This project will provide online access to some of the most significant collections of 19th century pamphlets held in UK research libraries. The digitisation of more than 20,000 pamphlets, which focus on the political, economic and social issues that fuelled the great Parliamentary debates and controversies of the 19th century, will provide researchers, students and teachers with an immensely rich and coherent corpus of primary sources with which to study the socio-political and economic landscape of 19th century Britain.

Brief Overview
The project is digitising approximately 1 million pages of 19th century pamphlet literature focusing on the political, social and economic issues that fuelled the great Parliamentary debates and controversies of the 19th century. The pamphlets are being made available via JSTOR and will be linked to from Copac and indexed by Google and other search engines, making them very much easier to find and use.

What's special about 19th century pamphlets?
Pamphlets were an important means of public debate in the 19th century, covering the key political, social, technological and environmental issues of their day. They are a valuable primary resource, of relevance to a wide range of disciplines.
However, they are underutilised within research and teaching because they are generally quite difficult to access – often bound together in large numbers or otherwise hard to find in the few research libraries that hold them. The proposed digital pamphlet collection will also complement other collections of parliamentary and newspaper literature currently being created.

Building on earlier work
The 19th Century Pamphlets Online project extends previous work RLSP-funded RLUK work to increase awareness of 19th century pamphlets in UK research libraries (http://www.is.bham.ac.uk/rslp/pamphlets/pamphlets.htm). The RSLP work described 49 collections and created over 179,000 records in Copac (http://copac.ac.uk/), making their existence and availability known to researchers and others worldwide.

Strategic partnership
Instead of putting significant resources into developing its own separate Web interface and search facility, the project has partnernered with JSTOR (non-profit digital journal archive), who are covering the costs of preserving and delivering the collection. JSTOR are making the digital pamphlets freely available and reusable within UK HE and FE. RLUK partner libraries will also receive a copy of their digitised titles if they wish, now or in the future.
RLUK regards the partnership with JSTOR as highly beneficial for the UK academic community, enabling the project to concentrate its funding on creating content rather than developing preservation and delivery systems. Because the full text of JSTOR's collections are being indexed by Google and other search services, the pamphlets within the collection will be found using a wide range of popular and research-focused search tools. In addition, the digital pamphlets will be accessible via Copac and the catalogues of contributing libraries.

Leveraging existing cataloguing data
The project also makes use of pre-existing expertly-created data from Copac. This again represents good value for money, enabling the funding to be concentrated on digitisation rather than on cataloguing.

State-of-the-art digitisation
The digitisation itself has been centralised within the state-of-the-art digitisation laboratory at BOPCRIS, University of Southampton. BOPCRIS recently digitised 1 million pages of 18th century parliamentary papers. Its expertise and technology ensure that the pamphlets are digitised efficiently and without harm to these often fragile originals.

For further information, please contact Grant Young at Grant.Young@Bristol.ac.uk