British Official Publications
DOI
Short description
This dataset contains the descriptive metadata of two collections in the Digital Viewer: British Parliamentary Publications, and British Non-Parliamentary Publications. Together they comprise more than 16,000 individual publications, dating from the early eighteenth century to the turn of the millennium.
Subject coverage. The two collections contain publications over the full range of UK government and administration: parliamentary and local government, legislation and elections; healthcare and public health; education; food and agriculture; the armed forces; justice and prisons; the economy; transport. There is a particular strength in papers relating to Ireland between 1801 and 1922, which together account for more than three quarters of the whole.
Provenance. The two collections are (in the main) the product of two major projects of digitisation, supplemented with small amounts of other material digitised as part of other funded projects and in response to local need. However, all materials were selected in the first instance from the print holdings of the Ford Collection of Official Publications, held at the Hartley Library. This collection was brought to Southampton in the 1950s, based on holdings first assembled by the Carlton Club in London, and were added to over time by Professor and Dr Ford. The Fords compiled ‘breviates’ or ‘select lists’ of official publications, in seven volumes covering the years 1833 – 1983; references in the data to ‘Ford lists’ are to these publications. It is not possible to say in general how comprehensive this print collection itself is of the whole of British official publication.
The main phases of digitisation were:
(i) the British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service project (BOPCRIS, 1999-2009), which digitised nearly 2,000 selected parliamentary and non-parliamentary publications, mainly from the later part of the twentieth century;
(ii) EPPI: Enhanced Parliamentary Papers on Ireland, 1801 – 1922 (EPPI), which ran from 2002 until 2005, digitising some 14,000 volumes, the bulk of the present collection.
Disclaimers: While the comprehensiveness of the digitisation (in relation to the Ford collection as a whole) is considerably greater in the case of EPPI than of BOPCRIS, neither is fully comprehensive, and the principles of selection applied are now not clear.
The data is offered as is, and no guarantees are made in relation to its completeness or accuracy.
Anticipated users and use cases
This data may be of interest to scholars of legal history and the history of government in particular. However, the collection is so wide and various in scope that it may include material of interest to scholars of the history of almost all aspects of British and Irish political, social and economic life.
Contents
The fields included are all those disclosed in the Digital Viewer, and a number of additional ones.
The fields included are:
(i) Main Entry: identifies the corporate body responsible for the document, and any subordinate unit within it;
(ii) Title Statement
(iii) Imprint: details of the place of publication, publisher and publication date
(iv) General Note(s): identifies the digitisation project with which the item is associated;
(v) Subject Added - Topical Term
(vi) Added Entry – Personal Name
(vii) Series Added Entry: uniform titles, parts/sections of works, volumes and sequential designations [multiple fields]
Production schedule
These digitised collections are not at present being added to. We will, however, reissue this dataset if (i) new content is added, or (ii) significant corrections come to light.
File information
british_official_publications_descriptive_metadata.csv 8,994 KB
british_official_publications_descriptive_metadata.db 23,316 KB
british_official_publications_descriptive_metadata_marcxml.zip 15,719 KB
README.txt 5KB
Rights
The data is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Licence
Further information
Further information on the Ford Collection is available at: How much do you know about the Ford Collection? | University of Southampton Library Blog
On the digitisation projects that led to the creation of this data: Online British Official Publications from the University of Southampton | referisg