British Official Publications Descriptive Metadata

This dataset contains the descriptive metadata of two collections in the Digital Viewer (https://viewer.soton.ac.uk): 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.