whether a criminal case initiated in-terventions, the role of the UNO policy in the state apparatus of the GDR, whether a prosecution was a topic in political relations between the GDR and FRG, the role of social policy in the propaganda of the SED, the history and establishment of the ’Day of the Stamp’, whether there have been talks about organizing a meeting, or whether a journey has been discussed.

-activity date Whenan activity occurred: Facts or documents related to an activity and a date such as when a medal was awarded, or a date of marriage.

-activity place Wherean activity occurred: Facts or documents related to an activity and a place, such as where an old Bible was printed.

Document Description

document Facts or documents related to various bibliographical information such as the number of existing copies, pointers to secondary literature or finding aids describing archival holdings. The Wanted document serves as a general and inclusive category in cases where the entity referred to or particular interest cannot be reasonably determined or does not fit any of the other categories.

-document identity The Wanted comprises information on whether a particular call number is correct, or two holdings are identical, whether the type of document is a biography or report; it also includes questions related to the form of a document such as whether the document has been digitized.

-document extent The Wanted comprises information on the extent of a file, series, holding, collection etc. such as how many files the holding contains, or how many pages are in the file.

-document provenance The Wanted comprises information on the past and current custody or holding of documents such as whether the files of the district committees of the Kulturbund have been coherently delivered to the responsible town archives, whether the archive assumed custody of films, or where a particular archival collection is being administered.

-document content The Wanted comprises information related to the contents of an archive, collection, aggregation of items or single items such as a general content description, whether a specific person is mentioned in a text, whether specific features such as personal marks appear, or what specific mark-ings in a text mean.

Thing Description

thing Facts or documents related to a thing such as a building or features of a building, ships, submarines, or aircraft.

Place Description

place Facts or documents related to a place such as a map of a particular city, a map of a drainage system and plant of a particular place.

General Topic Description

general topic Facts or documents related to a general topic such as "correspondence for armament and war economy", "limits of growth", "zero growth",

"ecology", or "milk analysis project".

Figure15shows the distribution of wanted entities among the primary categories for the whole sample. The primary category Actorsleads clearly with a count of 292 which equals 61% of all wanted entities in the whole sample. Also significant areActivities / Eventswith 122 occurrences (26%), of which only two were unintentional events, and furtherDocumentswith 43 occurrences (9%).

Figure 15– Primary categories of wanted entities.

Figure16shows the distribution of the wanted entities per sample. The relative distribution exhibits no significant deviations, with the exception of the categoryThings,which only appears in the National Archives of Norway sample, and a slightly higher relative number ofActivitiesin the German Federal Archives sample. Further,EventsandActivitiesare displayed distinctly in this figure in order to show that only two unintentional events occur as wanted entities in the National Archives of Norway sample.

Figure 16– Primary categories of wanted entities per sample.

The primary categoryActorscan be further divided into groups and persons. The numbers for both entities correspond in both samples: persons occur 138 times in the German Federal Archives sample, which amounts to 63% within the Actorscategory, while in the National Archives of Norway sample only 47 persons occur as wanted entities (64% within the same category). Groups appear 80 times (37%) in the German Federal Archives sample and 27 times in the National Archives of Norway sample.

Figure17further differentiates between the various sub-groups of the primary category Actors.⁶¹ Inquiries generally regarding actors constitute by far the largest group in both samples followed by actors in the context of activities.

61Note thatpersonsandgroupshave also been differentiated during the analysis but are not displayed in the figure.

Figure 17– Details of the wanted entities group Actors.

Archival materials by an actor are more important in the German Federal Archives sample while inquiries regarding aspects of identification are more important in the National Archives of Norway sample. Questions about the perceptions of actors only occur in the German Federal Archives sample while relationships between actors are present in both. Actors, dates and places are insignificant in both samples.

The second largest primary category of wanted entities, Activities, is shown in Figure18 together with its sub-groups. Inquiries generally interested in activities constitute the largest group in both samples with 73 occurrences (76%) in the BArch sample and 17 occurrences in the National Archives of Norway sample (79%).

Figure 18– Details of the wanted entities group Activities.

The role of activities (activity.role) and, to a greater extent, of activities and dates (activ-ity.date) are much less important. Only one inquiry in the National Archives of Norway sample concerned an activity in the context of a place (activity.date).

Finally, the distribution of the primary categories of wanted entities among the two main categories of the question types resource discovery and fact-finding is shown in Figure19. The wanted entities are slightly more diverse in the case of resource discovery questions, while actors and documents appear to be more important in fact-finding questions.

Figure 19– Primary categories of wanted entities per primary categories of type of questions.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the wanted entities cannot be easily compared to the Wanteds in Duffand Johnson (2001) since both are based on different conceptualizations.

The interest of users in actors is apparent from the figures discussed. Interestingly, not only individual persons but also groups are relevant. In this context, the discovery that activities are also significant interests of inquiries, which contradicts the findings by Duffand Johnson (2001), is important since activities are acts carried out by persons and groups. This discovery thus further underlines the relevance of actors. Unintentional events, on the other hand, are insignificant.

The various identified sub-types of wanted entities indicate that the interests are more diverse than the primary categories may suggest and can provide initial indications for the further interpretation and formalization of the interest of the inquiries.

Even though the wanted entities are more meaningful and expressive than the Wanteds described by Duffand Johnson (2001), they constitute only a preliminary understanding of the users’ interests and the relevant subject matter to which these interests pertain. The wanted

entities are only the first step towards a more thorough and explicit representation of these needs. As the initial building blocks of the ontological model, the given entities and especially the wanted entities need to be further analyzed and investigated with respect to which relevant relationships exist between them.

One important intermediate step during this continuing interpretative process is to determine how directly the further interest of an inquiry can be translated into an ontological represent-ation; that is, material facts (IV:3.1) adequate to the archival and historical epistemological framework (IV:2).