Looking for What You are Looking for: A Media Researcher’s First Search in a Television Archive

In this essay, the author reflects on her first search with the online search system of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This was part of a pilot study on how media researchers use the audiovisual archive. Her search was being logged, video taped and sound recorded, she had to ‘think aloud’, and all of this in the presence of a fellow researcher from computer sciences who observed her search behaviour. By showing how she found some relevant programmes among more than 1.2 million items, this article illustrates how archival finding by media researchers can be understood as archival looking or ‘exploratory search’.