Skip to main content

SWOP meeting: "From Parliament Square to Holyrood – historical official publications online"

Belatedly writing up the SWOP meeting, which I posted info about here. Links to available presentations here.

This turned out to be a really useful and interesting event, even though it may have been aimed more at academics and researchers than anything else (it was only me and someone from a Council who weren't academic staff).

  • "Parliament’s past online : a review of sources" Paul Seaward Director – History of Parliament Trust.
This part was full of interesting historical information, and background on UK Parliamentary materials development e.g House of Lords and House of Commons records were stored in different buildings, so a fire in 1834 that destroyed HofC records prior to that date had no effect on HofL records. Parliament Rolls and Statute Rolls are separate. Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (subscription service) and BOPCRIS (an HE and FE academics access only site). So, there's sources, but you have to be an academic to view them, from the looks of it!

  • "From archive to internet: producing an online edition of the records of the pre 1707 Scottish Parliament" Gillian MacIntosh St Andrews University
A review of the background to the development of the Records of the Parliament of Scotland online. Highlighting the lovely option for parallel translations from old Scots, that can be viewed alongside their modern English translations. Noting that there's now a citeable reference style for the old Acts (eg [1604/4/22], denoting year, month and number of the Acts), and original sources are given, unlike the previous printed edition, which is now known to be inaccurate and suffered from the editors personal bias!

  • "Prototyping Hansard" Robert Brook, UK Parliament

An un-official, ad-hoc project, working with the raw Hansard data and reusing it in various ways. It's a very basic, non-prettified version of a website, but it allows users to search on tagged items to find all sorts of information on them, eg, by member name like Tam Dalyell. They specifically don't work with the most current data, stopping at 2004.


I have to confess to tuning out slightly for the following presentations:

  • "Online Historical Population reports" Matthew Woollard – Project Director, Online Historical Reports Project.
  • "Digitisation of Parliamentary Texts at BOPCRIS" Dr Julian Ball, Project Manager, BOPCRIS
  • "ProQuest Parliamentary Papers" Rob Newman, Senior Editor, Proquest CSA

These were very definitely aimed at the academic sector, and researchers of population / history, and therefore not of particular use to me.

But overall, definitely an afternoon well spent - I have a far better understanding of where the historical parliamentary materials came from, why there's gaps, why the printed collected Scottish Acts are unreliable, and now know about a funky online tool to play with Hansard! :D
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's in a name?

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is
9 comments
Read more

cpd23 Week One - Blogging

So, week one of cpd23 begins, and participants are asked to set up a blog, if they don't already have one. Well, I've had this blog (in it's previous incarnation as "Jennie Law" for four years, so I think I'm good for the "setting up and getting used to blogging" part of Thing One :) I set this blog up originally as just somewhere to share the interesting things I found around the internet, with no real expectation of many others finding or reading it (and hence very little thought about a good name). At the time, there were only one or two other law librarians that I knew of blogging, so it didn't seem like it would be something long term, but for that moment, it felt good to be able to share some random thoughts with other law librarians, and to be able to learn from their blogs. I've stuck with it, despite a few periods of thinking "I've got nothing to say!" (and then finding a month or so later that I suddenly had a flood
4 comments
Read more

Where are the UK Librarian blogs?

In response to various posts wondering about the strange lack of UK library / librarian blogs, I thought I’d have a look for myself to see where they’re all hiding. I did a search on Google Blogs, just using the words “ uk ” and “librarian”, and looked for posts published ‘anytime’, which gave me 24 pages of blog listings. This included spam blogs, duplicate postings, and various sites including ‘ uk ’ in the text of a link they’d posted. I learned a few things in the process. Lots of blogs post occasionally about librarians, without necessarily being written by librarians. If a blogger doesn't fill out their location information, it can be quite hard to work out where they're based without having to read a few posts and look for cultural references. “ UK ” also means "University of Kentucky ” ( See? ). There are quite a few interesting English language library bloggers, but they're not on this list 'cos they ain't in the UK. There really doesn’t
10 comments
Read more