About 19th Century British Pamphlets Online

The purpose of this website is to encourage and enable the use of 19th Century British pamphlets. It holds resources created by large cataloguing and digitisation projects, which are briefly summarised below. If you would like to discuss this site or its content with someone, please use the contact details to the right of this page.

Cataloguing project: 19th Century Pamphlets (1999-2002)

This project was led by the University of Birmingham, sponsored by the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles (CURL, now called RLUK), and funded under the Research Libraries Support Programme (RLSP).

It created catalogue records for nearly 180,000 pamphlets held within 21 UK research libraries. In the past, libraries seldom catalogued their individual pamphlets – typically binding them together within volumes and giving them a single catalogue entry, if any. By creating separate records, the 19th Century Pamphlets cataloguing project opened up pamphlets for researchers.

In addition to the catalogue records, the project created an online Pamphlets Guide, describing each of the collections it had catalogued. This guide has been incorporated within the Collections section of this website. Further documentation relating to the cataloguing project is available via the links to the right of this page.

Digitisation project: 19th Century Pamphlets Online (2007-2009)

This second project took the further step of digitising a large selection of pamphlets, enabling researchers to link directly from a catalogue record to a full digital version. The project was led by the University of Southampton Library, which digitised over 23,000 pamphlets within its BOPCRIS Digitisation Centre. It was sponsored by Research Libraries UK (RLUK, previously called CURL), and funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Pamphlets were contributed to the project by the universities of Bristol, Durham, Liverpool, LSE, Manchester, Newcastle and UCL.

The digital pamphlets are available via JSTOR and are free to UK researchers, teachers, students and members of the public. More information about access for UK users is available from JISC Collections. Those in other countries should contact JSTOR directly.

Further documentation about the digitisation project is available via the links to the right of this page. In addition to project plans and reports, we have included a selection of ‘digitisation tools’ that were created for the project but may be of use to those undertaking similar work. If you would like to know more about these tools or the project, please use the contact details provided to get in touch.

© 2009 RLUK. Created by the 19th Century Pamphlets Online project, which was led by the University of Southampton with funding from JISC and sponsorship from RLUK.
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