18th-Century Parliamentary Papers

Project start date: 2005-04 Project end date: 2007-03
During the eighteenth century the British Parliament ruled over one of the most powerful nations on earth. The matters it debated ranged from the minutely personal, such as individual divorce cases or family financial affairs, through the local, for example the construction or roads or harbours, to matters of the most central national importance, like electoral reform, wars and treaties, catholic emancipation or law and order. All of these matters were reflected in Parliament's proceedings, in committee reports, bills, accounts of debates, and so on. But the mass of parliamentary papers is poorly indexed, and the complex inter-relationships between the documents difficult to understand. As a result it has often been difficult to mine the richness they contain. BOPCRIS makes all of this vast and exciting collection of material online for the first time, to allow it to be effectively exploited by anyone interested in anything that went on in Britain - and its colonies - from 1688 to 1834.
Subject domains: 
Methods usedCategory
2d Scanning and photographyData capture
IndexingData analysis
Text recognitionData capture
Interface designData publishing and dissemination
preservationStrategy and project management
textContent types
Funding sources: 
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Content types created: 
Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used: 
Agora
Source material used:  
House of Commons and House of Lords Bills, Papers and Commons Papers
Digital resource created:  
Over 1 million scanned printed and hand written pages from all surviving 18th century Parliamentary papers, bills, journals and reports.
Data Formats created: 
XML
Metadata standards employed: 
Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS)

Institutions affiliated with this project: 

UK HE institutions involved:
University of Southampton
University of Cambridge
UK HE institutions involved:
British Library

Project staff and expertise: 

Principal staff member:Julian Ball, Mark Brown, Richard Wake, Christine Fowler, Wendy White
Other staff:Computing officer(s) / Technical supporter(s)
External expertise:


Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record
Author(s) of recordValentina Asciutti
Title18th-Century Parliamentary Papers
Record created2009-04-29
Record updated2010-06-15 13:04
URL of recordhttp://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2671
Citation of recordValentina Asciutti: 18th-Century Parliamentary Papers.
<http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2671>
created: 2009-04-29, last updated 2010-06-15 13:04