JISC

Start date: 1 January 2007

End date: 1 March 2009

Funding programme: Digitisation programme

Project website: http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/71/

JISC theme(s): e-Resources

Committees: JISC Content Services committee

This project will provide online access to some of the most significant collections of 19th century pamphlets held in UK research libraries. The digitisation of around 23,000 paper copy pamphlets, which focus on the political, economic and social issues that fuelled the great Parliamentary debates and controversies of the 19th century, will provide researchers, students and teachers with an immensely rich and coherent corpus of primary sources with which to study the socio-political and economic landscape of 19th century Britain.

The project

Pamphlets played an important role within the great debates of the 19th century and are a valuable but underused primary resource. This is largely due to their scarcity and the difficulties in accessing them – they are often bound together in large numbers or otherwise hard to find within the few research libraries that hold them. Exposing this material to a wider audience to support both learning and research is of particular value, as their interest lies not only in their content but in the format itself: as a medium for academic or other discourse, expressing personal beliefs, or responding to major societal issues. Understanding why they were produced and why acquired adds an extra dimension to the study of a fascinating period.

This project will capture several whole collections that belonged to individual politicians or political families. Although they have a political emphasis, these collections represent the wide interests of their collectors. Selections of items from larger collections will address areas not represented by the smaller, complete collections in order to provide a broad representation of 19th century pamphlet literature.

Users will be able to access the digitised pamphlets via a special JSTOR/JISC collection. They will encounter this digitised pamphlet collection alongside journals they are using from JSTOR - or via the Google Scholar search service and other public search engines. JSTOR has established a crawl site which will allow public search engines such as Google to index the full text of the pamphlets, enabling polemical voices from the past to be discovered alongside today’s outspoken blogs. The pamphlets will also be accessible via research tools such as Copac and the collection level descriptions in the RSLP/CURL 'Guide to 19th Century Pamphlets'.

The content

The project will create more than 1 million OCR-ed and metadata-enriched digitised images from the paper copy of some 23,000 pamphlets.

See further information

The process

A rich and experienced partnership has been put together to facilitate the creation, delivery, discovery and preservation of this digital content. A key aspect of this project is its use of existing infrastructure, including production systems, preservation and delivery systems, and discovery services. This avoids the considerable expense and delay in developing new systems and also means that the collection can be quickly made available to users. JSTOR will release the collection in batches as the content is ready. As a result, this project expects to be delivering digital content to users within its first year. This will provide an opportunity to gain information from users to help inform some of the later selection of pamphlets being undertaken by the LSE and Bristol university.

The future

In addition to opening up a neglected resource to wide discovery and use, the project will enable connections to be made with the other important literatures recording the controversies of the day, in particular newspapers and parliamentary records. Other projects underway which will complement this collection and are likely to offer opportunities for collaboration are the British Library's newspaper digitisation project and the House of Commons' Hansard digitisation project.

The project plan

Download the project plan to find out more about the detail of the project.

Lead site: University of Southampton

Project partners: BOPCRIS/University of Southampton; University of Bristol; RLUK; Durham University; JSTOR; University of Liverpool; LSE; University of Manchester; MIMAS; University of Newcastle; UCL