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Seax is the Essex Record Office's online computerised catalogue. It contains written descriptions of every document in the archive, but it does not contain the text of the documents themselves. Some entries have a digital image of the document, picture or map, so you can see the item. This guide gives a brief outline on using Seax.
What is Seax?
Seax is the name that we have given to the computer program designed and written for the Essex Record Office. Unlike some other computer program names, Seax is not an acronym: the letters do not represent words. A seax is a curved Saxon sword, and a row of three seaxes appears in the symbol of the county of Essex. So the name Seax identifies our new archive computer system with Essex.
What does Seax do?
There are two parts to Seax. One is the part used by the public to search for records relevant to their research. This contains the complete text of all the Essex Record Office catalogues and its indexes. You can use the public access module of Seax to search for any documents relevant to your research.
The other element of Seax is called Seax Explorer. This is used by staff to record new collections of records, to catalogue and index them, to produce documents from the strongrooms and issue them to the public, and to record any photographic or conservation work done.
What is in Seax?
Seax contains all the Essex Record Office catalogues. These are written descriptions of all the documents in the archives, collected from across the County and beyond in the 60 or so years since the Record Office was first established. All these catalogues have been converted to Seax and can be searched electronically, making searches quicker and more thorough than was ever possible using the old card indexes and paper catalogues. The database is huge; the converted catalogues comprise approximately 80,000 A4 pages and, as archivists catalogue new collections directly into Seax, it continues to grow.
What is not in Seax?
Seax contains the catalogue descriptions of the documents, but it does not contain the text of the documents themselves. For example, it will tell you that there is a 1665 hearth tax assessment for the County, or a parish register for Fyfield dated 1754-1812, but it will not show you the content of those records. If you are looking for an ancestor, you will still need to search the whole document for entries relating to the name you are researching. Family historians will find it useful to search Seax for references to a family name, and they may discover a wide range of documents where the name appears in the catalogue description, but the main sources for family history - copies of parish registers, census returns, wills etc on microfiche/microfilm - can be accessed directly without needing to use Seax.
Using Seax
You can search for a word, a combination of words or a phrase, such as place or institutional names, personal names, subjects or document types. You can refine your search further by adding dates – for example, maps of Maldon between 1650 and 1700. You can also read complete catalogues or go to a specific reference, if you know which collections of records are of interest to you.
By logging in with your reader’s ticket number, when you have found the documents you want, you can order them for study simply by pressing the Order item button and entering your CARN reader’s ticket number.
How does Seax work?
Seax is very easy to use. At every stage throughout Seax there is either 'Help' on screen or a 'Help' button which will take you to a separate screen which explains as clearly as possible how to use each element of Seax.
Images
Seax has been designed to incorporate digital images. Documents will be scanned digitally and added in to the system so that they can be viewed on screen. There is also a facility to manipulate the image, to improve its legibility or enhance its appearance. More images are added to Seax weekly, and the number available online continues to increase. It is now possible to view online all the Essex parish registers from before 1700 which are in our collection.
