JISC

Overview

The project will deliver up to 1 million pages from all surviving 18^th century Parliamentary papers, bills, journals and reports using an automated workflow, and Britian’s first robotic scanner. The project will allow users to browse, search and download the texts from documents of all surviving 18th century Parliamentary papers, bills, journals and reports. By making previously obscure materials accessible, it will release potential to reassess the role of the 18th century parliaments at a critical time of change.

Watch a video on the resource

The project

Search the complete run of documentation generated by Parliament’s papers and bills, and its day-to-day workings, including House of Commons and House of Lords Journals and Reports. BOPCRIS will offer unprecedented access and flexibility to search, question and analyse 18th-century Parliamentary papers, bills and journals in a completely new way. The century which bore witness to the Industrial Revolution and the American War of Independence (1775–83) is recorded at the highest level in the parliamentary papers of the era.

Momentous stories are included, such as an in-depth account of the scandal-ridden tenure of Britain’s ‘first prime minister’ Sir Robert Walpole (1721–42). You can get a feel for Anglo-American relations in the 18th century, as you can for the early days of British rule in India during the raj. Many others are included as well, such as Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches and John Harrison’s longitude clocks.

The paper copies of this material which still exist are not generally held on libraries’ open shelves and are poorly indexed, but this electronic resource will allow universal access to high-quality, fully searchable digital surrogates of the complete records.

The content

House of Commons and House of Lords Bills, Papers and Commons Papers: estimated number of documents:

The process

Revolutionary technology is bringing the project to life. For the first time ever in the UK, a Swiss-built one-ton robotic scanner is being used. It is capable of working its way extremely fast and delicately through up to 1,000 pages an hour of original historical documents. The pages are turned with vacuum technology, their edges pinpointed by lasers. This output rate has freed up staff time, so that they can devote more attention to indexing and classification, enhancing the eventual resource.

BOPCRIS is applying 21st-century classification and search-and-retrieval methods to 18th-century material. The team has re-organised the access points for all 14,000 documents under Library of Congress subject headings. The end user will benefit from the familiarity and comprehensiveness of this international standard. Full-text searching will be possible using an innovative approach: while the screen displays individual page scans, a hidden full-text version resides in the background to facilitate keyword searching. Material will also be browsed through traditional tools such as tables of contents. Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of individual pages will be available for download.

The future

The project will deliver a pilot demonstrator in Summer 2005. This will be accompanied by lab-based user testing to refine the User Interface and Resource Discovery tool development. Full service commences in March 2007. The robotic scanner itself is a long-term investment and there is ample scope for its application to other national projects.