Internet Data Sources by Subject:
History and Culture
Scotland
Bathymetrical Survey of the Fresh-Water Lochs of Scotland, 1897-1909
The Bathymetrical Survey of the Fresh Water Lochs of Scotland was the first comprehensive examination of the depths and nature of Scottish lochs. Over 10 years some 60,000 soundings were taken of all of the 562 major Scottish lochs resulting in the first detailed charts of all their depths. Charts can be obtained by searching for loch name, river basin name or by using a zoomable map utility.
Charting the Nation (Edinburgh University Library)
Charting the Nation is a 3 year collaborative digital imaging and cataloguing project funded by RSLP on behalf of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) with additional funding from Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN) and the National Library of Scotland. The image collection includes a wide variety of single maps and maps in atlases and other bound books, together with manuscript and printed texts relating to the geography and mapping of Scotland from 1550 to 1740 and beyond. The site contains source materials for the study of the history of cartography, architectural history, genealogy, military history, environmental history and archaeology, amongst many other disciplines. The site currently contains over 3,500 images which can be viewed with the Insight Browser or by downloading the Insight Java Client.
Gateway to
Scotland
(Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh)
A great launching point for facts on Scotland, from tracing your
Scottish ancestry, to important dates in Scottish History, to Great
Scots (famous people).
Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) (University of Strathclyde)
The GDL is a collaborative venture based in the Centre for Digital Library Research whose aim is to create a wholly digital resource to support teaching, learning and research at all levels in Glasgow, bringing together material currently separated by ownership and physical location. Links include: Aspect - Access to Scottish Parliamentary Election Candidate Materials, 1999; Virtual Mitchell - images of Glasgow by area, street or subject, 1860-1980; Red Clydeside - a history of the labour movement in Glasgow, 1919-1932; Victorian Times - social, political and economic conditions, 1837-1901.
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland
The RCAHMS Gateway page provides access to the following databases relating to Scotland's built heritage:
Canmore: The RCAHMS database containing details on approximately 250,000 archaeological sites, monuments, buildings and maritime sites in Scotland. Users must register to gain access.
PASTMAP: A map enabled query system for Scottish National Archaeological and Architectural Datasets. Brings together Canmore, Scheduled Ancient Monuments, and Listed Buildings. Updated every two weeks.
HLAMAP: Provides access to info provided gathered by the Historic Land-use Assessment Project (HLA), a joint project with Historic Scotland, which is creating a digital map of the historical landscape of Scotland. HLAMAP allows the user to view the data by Historic Land-use Type, Period or Category as well as by Relict Period, and to print out a report of any selected area.
Resources for Learning in Scotland (National Library of Scotland)
A resource base with over 107,000 records, 650 reference packs and 26 websites on Scotland's social, cultural and industrial heritage.
The resources can be accessed through the search function or via Pathfinders, which categorise resources to direct a search.
Scotland's People
This allows users to search family surnames through Statutory registers, parish Registers, Census Records and Wills and Testaments. A partnership between the General Register Office for Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, The Court of the Lord Lyon and brightsolid (formerly Scotland Online).
Scottish Cultural Resources Access
Network (SCRAN, Edinburgh, Scotland)
SCRAN is a millennium project to build a networked multimedia
resource base for the study, teaching and appreciation of history and
material culture in Scotland. Available to institutions
via an educational licence, this site also includes a large set of
links to: Reference Sources including Gazeteer for Scotland, Subject Gateways, Digital Resource Bases.
The Scotsman Digital Archive
The Digital Archive provides access to every edition of The Scotsman between 1817 and 1950. Editions can be searched using boolean operators and keywords and can be restricted by date. This subscription service (for Edinburgh University users only) can be accessed via EASE (see URL: https://www.ease.ed.ac.uk/.
Scottish Emigration Database (University of Aberdeen's AHRC Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies)
Contains the records of over 21,000 passengers who embarked at Glasgow and Greenock for non-European ports between 1 January and 30 April 1923, and at other Scottish ports between 1890 and 1960.
Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563-1736 (Scottish History Dept., University of Edinburgh)
This electronic resource for the history of witchcraft and witch-hunting in Scotland is divided into two parts, an interactive database, and supporting web pages. The searchable database contains all people known to have been accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. Information includes: where and when they were accused; how they were tried; what their fate was; and on a wide range of themes relating to social and cultural history. Data can also be shown using interactive graphs and maps or downloaded for detailed analysis in MS Access.
Timeline (National Library of Scotland)
An interactive resource which explores one thousand years of Scotland's history. Digital facsimiles of some of the most important documents in the National Library of Scotland's collections help to illustrate the story of the shaping of the Scottish nation.
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United Kingdom
Arts and Humanities Data Service
(King's
College, London)
Search the AHDS Gateway to access the combined catalogue of holdings
of the
component services: Archaeology
Data Service, History Data Service, Oxford Text Archive, the
Performing
Arts Data Service, and the Visual Arts Data Service, each of which
create or collect
digital resources for academic use.
British
History and the Census (University of Glasgow)
Part of a JISC-funded larger project, these materials focus on historical
Censuses and have developed teaching materials for use in Higher and
Further Education, such as Migration in Nineteenth
Century Britain, Using the Census for Local History, Urbanisation.
BUFVC (British Universities Film and Video Council)
BUFVC provides a range of
services to promote the production, study and use of film and
related media for education and research. Services and projects include: TRILT; Newsfilm Online; Moving Image Gateway.
Visual and Sound Materials Portal
The beta-version portal from EDINA offers access to downloadable film, sound or still image collections (both open and subscription-based) of interest to UK FE and HE and will be available until 2011.
The 1901 Census Website (Public Record Office)
The 1901 Census for England and Wales was taken on 31 March 1901.
In addition to searching the name index to over 32 million individuals, searches can be conducted by place, institution and vessel free of charge.
Census charges are implemented for full transcription details of person in household, details of the rest of the people in the household as well as the majority of the
images of the original census pages as written by the census enumerator in 1901.
The Charles Booth Online
Archive (London School of Economics & Political Science)
A searchable resource giving access to archive material from the
Booth collections of the British Library of Political and Economic
Science (the original records from Booth's Inquiry into the Life
and
Labour of the
People in London from 1886-1903) and the University of London
Library
(the Booth family papers from 1799 to 1967).
The Charles Booth Online Archive allows users to search the
catalogue of original notebooks, search a
digital version of the Maps
Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898-9, and view complete digital
images of the 31 "police notebooks" from the survey.
Digital Library of Historical Directories (University of Leicester)
This resource contains a library of city and town directories from 1750-1920 intended to aid historians a genealogical researchers. They include lists of names, addresses and occupations of the inhabitants of the counties and towns they describe, and successive editions reflect the changes in the localities over a period of time. The data is in the form of scanned copies of original documents which are available online.
Great Britain Historical Database (GBHDB) (Humphrey Southall, University of Portsmouth)
As part of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project this was originally known as the Queen Mary & Westfield College
Labour Markets Database,
made up of measures of localised economic distress in the period 1850-1914,
and was expanded with further funding. The resultant Great Britain Historical Database (GBHDB) is a large integrated database of geographically-located historical statistics for Great Britain including: Information from the Census of Population since 1801 (age and sex structure, educational statistics, housing conditions, industry statistics, migration statistics); Economic Distress and Labour Markets (unemployment statistics, poor law statistics, trade union statistics); Information about Health and Health Care (hospitals and other institutions, mortality statistics); Other Data including pre-1800 Surveys (agricultural statistics, pictures, topographic descriptions); Geographic Units and other information (gazetteers, geography conversion tables, boundary changes, standard locational descriptors).
Historic Maps (Landmark
Information Group)
First Edition 1:10560 County Series maps (dated between 1846 and
1899) navigatable using a County Name Gazeteer. Selecting a county
presents the user with
a gazeteer of towns and villages in that county. The counties are
named as they existed around 1850 however the gazeteer contains
over 40000 placenames as they exist today. Since the map sheets are
larger than the viewable area on your screen, you will need to pan
around the sheet using your browser scrollbars in order to see the entire map.
Note: Please also refer to the Historic Digimap Service developed by EDINA as a subscription service which delivers the Landmark historic map collection to the tertiary education community.
Histpop (Online Historical Population Reports)
Histpop is the tangible output of the Online Historical Population Reports (OHPR) project which is run as a project within AHDS History at the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. The OHPR website (histpop) is an online resource of almost 200,000 pages of all the published population reports created by the Registrars-General of and its predecessors for England and Wales and for Scotland for the period 1801-1920, including all Census Reports for the period 1801-1937, along with ancillary archival material from The National Archives. The whole resource will illustrate the changing demographic structure of Britain and Ireland over this period.
History On-Line (Institute of Historical Research)
A JISC-funded project providing access to evaluated online information resources for the teaching and learning of history in the UK tertiary education community.
Linking Censuses Through Time
(MIMAS, University of Manchester)
A very useful and friendly online database from an ESRC-funded project which currently runs unsupported by
MIMAS. Login required from the
Census Registration Service. Data from 1971, 1981, and 1991 UK population
censuses have been harmonised to make comparisons possible. An option to use
adjusted 1991 data based on the results of the Census Coverage Survey
is given.
A range of options for geographic areas are provided, which are comparable
across the 3 decennial censuses. Use the edit button to make selections
for year(s), geography, and variables (by subject area). Data selections
are executed for the entire UK only, and downloaded in ASCII (csv) format,
which may be read in a spreadsheet.
Victorian Census Project (Staffordshire University)
An ongoing project to digitize historical censuses and related
research materials. From the
download page one can obtain four extract files from the
1831 and 1861
censuses, and the Scottish Registrar General's Annual Report for
1861, in
ASCII comma delimited format.
Vision of Britain Through Time (Great Britain Historical GIS project, University of Portsmouth)
This UK national lottery-funded service, hosted by EDINA, is part of the Great Britain Historical GIS project (see above). It provides 'a vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001' including historical mapping, census reports, historical descriptions via 'travellers tales'. Locations can be searched by categories such as: population; life and death; industry; work and poverty; social class; housing; learning and language; roots and religion. Information is represented graphically and as descriptive text. Additional information is also available regarding administrative units and boundaries for a chosen location.
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International
The Internet Archive
Since 1996, this San Francisco-based not-for-profit organisation has been building an Internet library to offer permanent public access for free to websites and other digital "cultural artifacts". A web 'harvester' has crawled thousands of Web sites, collecting and archiving sites for the collection over twelve times, amounting to over 100 terabytes of web pages. Try searching the Wayback Machine to look up previous incarnations of your favourite websites.
Not finding the data you are looking for?
Go back to the
Internet Data Sources page or
view related subject categories
Population and Area Statistics, or
Geo-spatial and the Environment.
OR
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