Educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has announced the availability of the Nineteenth Century Collections Online, a multi-year global digitisation and publishing programme. Nineteenth Century Collections Online brings together rare primary source materials – monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs and more – from the nineteenth century (1789-1914) and beyond. The first two of four Archives for 2012 - British Politics and Society and European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection – are now available to customers.
Several leading research institutions have recognised the revolutionary effect Nineteenth Century Collections Online will have on research of this important era. Early adopters include the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, McGill University, Simon Fraser University, the University of Ottawa, the University of Regina, Old Dominion University, York University, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and the University of Miami.
The vast majority of the content within Nineteenth Century Collections Online has never before been digitised, and much of the content has never been captured for microfilm or been otherwise made available outside the source institution. These Archives will open up a world of material to scholars across the globe. Extensive conservation and preservation work is also being done on the materials to ensure the originals can be used by future generations of researchers.
In addition to the nearly 10 million pages of content within the overall Archives for 2012, the resource is built on an innovative technology platform that features a range of tools to support advanced research. These include textual analysis tools, subject indexing; user generated tags and annotations; image viewer; and Zotero, a robust browser-based tool for collecting, citing, and organising research sources.
Through the use of agile software development methodology, which allows for a high degree of collaboration among development teams and enables users to review and test products early in the process, Gale has been able to incorporate all of these features into Nineteenth Century Collections Online in a quick and efficient manner.
