JISC

Far from being bland, the cultural and sociological facets of local and regional life in the UK, drawn from census and registration data, provides a fascinating insight into the sociology, demography and economy of the UK. Digitisation is enhancing the research experience and bringing the data within reach of new audiences from across the UK’s learning and academic communities.  

We find out more in an interview with Matthew Woollard and Jenny Ball, Project Director and Project Manager respectively of the Online Historical Population Reports Project . Matthew and Jenny explain how data, much of it previously hidden away in books and microforms at institutions and departments around the UK, is being brought to life through funding provided by JISC’s multi-million pound CSR2 Digitisation Programme.  

JISC: Matthew, could you tell us a little more about the project itself

Matthew Woollard (MW): The aim of the project is to digitise some 200,000 pages of population reports published between 1801 and around 1937. It’s not just the Census, it will also cover the Registrar Generals annual and decennial reports which are published from the 1830s through to the 1930s. So it is 150 years of primary published material which relates to the demography of Great Britain.  An ancillary aspect of this project is to collaborate with the National Archives (TNA) in making a wide selection of the administrative material which surrounded the creation of these statistics. 

JISC: What then are the main drivers to digitise this material?

Jenny Ball (JB): Most of it is extremely hard to access. Many universities don’t have a complete collection of the relevant volumes and of those that do, the copies are on very brittle paper which means using the material is incredibly difficult or even impossible. As you can see from the volume in front of us, the pages are extremely loose, some are torn and missing. Even one of the most useful maps has been cut out. 

JISC: Where did this volume come from?

MW: It was thrown away by a government department. They had a relatively complete set, but many were in very poor condition. They just phoned us up and said “would you like them?” and of course we said “yes!” 

JISC: Saved by the skin of its teeth

JB: Absolutely. There are microfiche and microfilm copies that were produced in the 1980s, but the problem with these is that searching them is extremely time consuming. The indexing of this material was poor, so trying to find any particular table or reference within the microfilm editions is very hard. And not all universities will have access to these microform versions. What we are trying to do by digitising all this material is to bring it to more people, giving them fast and easy access to it via a website. This means they can search and download not only images but also tabular material as well. 

JISC: Once digitised, what do you think people may actually use the material for in Further and Higher Education?

JB: The creation of a web-based resource will provide easy access to digitised images of historical population reports and associated resources. It can enhance learning and teaching in the fields of History and Social Sciences. We are aiming to facilitate access to valuable primary resource material for students and teachers. By making it accessible from a website, we plan to increase awareness of the existence of this information and encourage new areas for enquiry and new methodologies, to the benefit of the wider learning community. 

MW: There have been some researchers who have made quite significant use of this material, and it is often on a very local or regional basis. Bringing it to a much wider audience will enable a much greater understanding of development of population in Britain throughout the 19^th and early 20^th century. 

JISC: How will you promote it to the right people?

MW: I think our first aim is to make sure that those specialist users are made aware of the service so that they can utilise it for their research, but it’s also to try and bring it into the classroom as well. We’re going to be designing learning tools to promote these materials to the widest possible audience. 

We will also develop a gentle introduction to population history and use that to go out to universities and show people how the material can be used generically. They can then adapt this for their own bespoke courses. 

The census has been used for local history courses over the last twenty or thirty years to some level. I think that this will open up the material to wider group of community and family historians who are interested in regional and local history. So it will be used in traditional local history classes which are offered to both undergraduates and postgraduates. It will also be an invaluable tool for continuing education. 

At a continuing education class I teach at the University of Essex, I have used this form of material and having it in a digital form will make it much more available to these students. 

JISC: What plans are there for a pilot service?

JB: We are working on that at the moment, and hope to have a demonstrator available in a few weeks. We wanted to develop a pilot service as quickly as possible to ensure that all types of potential users can utilize what we have developed, and that our basic suppositions about user needs are correct. 

MW: The demonstrator site doesn’t contain a lot of the value added material that we will also be creating. Over a hundred essays will eventually be included which discuss in general terms the development and history of population statistics. We feel that this would be a very useful entrance to the site for our non-expert users. 

JISC: Do you see all of this eventually becoming a Service

MW: It will be integrated within the AHDS History Service. 

JISC: What about the Further Education community?

JB: The essays will really be the starting point. As Matthew pointed out, these discuss in general terms the census but they will also link through to the core primary material within the site so anyone who is not familiar with this type of content will be led through the site to the most useful type of material. 

JISC: Will you clearly label it as being for FE, or will it be integrated?

MW: There is no real reason why any of the resources should be labelled as being specifically for FE or HE. The service will be for all people in education who want to find out about the population of the British Isles in the nineteenth century. 

JISC: Have you got any plans to work together with any of the other CSR2 projects?

MW: We are investigating the possibility of making a number of these different projects fully interoperable through the collaborative use of metadata, but these things are still under development and we are investigating in detail how we can interoperate. 

JB: We are making sure that all other projects are aware of our metadata and development strategies. We are hoping that by working as closely as possible with the other projects as early as possible it will allow us all to see where it will be viable to interoperate in the future. These documents are also available via our website www.histpop.org in the What’s new section. 

JISC: What technical standards are you using for the project?

JB: The standards are METS, MIX, DDI and we are investigating TEI at the moment 

MW: One of the things that is really important about the project, and why we are so grateful for JISC for funding it as a separate project within the AHDS History, is that not only do we give advice about the standards use in the case of the project, we have to show that we use the standards ourselves in the best way. So bringing out best practices in all forms of the digitisation process has proved invaluable for the AHDS History. 

JISC: Are you collaborating with partners internationally?

MW: At the University of Minnesota, we have some firm contacts. There is a project there which is digitising census statistics. They have an online project and we are following progress very carefully. NIWI, in the Netherlands, have digitised many of their census reports. And there are some projects in Australia and there is some Indian census data which has been put online. 

JISC: And what's available now?

MW: Well, we have a limited demonstrator up and running at the moment, which contains what we think that our target audience will find useful, and we're going through some user testing.  Anyone interested in having a look can just go to our site and we'd be happy to get some response.