ORA: Repositories

ORA enhances online repositories using services that are customized to extract data from pages you visit in your web browser.

Supported Repositories

ORA includes custom rules for extracting data from the repositories that it supports. The supported repositories are listed below.

In addition, the Generic Service can extract data from hundreds of other sites that are not part of the repositories listed below.

There are many differences between online repositories, but there are also common elements.

Most repositories have a search feature that returns a result list. Clicking an item in the result list opens a "record details" page with more details about a specific item.
Many repositories include more than one collection.
For example, Ancestry has thousands of collections. An example is the 1880 United States Federal Census.

Collections usually contain the same kind of records, and so the records will have a common set of field definitions. For example, a marriage register collection will usually include the names of the bride and groom, the date and place of the ceremony, etc. In contrast, a baptism collection will have a different set of fields. Date and place may overlap with a marriage collection. Even when fields contain similar data, the field names are often different.
Some repositories, including Find a Grave and Newspapers.com, do not separate records into collections. For those repositories, ORA treats records as being in a default collection.
Most repositories use a unique record ID to identify a specific record in a collection. The record ID can be used to link directly to the record without searching for it again.
Some repositories include links to other records on their record detail pages. The links may be to related records (such as people mentioned in the same record) or to records that may relate to the same subject.