Exeter’s open archive reaches readers in 100 countries
A document kept safely in an archive can still be out of reach for the people whose history it holds. In Exeter, a growing digital collection is helping close that gap.
The University of Exeter reports that its Digital Archive of the Middle East has reached more than 16,000 people since 2023, across 100 countries. Readers can explore letters, diaries, maps and photographs without a subscription or university login, searching in English, Arabic and Sorani Kurdish.
Digitisation assistant Beth Mills describes the work behind that access: photographing fragile material, preparing files and adding multilingual descriptions. Her account also explains a practical limit: text-recognition software does not support every language, so making a document available does not always make its words searchable.
The reach figures come from the university, rather than an independent assessment of how people use the collection. Even so, removing travel and login barriers gives more readers a way into histories once confined to a reading room.
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