retrieving Northwest Digital Archives resources using Google

I've been working with other Northwest Digital Archives team members to feed NWDA resource information to Google. While the NWDA interface search features support the most precise searching (e.g., searching using the controlled vocabulary terms defined by the project's archivists), incorporating NWDA documents and digital objects into search engines is important in expanding their use. The identifiers harvested by Google are durable URLs that follow the Archival Resource Key scheme.

Below are two sample search strategies that retrieve NWDA documents, with the number of retrieved results listed in brackets. 80444 is the ARK Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN) for the Northwest Digital Archives.

Google searches and results:
site:nwda-db.wsulibs.wsu.edu ark [result: about 1,580]

inurl:findaid/ark:/80444 [result: about 2,510]

The methodologies for serving NWDA resources to search engines are still being developed. The key driver for Google indexing appears to be linking to NWDA identifiers from multiple, high-use web pages.