Abstract
Abstract Archival research is foundational to the writing of most works of academic history and is a central part of the professional identity of historians. Despite this, we know very little about what historians do in archives, and how it shapes the process of writing history. This article uses quantitative data from The National Archives of the UK to analyse one part of this puzzle, namely how historians choose what to look at in an archive. It explores the nature of archive catalogues, and their relationship to the collections they describe. It goes on to assess how catalogues shape what historians choose to view when they visit an archive, and concludes by looking more widely at historians’ information seeking practices. Through this analysis the article will argue that external factors have a far greater impact on archival research, and through it the writing of history, than is traditionally acknowledged, and as such historians need to pay considerably more attention to the ways in which their access to archives is shaped by these factors.
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