Going Digital

General Digital Research Information:

• To start here is a presentation my friend Ian Milligan produced to help his students learn basic digital research skills: Going Digital.
• Also see Sean Kheraj’s blog post on the Top 5 Indispensible Digital History Tools.
• For a more comprehensive list of digital tools see Bill Turkel’s Going Digital in Two Hours website.

Finding Primary Sources in British History:

Web:

• The internet archive has a huge collection of out of copyright published books and pamphlets that can be downloaded as PDF or ePub files. You can find anything from classic books by Charles Dickens and J.S. Mill to lesser known travel narratives describing parts of Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. Google and Microsoft helped digitize almost all the books in some of America’s largest libraries, so the collection is very large and growing. It also has a collection of audio and film that might include early audio recordings, such as this collection of Churchill’s war time speeches.
• Google Books has many of the same books and pamphlets as the Internet Archive, but sometimes the better search engine makes it easier to find something. However, it does not offer as many download options as the Internet Archive.
• Project Gutenberg has a similar collection of out of copyright books.
• British History Online hosts a large collection of both primary and secondary sources. This includes an impressive collection of Maps and Surveys for local history projects.
• Another great local history resource is the Vision of Britain that brings together census statistics, maps and descriptions of cities, parishes and towns in Britain.

York Library Website:

• Here is the Library’s Guild to Finding Primary Sources.
• Nineteenth Century British Periodicals.
• Times Digital Archive.
• 19th Century British Library Newspaper Collection.
• British Government Documents, which includes all the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers from the late 17th century onward.
• Collections of Autobiographies, Memoirs and Letters.
• Mass Observation Online: a collection of diaries used to track public opinions from the 1930s and 1940s.

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