The News Business: Out of Print: newyorker.com

From the New Yorker, Mar 31, 2008

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman

new e-resources

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Lynn Sipe <lsipe@usc.edu> wrote:

…now having access to Science Citation Index coverage back to 1900.  In addition to this splendid new acquisition some other significant additions have recently been added to our growing electronic resource holdings of which everyone should be aware.  In some instances these are not yet available via the A-Z list of electronic resources, though this should change by Monday.  In the meantime they are currently accessible via the “Selected Resources by Subject” link on the e-resources page.
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17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers [Gale/Cengage]
The newspapers, pamphlets, and books gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest and most comprehensive collection of early English news media. The present digital collection, that helps chart the development of the concept of ‘news’ and ‘newspapers’ and the “free press”, totals almost 1 million pages and contains approximately 1,270 titles. Many of the Burney newspapers are well known, but many pamphlets and broadsides also included have remained largely hidden. Newly digitized, all Burney treasures are now fully text-searchable in Gale Digital Collection.  

Newspaper images can be magnified for easier reading or reduced for on screen navigation. You can save and print article images, create persistent links and email them to others. When trying to print 
entire newspaper pages, you will need to tile them to make them legible given the differing paper size between newsprint and common office paper sizes.
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19th Century British Library Newspapers [Gale/Cengage]

Gale, a part of Cengage Learning, partners with the British Library to create one of the richest collections of primary source material in the world. Unparalleled in depth and scope, British Library Newspapers consists of two major collections from the British Library which span three hundred years of newspaper publishing in the U.K.—17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers and 19th Century Newspapers. The two collections combined contain nearly 3 million pages and 40 million articles, and can be purchased separately or together depending upon your institution’s needs and requirements.

For decades, even hundreds of years after publication, researchers of all kinds, all over the world, turn to newspapers for information relating to a widest variety of research needs. The rise of newspapers in Britain was a phenomenon which characterized a new age. The newspaper was increasingly a medium for information required by the commercially minded societies of major cities and regional centers. Taken as a whole, the huge production of newspapers in Britain provides an enormous resource for research on all subjects for all of the U.K., both urban and rural. The bulk of advertising, particularly for new books and theatrical performances, has proved especially useful to historians. Cultural trends, political currents and social problems are reflected in the newspapers and give new freshness and immediacy to the historic events.

The 19th Century British Library Newspapers collection contains full runs of 48 newspapers specially selected by the British Library to best represent nineteenth century Britain. This new collection includes national and regional newspapers, as well as those from both established country or university towns and the new industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands, as well as Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Special attention was paid to include newspapers that helped lead particular political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule. The penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes are also present in the collection.

Newspaper images can be magnified for easier reading or reduced for on screen navigation. You can save and print article images, create persistent links and email them to others. When trying to print entire newspaper pages, you will need to tile them to make them legible given the differing paper size between newsprint and common office paper sizes.
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Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 [Adam Mathew Digital]

Nature of the Material:

The collection consists of original manuscripts from 15 major libraries, reproduced as greyscale facsimiles. All of the manuscripts have been subjected to detailed indexing by the Perdita Project, providing access by:

• Author
• Title
• Places
• Genre within document
• First lines; poetry
• First lines; prose

There is also a wealth of information provided concerning the ‘Perdita women’ featured in the texts, as well as details of:

• Physical description of the document – including information on layout, binding, foliation, provenance.
• Additional information – including details of the repository that holds the item.
• Item Description – containing information such as; names responsible, title, genre within document, folio details, overview, first line, last line, summary, bibliographic reference. Where this item information is available the user will be able to jump straight to the relevant portion of the manuscript.

The advanced search options provided in the searching aid enables users to generate complex searches.

Scope of the Collection:

This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. “Perdita” means “lost woman” and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were “lost” because their writing exists only in manuscript form. Thanks to the endeavours of the Perdita Project the valuable work of these “lost” women is being rediscovered. Adam Matthew Digital has now enhanced their path-breaking research by linking their catalogue descriptions with full digital facsimiles of many of the manuscripts in an exciting new resource.

The manuscripts in the site were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they have been sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA. One of the key attractions of Perdita Manuscripts is that it brings together little known material from widely scattered locations. The provision of a powerful searching facility, biographical and bibliographical resources, and contextual essays by academics working in the field, makes this an indispensable resource for students and researchers.
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Virginia Company Archives [Adam Mathew Digital]

Nature of Material:

The project is made up of four constituent parts:

• Previously unpublished transcripts by Dr David Ransome of over 500 documents from the Virginia Company Archives. These will be fully searchable and are linked to the original manuscripts.
• A fully searchable text of The Records of the Virginia Company of London (4 vols, Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1906-1933).
• The complete Ferrar Papers from Magdelene College, Cambridge, together with a fully searchable listing linked directly to the manuscripts.
• An extensive contextual introduction to the Ferrar papers and a wide range of maps, illustrations and other works.

Scope of Collection:

This is an essential source for the study of the Atlantic World and Early Colonial Period.  It documents the founding and economic development of Virginia as seen through the papers of the Virginia Company of London, 1606-1624. It then shows the continuing interest of the Ferrar family in the settlement of North America from Jamestown to the Bermudas.

This collection provides a rich source for the study of trade between Britain and America. There is valuable evidence on the ethnic and gender composition of Virginia and new evidence of tensions amongst the colonists and of early relations with Native Americans.  It is also a crucial source for London’s economic history and will be welcomed by religious and social historians of Early Modern England.

The Scope of the Ferrar Papers, 1590-1790:

The collection began as a business archive, consisting of the papers of Nicholas Ferrar (c1544-1620) and those of the Virginia Company of London and its subordinate, the Somer Islands Company.  Both Ferrar and his sons held key positions until its demise in 1624. Kingsbury’s Records of the Virginia Company listed 80 documents relating to Virginia, but this was before the discovery of further Ferrar papers at Magdalene College in the late 1970s.  Recent work has shown that there are over 500 documents of direct interest.

In addition the archive contains much material for the period after 1624 describing the business and commercial interests of the family, who continued to be interested in the fate of the American colonies.

There is, for instance, a list of women sent to the colony to be wives c1619-20.  These have always been characterized as the sweepings of the streets, but the lists in the Ferrar papers indicate that they were selected with as much care as were those who went to the puritan colonies.  Every woman was recorded with her pastor’s recommendation, her parents’ condition, and her own skills.

The papers contain similar lists of men.  They also contain a census that may be from 1619 or 1620 that mentions a substantial number of Africans, almost equally split between men and women, living in Virginia – this is independent of the emblematic first arrival of Africans in 1619.

The papers also have a strong social and religious content with family letters, including many from women.

Finally, the collection is rich in prints and all of these have been fully catalogued and reproduced.

The Transcripts:

Originally intended as a book, the new transcripts of Virginia Company Archive material extend to over 350,000 words, including a contextual introduction by David Ransome describing the papers.  Scholars have been awaiting the publication of this material eagerly and it is fitting that it will be published in time for the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement.
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The Guardian (1821-2003) and The Observer (1791-2003)  [ProQuest]               {available upon release in June 2008}

ProQuest is releasing both The Guardian and its sister paper, The Observer on its historical newspapers platform.  As such, they have been digitized from cover to cover, with full-page and article images in easily downloadable PDF format. I believe initial coverage upon release will extend through 1900, with coverage extended through 2003 by the end of 2008.  Both papers have reputations for fearless reporting and controversial opinions.

The Guardian was first published in response to the Peterloo Massacre.  Originally known as the Manchester Guardian, it was a Saturday-only paper until the newspaper stamp duty was repealed in 1855.  Businessmen who hated its progressive opinions would tear the paper in half, throw the commentary out the train window, and only read the portion containing stock prices.  The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday paper, was first published in 1791.  Thought-provoking writers such as George Orwell, Via Sackville-West, Clive James, Philip Toynbee, and others were contributors, continuing a tradition of freed of the press, as well as serious coverage of politics and literature.

 

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Lynn Sipe
Collection Development Coordinator