Reference
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.
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.