Cabinet Papers 1915-1978 Digitisation
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Over half a million images were digitised from microfilms to create an online resource with access to the full-text Cabinet papers from 1915-1978, plus a contextualisation package. These collections of minutes and memoranda, which cover both peace and wartime, constitute a fascinating record of the way in which the British government grappled with events of the 20th century.
Executive Summary
See the Cabinet Papers 1915-1978 collection
From its outset the Cabinet Papers Project aimed to provide an online resource for learning and research that would make The National Archives’ holdings of the Cabinet Papers available to the public, and in particular to Higher Education and A-level students. The aims and objectives of this project have remained consistent and The National Archives is now able to provide an entire collection of searchable digitised images of the Cabinet Papers to users of the site as well as providing relevant information and study guidance for both teachers and students of British 20th-century history.
This project broke new ground for The National Archives in the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The ease of access that the OCR provides to the documents is of great value to research, however this project has also discovered the limitations of OCR in its inability to recognise images, foreign text etc. and the use of manually transcribed metadata is useful here in ensuring access to the document. The sheer quantity of digitised content used by the Cabinet Papers project has precipitated a move forwards in The National Archives’ processes for the handling and loading of documents for digital storage and presentation. New processes have been developed for Quality Assurance (QA) and correction of OCR and for managing document releases within the collection.
The Cabinet Papers site has been tailored to the needs of its projected users in a drive to make the content, not only available and accessible to the public, but useable and relevant for the intended audience. Part of this user centred design process has been the creation of the study packages and educational information available on the site. The large amounts of additional content involved in this project has allowed The National Archives to increase its experience of using internal content management systems and the Cabinet Papers site now provides a structured set of informative pages that can be added to and expanded in the future.