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The Rural History Centre Library cataloguing project: assimilating the MAFF Library |
The library of the Museum of English Rural Life is the national library for the history of farming, food and the countryside. During 2002 the library was able to enhance significantly its collections through the donation by DEFRA's library of:
• about 250 shelf metres of periodicals, dating from between the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries
• the Fussell collection of 600 classic farming texts from about 1750 onwards
• a large collection of parliamentary papers and royal commission reports from the mid-nineteenth century onwards
• about 100 bound volumes of trade and other pamphlets since the late nineteenth century
• about 4,000 books
The Project, which started in November 2003 and was completed in September 2005, enabled this collection to be physically integrated into the existing MERL library, and the records to be created for the online catalogue, transforming the accessibility of these resources for researchers. |
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Wars of Liberation, Wars of Decolonisation: The Rhodesian Army Archive Project |
The Rhodesian Army Archive project was set up by the University of the West of England, Bristol, in September 2006, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to catalogue the extensive collection of papers and other materials from the Rhodesian Army Archive, which is held by the Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. The archive was deposited in uncatalogued boxes at the Museum. However, despite this richness of material, there was no way of locating specific documents, and no organising principle behind the boxes. The RAA project is producing a comprehensive catalogue to these unique materials. The catalogue will make the archive accessible for researchers and others interested in the Rhodesian military, their struggle to suppress African insurgency, and their ultimate failure. The catalogue, which is based on the Bamboo software, will become available with a searchable database on the UWE website. |
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Connected Histories |
Connected Histories (Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900) will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.
Through a combination of web crawling and the application of Natural Language Processing methodology the project will create a non-intrusive, distanced tagging of the data within those distributed sources to facilitate more sophisticated and structured searching.
Using metadata and other available background information, the project will create a search facility that can adapt to each resource to allow searching across a range of chosen sources for names, places and dates as well as keywords and dates. Background information about search results and a facility to save and export search results for further analysis will also be provided. An online collaborative workspace will allow users to document connections between resources.
In total, Connected Histories will provide access to 14 major databases of primary source texts, containing more than 412 million words, plus 469,000 publications, 3.1 million further pages of text, 87,000 maps and images, 254,000 individuals in databases, and over 100 million name instances. |
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Survey of Saint Dedications in Medieval Scotland |
The chief aim of the project has been to construct a searchable database with a web-site interface recording and mapping dedications to saints in Scotland prior to 1560. It is hoped that the database will be useful as a research, reference and teaching tool for the study of saints’ cults and the wider examination of piety and devotion in medieval Scotland. The database has been compiled through a systematic survey of published sources relating to the medieval kingdom and a significant body of unpublished archival material. Please note that there are a number of sources, both published and archival, that were not included within the limits of the initial survey. The database should not, then, be regarded at this stage as a comprehensive register of medieval dedications to saints in Scotland, although it does contain sufficient information to allow the spread of particular dedications, and by implication individual cults, to be examined chronologically and spatially. A subsidiary aim of the project has been to stimulate and facilitate further research activity relating to the cult of saints and medieval piety in Scotland. |
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The origins of early modern literature: recovering mid-Tudor writing for a modern readership |
This project aims to redress the critical neglect of mid-Tudor writing, a period which saw the Reformation, the consolidation of the Tudor state, and the rise of English as a national language. The project team have compiled a searchable, on-line catalogue of literary works printed in English, 1519-1579 - the decades which precede, and lay the foundations for, the canonical period of English Renaissance Literature. This catalogue includes details of titles, authors, printers, booksellers, dedicatees, entries in the Stationers Register, the format in which books were published, and type faces and foreign languages used. It also contains a list of contents for each work, and information about genres, subjects, sources and literary coteries, as well as short essays on the context for each work. The catalogue significantly adds to the information available on ESTC and other bibliographical resources, providing scholars, students and members of the general public with a first point-of-call for research on works from this formative period of early modern literature. You can browse the site, or search by title, date, subject, genre, or surname. The catalogue offers a representative selection of literary works (broadly defined) published between 1519 and 1579, but it does not aim to be comprehensive. |
