Building on the Stanford Libraries' excellent collection of British historical government documents, the Libraries have acquired two new collections of State Papers (UK):
- State Papers Online (published by Gale)
- Colonial State Papers (published by ProQuest). Both digital editions provide access to digitized manuscript documents from the National Archives (UK), as well as printed, searchable calendars that describe them.
State Papers Online
The first, State Papers Online, published by Gale, provides a digital edition of the Domestic, Foreign, Borders, Scotland, and Ireland State Papers of Britain with the Registers of the Privy Council and other State Papers now housed in the Cotton, Harley and Lansdowne collections in the British Library.
A critical resource for historians of early modern Britain and Europe, the British State Papers in this online edition are predominately papers of the Secretaries of State from the early Tudor period (1509) through the early eighteenth century. Parts I and II (1509-1603) are complete; additional segments for the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are forthcoming.
The Calendars are fully searchable, and each Calendar entry has been linked directly to its related State Paper. With these links, the difficulty of locating individual manuscripts has been substantially overcome.
Among the Calendars included here are the HMC Calendars and the Haynes/Murdin transcriptions of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House. All the Calendars are fully searchable, the page or Calendar entry references in the indexes are hyperlinked to the Calendar entries, and each Calendar entry is hyperlinked to its related manuscript document. The user is now able to identify a reference in a Calendar index, from a search or browse, and link directly to the Calendar Entry and from there to the manuscript document. The scholarship in the Calendar indexes is made accessible and given a central role in State Papers Online.
Additionally, users can:
- Choose to start with the series of essays by leading historians on key themes covered by the materials. Each essay has hyperlinks to the State Papers mentioned and provides an instructive way into study of the Papers themselves.
- Look at Calendar entries and manuscript documents side by side.
- Compare two manuscript documents or two Calendar Entries side by side.
- Use a notepad for transcribing or making notes.
- Create a Personal Archive in which to save Calendar entries, notes and links to manuscript documents from session to session.
- Use such research tools as lists of abbreviations, glossary, chronology, details of dates, weights and measures, as well as holders of the main offices of government
State Papers Online is being published in four Parts; Parts I and II are complete and available to Stanford users. They contain:
- Part I: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Domestic
The National Archives of the UK: SP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15
British Library: Lansdowne Collection's Burghley Papers
HMC Calendars and Haynes/Murdin transcriptions of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House
- Part II: The Tudors, 1509-1603: State Papers Foreign, Scotland,
Borders, Ireland and Registers of the Privy Council
The National Archives of the UK: SP 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, PC 2
British Library: Selected Cotton, Harley and Yelverton Papers
Colonial State Papers
ProQuest's Colonial State Papers provide researchers with two invaluable sources for the study of colonial American history-the manuscripts that make up the Colonial Papers in the UK National Archives, as well as the printed calendars that describe them.
The National Archives' collection 'CO 1' (full name - Privy Council and related bodies: America and West Indies, Colonial Papers) contains thousands of papers that were presented to the Privy Council and the Board of Trade between 1574-1757, and which relate to England's governance of, and activities in the American, Canadian and West Indian colonies.
ProQuest's Colonial State Papers, from ProQuest's Chadwyck-Healy publishing unit, also includes the digitized Calendar of State Papers Colonial - an advanced bibliographic tool providing more than 45,000 records of bibliographic description, covering not only CO 1, but also documents from many other collections, all relating to the American colonies. The Calendar of State Papers Colonial consists of bibliographic entries along with full transcriptions, extracts and abstracts, in fully keyed XML.
All documents have been reproduced as full color, high quality images, including a number of unique contemporary hand-drawn maps. Users can search and browse in variety of ways.
