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29 Jul 2008

Another update on the electronic resources front: we've added another two new resources to our collection since I wrote my last library update back in May.

Access is available from the Caird Library and E-Library here at the museum. (I've added the links below as they contain more information about each resource, but please note that you will only be able to access the content itself if you stop in and pay us a visit.)

Early English Books online is a fantastic complement to our rare printed collections, and contains digital versions of over 100,000 books, broadsheets and tracts printed in English between 1475 and 1700. Works can be viewed in digital facsimile images, or transcribed text, and can be printed page by page or in entirety.

Ancestry Library is a well-known and hugely popular family history database that will be extremely useful for anyone searching for naval or merchant seamen. It's organised into over 4,000 seperate collections, including census, birth, death and marriage indexes, trade, town and telephone directories and passenger lists. Collections of particular interest include:
  • 1841, 1851, 1961, 1871, 1881, and 1901 censuses for England, Wales and Scotland.
  • Passenger lists for Australia for assisted immigrants 1828-1896 and unassisted 1826-1922, as wells as convict transportation registers and muster rolls.
  • A slave narratives database containing over 20,000 transcripts of type-scripted interviews with more than 3,500 former slaves, collected over a ten-year period from 1929.
  • A passenger ships and images database containing photographs and information on over 3,000 ships.
A lot of our new resources have been acquired as part of a pilot project initiated by the London Museum Libraries and Archive Group (LMLAG). We've been working on this for the last year, so it's really exciting that we're now able to offer these resources to our museum visitors and library users. You can read more about the pilot project on the JISC Collections website.

Renee (Digital Resources Librarian)