JISC

A JISC Collections-sponsored digital prize has been awarded to Electronic Enlightenment, a website that reconstructs the vital web of 18th century correspondence that marked the start of the modern world.

The resource holds the most wide-ranging online collection of correspondence of the early modern period, including over 55,000 letters in a network of interconnected documents, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid 19th century. The resource holds the most wide-ranging online collection of correspondence of the early modern period, including over 55,000 letters in a network of interconnected documents, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid 19th century.

JISC Collections sponsored the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies prize alongside Adam Matthew Digital, GALE Cengage Learning, and ProQuest to showcase the development, use and presentation of digital resources to assist people researching the period.

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections, said: “By making connections between primary sources, innovative web services like this one are opening up new avenues of inquiry for historians and other researchers.  Our sponsorship of the British Society for Eighteenth Century studies is part of a genuine commitment to making sure that quality resources are within reach of everyone in UK colleges and universities.”

The website, a Bodleian Library project distributed by Oxford University press, saw off competition from the international research community.

The judges said: “With wide coverage, full annotation and presentation, Electronic Enlightenment will be immensely valuable to scholars of the 18th century.”

Dr Robert McNamee, Director of the Electronic Enlightenment Project says, "There are a growing number of extraordinary  resources being offered to scholars in the period; to have EE's hard  work and scholarship recognized as 'best in class' by one of the key learned societies in the field is a great honour. We are sure that this seal of approval will further raise EE's profile and encourage participation by the scholarly community."

JISC Collections’ sponsorship for 2010 is also funding travel grants for overseas academics to attend the Society’s Annual Conference, supporting conference papers by postgraduates from the European Union, as well as the plenary lecture.

This sponsorship of the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies is one part of JISC’s commitment to history resources.  JISC Collections licenses a range of useful resources for use in education and has just announced its license of the ‘History Resource Center: World,’ as part of the Gale Cengage collection, which  is a comprehensive online collection of full-text periodicals, reference works and primary source documents covering world history topics from pre-antiquity up to the present. 

The next online content funded by JISC will include the creation of a search facility for a wide range of electronic early modern and 19th century history and a website that connects up crime-related ephemera from 1508-1939.

Visit the e-Enlightenment website 

Explore the history resources licensed by JISC Collections for UK colleges and universities

Find out more about JISC’s commitment to putting history and other resources online