Reference desk
Find the artefact, not the article
Tell the desk what you are looking into. It searches digitised archives for the thing itself — a letter in the writer’s own hand, a charter as sealed, a register as kept — and says plainly how far each result sits from the event. When it finds nothing, it says that too.
Sign in to use the reference desk. It is limited per account because every question runs real searches and a real model, and both cost money.
What this desk will not do
- It will not tell you a document exists unless a search returned it. If it cannot find something, it says so rather than describing where it might be.
- It will not write, complete, or paraphrase the contents of a document it has not been shown. Excerpts are retrieved text, verbatim, or absent.
- It does not decide what a source is. Whether something is the object itself, a later edition, or modern scholarship is worked out from the catalogue record, and the reasoning is shown on every result.