New: GLOBALISE – digitised Dutch East India Company archives for 17th & 18th centuries

Researchers interested in colonial history and Dutch history will be delighted to know that over 5 million scans of the Dutch East India Company are now freely and fully searchable at GLOBALISE.

 GLOBALISE Unlocking the history of early globalisation and colonialism for researchers and the general public. Image of Hougly complex in Bengalen Consisting of approximately twenty-five million pages, the UNESCO Memory of the World-listed archives of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) offer a unique view on interactions between European and non-European actors in Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 5 million scans of the ‘Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren’ (1610-1796) of the VOC are now fully searchable. From early October 2023, a prototype of the GLOBALISE transcriptions viewer is online at: https://transcriptions.globalise.huygens.knaw.nl/.

These archives not only provide insights into the VOC’s operations but also offer rare glimpses into early modern societies in Asia, Africa, and Australia. For these regions, where few archival sources exist, the VOC archives hold unique and invaluable information, illuminating their multifaceted interactions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This resource is useful for those interested in early modern global and colonial history.

While you are here, check out…

Could you be the next Gale Student Ambassador for Oxford University?

Calling Oxford University students: fancy getting paid business experience with a global publisher?

Paid Publisher Ambassador Role. Deadline 1 May 2024. Young man and woman sitting next to each other with a laptop between them.Gale is an international publisher of digital archives and other library resources such as eBooks. Gale’s primary sources include full archives of newspapers like The Times, The Telegraph, the Daily Mail and The Economist, as well as period and topical archives like Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Archives of Sexuality and Gender.

Gale are recruiting students to undertake awareness-building activities, so more students find out about, understand and use these fascinating archives! Students from all year groups can apply.

Deadline for applications is 1 May 2024.

The role lasts for the 2024-25 academic year and requires set activities for which Gale Ambassadors are paid £700. Plus, the role is great for your CV:

  • Business experience – work directly with a global publisher.
  • Run your own marketing activities – refine ‘marketing copy’ and images to make successful use of social media.
  • Public speaking – run presentations and training sessions with your fellow students, obtaining valuable public speaking skills.
  • Have your work published on a company blog – great, shareable evidence of your work.
  • Network – connect with staff and students at the university, other students internationally, and numerous colleagues at Gale.
  • Improve your research skills and discover primary sources for your essays – potentially improving your grades!

 Interested? Click here for more info and how to apply!

Trial until 10 April 2024: The Civil & Military Gazette Online, 1876-1963

Oxford researchers are invited to trial The Civil & Military Gazette Online, 1876-1963.

A faded image of a printed gazette with the title of the resource: Civil & Military Gazette, 1876-1963

Civil & Military Gazette Online, 1876-1963 ©Brill

Published in Simla and Lahore, The Civil & Military Gazette stood as an unrivalled media institution, offering extraordinarily broad perspectives on South Asia during the late 19th and 20th centuries.

This database offers access to holdings from 1876-1963 and covers British rule in India at its height, partition and the early years of the independent countries of India and Pakistan.

As well as political events, the paper also cultivated and published literary talent, including Rudyard Kipling, some of whose earliest published works first appeared in the Gazette.

The trial can be accessed via SOLO and ends on 10 April 2024.

Please send feedback to Emma Mathieson.

New: Expulsions from German Universities during National Socialism

We are delighted to report that historians now access have to Vertreibungen aus den deutschen Universitäten im Nationalsozialismus = Expulsions from German Universities during National Socialism via SOLO or Databases A-Z.

This database provides short biographical descriptions of German academics that were forced to leave their academic jobs during the Nazi regime. The expulsion of numerous scientists by the Nazi regime’s brutal policy of exclusion, and the international refugee movements it caused, can be regarded as a significant turning point in the history of science. The “cleansing” of the German universities that began in 1933 led to a considerable loss in Germany’s intellectual milieu.

The text is in German.

Reference entry for Gerhard, Dietrich written by Michael Grüttner. Give brief information on the university, position, birth and death dates, and a brief description of the academic work.

© De Gruyter. Gerhard, Dietrich written by Michael Grüttner. Vertreibungen aus den deutschen Universitäten im Nationalsozialismus. Accessed 8 March 2024

The database covers 1,300 persons who were affected by the dismissals, covering all German universities in detail. The short biographies provide information on academic status and disciplines, religious affiliation, membership in political parties, reasons of expulsion, and also (if applicable) on concentration camp imprisonment, countries of emigration and remigration.

Links are provided to other biographical resources such as Deutsche Biographie.

You can search by person, university, academic displine, birth and death dates. You can also browse by person or academic discipline.

Other related resources (SSO required):

SOLO improvements: Journal Search and shortcuts to purchase and Interlibrary requests

We continue to improve SOLO for our users. Here is the latest round of changes and tips.

⇒ We have added shortcuts to the top of SOLO and it’s now easier to recommend a purchase or request an item from a library outside Oxford (InterLibrary Request).

⇒ We have added Journal Search to only search or browse for print or electronic journals.This replaces Journals A-Z.

Top tip: switch from Search Everything to Oxford Collections to only find books, theses, databases, journals (but not 100m+ journal articles, book reviews, etc.)


See our SOLO LibGuide for full details and see below for quick links to useful searches and tools. Once you master SOLO, you will be able to make even more the most of our very rich and extensive collections.

Frontpage of SOLO with pointers highllghting Help to the SOLO LibGuide, Purchase Request to recommend a purchase, Need More? for InterLibrary Requests and '...' (three dots) to see more search options. Further pointers highlight the tip to change the default Search Everything to Oxford Collections and to click on Live Chat on the right to get help during working hours.

More searching options are in the extended section. That is especially useful for browsing for books by subject where you don’t have any author or title.

The Journal Search is also available from here (as well as from the SOLO front page > Useful Links).

A screenshot from SOLO's full list of search options, including browsing by subjects and doing a Journal Search

In Journal Search, you can browse by subject (may not be the best search for a very large subject like History but it could be useful)…

Screenshot from Journal Search, showing how to browse for journals by subject.

… or you can search by journal title (not article title!). This is useful if your journal uses very common words – such as History!

A screenshot from SOLO Journal Search with an example of searching for journals called 'History'.

Getting help

  • During working hours, the quickest to get help is to ask our Live Chat (from front page of SOLO).
  • Check out the SOLO LibGuide.
  • Ask any of our friendly library staff in our libraries.

Trial access to Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism until 7 March 2024

Oxford researchers are invited to trial Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism: 1840–1927, part of East View’s Archive Editions series. This resource consists of 4,050 digitized documents, almost all derived from government records held in The National Archives UK; they capture an era of rising nationalist sensibility in Egypt and the response of the British government in its evolving policy towards the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Autograph letter from Esther Fahmy H. Wissa, Vice-President of the Women’s Committee of the Delegation in Egypt, to His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Allenby, 1 August 1922

Autograph letter from Esther Fahmy H. Wissa, Vice-President of the Women’s Committee of the Delegation in Egypt, to His Excellency Field Marshal Lord Allenby, 1 August 1922 ©East View

The British military occupation in Egypt was a legal and political anomaly. Never formally described as part of the “British Empire” by successive British governments, that relationship may have been inferred, applied by the popular press, or understood to be a colonial relationship by the public. But Britain was an administering power and the term “protectorate” was a debated definition of the relationship as early as 1884. The eventual end of British occupation marked the emergence of modern Egypt.

With more than 4,000 primary source documents in English, French and Arabic, Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism presents the development of nationalist sensibilities, movements, and publications from the 1870s until the third decade of the twentieth century and culminating with the formal dissolution of the British protectorate in 1924.

Letter from British Diplomat L. Oliphant, to for the Foreign Office, 1 June 1922. U.K. National Archives, T 161/155

Letter from British Diplomat L. Oliphant, to for the Foreign Office, 1 June 1922. U.K. National Archives, T 161/155

The documents included in Egypt and the Rise of Nationalism range in scope from records of casual conversations, formal meetings, correspondence with individuals and groups, monitoring of the nationalist press, internal British evaluations and debates on objectives and the status of leaders and individual campaigners, and forceful responses to insurgencies involving nationalist activists.

This collection focuses on developments connected to figures prominent in nationalist activities and pays special attention to interactions between them and British authorities, typically at flashpoints. As such, some years in which no specific events occurred may be omitted, while documents relating to particularly eventful years figure more prominently in the record.

Due to the official nature of the documents included, there is an inevitable bias against Egyptian nationalist sentiments for its inherent negative implications to British interests. However, some officials and politicians were more sympathetic and supportive than others, depending on the overall policy of the home government.

Each document in this collection is richly tagged and full-text searchable. Users can browse by people, places, and topics (as identified by the collection’s editors), as well as document types (e.g., despatch, map, telegram, letter, etc.). Each object is also georeferenced in a map view, both by geographic origin of the document and by locations associated with items in the collection.

[Information derived from East View’s website]

This trial ends 7th March 2024. Please take a look and send feedback to lydia.wright@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

We Are Our History Conversations: Talks 23 Jan and 19 Feb 2024

We Are Our History Conversations is a series of Bodleian Libraries’ talks by artists, scholars and researchers opening up critical engagement with archives.

Two talks are scheduled for Hilary Term:

Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Cut/Copy/Paste: Collage as a form of reading and writing the archive

Tuesday 23 January 2024, 1pm–2pm, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library – Book your free place

Oxford is a host and a nexus of the colonial archive, an epistemological reference point on the historicity of empire building and meaning making. In this talk, Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu marshals critical and creative tools of reading, writing, and editing black lives and black bodies in the archives of Cecil John Rhodes, institutional histories of museums and universities in Southern Africa, and the creation of ‘fictional’ languages such as Shona.

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African & Comparative Literature at the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT), St Anne’s College. He holds a PhD in English from University of Kent (England) and completed postdoctoral work at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa). He has an interest in literary archives from southern Africa and interrogates issues to do with literary legacies. Apart from writing journal articles, book chapters, this work also manifests through a series of creative publications, exhibitions and digital humanities projects.

Sadiah Qureshi, Tracing the Legacies of Empires of Extinction

Monday 19 February 2024, 4pm–5pm, Lecture Theatre, Weston Library – Book your free place

Professor Sadiah Qureshi is an historian of racism, science and empire. She has recently joined the University of Manchester as Chair in Modern British History. Her first book, Peoples on Parade (2011), explored the importance of displayed peoples for the emergence of anthropology. She is currently writing her next book, provisionally entitled Vanished: Episodes in the History of Extinction, for Allen Lane, supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. In 2023, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Bodleian Library.

LibGuide for Disability History resources now live

We are delighted to announce that the Bodleian Libraries’ LibGuide Disability History Resources is now live, just in time for UK Disability History Month (UKDHM).

The guide was created by Alice Shepherd, the 2022-23 History Faculty Library Graduate trainee, as part of her year-long project and was launched at a research seminar, convened at the Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology (OCHSMT) on Monday 27 November 2023.

Alice Shepherd presenting the LibGuide to the audience. The slide on the screen reads: The Oxford Disability History LibGuide

Photo by Isabel Holowaty, 27 Nov 2023, Maison Française, Oxford

Who is the guide for?

It is intended for researchers and students who are studying Disability History and other information professionals supporting researchers. It is also useful for practitioners and members of the public with an interest in (or who have a disability) and wish to gain a historical perspective.

A screenshot fromm the Medical technologies section. It shows a Dental Technology video from YouTube and 2 readigs on the right hand side: 1. Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Ryan Sweet 2. Accessible America by Bess Williamson What can you find in the guide?

The LibGuide consists of a collection of research resources crowdsourced during a Hackathon by 24 volunteers in Dec 2022 who scoured the internet for relevant archives, journals and various other useful websites. Over 200 nominated resources were then assessed and organised by Alice to make them as discoverable as possible. The guide conforms with accessibility standards.

The selected resources cover a great variety of topics across different historical periods (ancient to contemporary history).

A screenshot from the medieval section, showing Medieval Disabled Bodies, Medieval Graduate Podcast, episode 4, from YouTube. Shows a reading on the right-hand side for Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World Blighted Bodies by Kristina L. Richardson.The disabilities covered are wide ranging and include, for instance, autism, birth defects, chronic pain, hearing loss /deafness, learning disabilities, mental illness, mobility disabilities, visual impairment, and more.

Resources were also selected for aspects of disability relating to education, employment, medical technologies, stigma and war. The materials themselves may be archives, audio-visual, biographies, books, journals, legislation, newspapers, theses and websites.

The guide also lists Oxford historians researching aspects of disability history.

Feedback & suggestions

The guide will continue to evolve. It is currently limited largely to English language resources focused on western history and we hope there will be opportunities to expand its scope in the future.

We very much welcome feedback and, continuing in the crowdsourcing spirit, invite suggestions for additional resources for the LibGuide which can be made via our Recommend a Resource form.

Many congratulations and thanks go to Alice for her terrific work. We believe that this guide will be an excellent resource to help with the discovery of resources for disability history. Thanks of course also go to the volunteer ‘hackers’, without whom this guide would not exist, and the History Faculty for hosting and funding the hackathon in 2022.

Isabel Holowaty, Deputy Head of Humanities Libraries & History Librarian (Research), Bodleian Libraries, Oxford University

Dr Sloan Mahone, History Faculty, Oxford University

While you are here… we have many other guides for history resources. Check them out!

British Library cyber-attack – some tips for workarounds

Have a suggestion for this list? I would love to hear from colleagues & researchers so I can keep it updated. Please email me at isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Thank you! Smilie[last updated: 15 January 2024, 9:55am]

Following the cyber-attack, our colleagues in the British Library work are working very hard to restore operations and services. As the disruption is likely to continue for a few weeks, below is a list of tips for some workarounds.

BL updates and contacts

Regularly check the British Library blog and their Twitter feed @britishlibrary for updates on the current status of their services. You can contact the BL via Twitter or emailing customer@bl.uk (be prepared for delay to responses).

On Monday 15 January 2024, the BL released access to an interim catalogue. You can search for the majority of their print holdings.

For ongoing services and disruptions, do check their website.

Do you have BL login? Reset your password

‘We have no evidence that data of our users has been compromised. However, if you have a British Library login and your password is used elsewhere, we recommend changing it as a precautionary measure.’

Tip 1: Finding alternative copies

Researchers can obviously double-check SOLO for alternative copies, but may also want to consider HathiTrust or Archive.org for older and out-of-copyright material.

Although the British Library catalogue is not available, you can still check for British Library published material in Library Hub Discover. This resource is a database of 204 UK and Irish academic, national & specialist library catalogues. If you want to easily find a copy in another library in the UK, then make friends with Library Hub Discover!

Single Search box of Library Hub Discover with a brief description of its purpose: giving access to detials of materials held in many UK national, academic and specialist libraries. It currently contains 51,612,322 records contributed by 204 institutions.Recommend a Purchase for the Bodleian Libraries (Oxford staff and students only)

If an item is not held in Oxford or it is not accessible because it is a Non-Print Legal Deposit item, Oxford researchers can check SOLO if another Oxford library (incl. a college library) has your book. If not, you can ask for a book to be purchased using our Recommend a Purchase form (SSO required).

Tip 2: Finding and locating BL open shelf collections

The reading rooms are still open for private research and collections, which are on the open shelves, can therefore be used. Very limited, manual collection item ordering in London for general collection items stored in St Pancras (this does not include special collections) – these can be requested by completing paper forms in the Reading Rooms and will be delivered at set times.

So, how do you find St Pancras items when the BL catalogue is down?

In Library Hub Discover’s Advanced Search, you can limit your search to BL St Pancras in the Library section. You can at least copy the shelfmark and make your way to London.

Showing the catalogue record details: Calendar of state papers, domestic series, of the reign of Anne : preserved in the Public Record Office / Public Record Office. London, 1916.

Calendar of state papers, domestic series, of the reign of Anne : preserved in the Public Record Office. British Library SPHOA HLR 941 (RS 129 )

Admissions

The BL can only issue temporary reader tickets at the moment. If you already have a card and it needs renewing, this will probably be slightly easier than those who need to register for the first time. Contact customer@bl.uk if you need help but be prepared for a delayed response as our colleagues will be terrifically busy with other enquiries.

Tip 3: Accessing British Library website content

BL websites will have been archived, probably to varying degrees of depth, by the Internet Archives’s Wayback Machine.

If you have the URL of the webpage you want to access, just type it into the search box and you will be presented with a calendar indicating the days and years when a snapshot of the webpage was taken:

Showing a graph with indications when the BL website http://www.bl.uk/collection-items was archived with a visual calendar below highlighting in blue or green the dates and year when snapshots where taken. There can be clicked on.

Wayback Machine showing when the BL website on its Collections (http://www.bl.uk/collection-items) were archived.

Some formatting may be a bit odd and, depending how deeply the content was crawled, you may not always get the full content. It also loads quite slowly. However, I was able to listen to some sound recordings:

A sound recording from the BL Collections website Sisterhood. An image and recording of Ann Oakley discussing motherhood and depression.

A sound recording from the BL Collections website ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project’ where Ann Oakley discussed motherhood and depression. Interview 11 May 2012. Shelfmark: C1420/56

So, how do you find the URL of a BL website?

This becomes a little more ‘interesting’. The easiest is to Google, hopefully find the webpage you are interested in, make a note of the URL string and put it into the Wayback Machine. Please note that this may not always work, if e.g. names of URL were changed over time.

A google search for British Librayr collections where the URL can be seen.

You may also come across links to the BL webpages from other sources. This can of course include the BL’s own Blogs which don’t appear to be affected by the cyberattack. A list of BL blogs is webarchived at https://web.archive.org/web/20231010125136/https://www.bl.uk/blogs.

Please note that this technique will not work for URLs of content in databases with dynamic content such as library catalogues, archive catalogues, etc. None of these are crawled by the Wayback Machine.

At this point it might be a good idea to upskill your Google searching skills. You can target your searches more effectively with certain commands. Check out our Advanced Google Searching teaching materials and video recording.

Tip 4. Looking for the ESTC?

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is the definitive union catalogue for early British or English language books, covering publications printed before 1800. The BL website for ESTC is down.

A temporary version of the pre-1700 ESTC is hosted at https://estc.printprobability.org/.

However, if you are fortunate enough to have access to a library which has Early English Books Online and the Eighteenth Century Collections Online, then that is a great alternative because you can then also look at the digital copy.

If you are not a member of Oxford University and you are just searching for citations, then you can still search Oxford’s SOLO from anywhere in the world:

A SOLO list of results including a citation to: Epulario, or The Italian banquet wherein is shewed the maner how to dresse and prepare all kind of flesh, foules or fishes. As also how to make sauces, tartes, pies, &c. After the maner of all countries. With an addition of many other profitable and necessary things. Translated out of Italian into English.

Searching ‘eebo cooking banquet’ in SOLO’s Oxford Collections.

Tip 5. Looking for BL Special Collections?

You may be able to use other sources to find descriptions of BL Special Collections. It can be a bit tricky but here are some suggestions:

Both The National Archives and The Archives Hub describe collections held in repositories in the UK, including the British Library. You can limit your search to just the British Library and get some description and shelfmarks. In some instances, the description also mentions microfilmed versions which may be accessible in another library.

A search in The National Archives Discovery tool for India Office material held in the British Library.

Many BL archival and rare book materials have been digitised in source databases, such as the East India Company (Modules I-V). You can get a list of these databases by searching our Databases A-Z for “British Library”. Current staff and students can then of course access these, using SSO for remote access.

Databases A-Z: "british library" brings up 30 results of which the first one is mentioned: British Library Newspapers, Parts I-V. (1732-1950)

Databases A-Z with a phrase search “british library”.

If you are an external reader and would like to register with the Bodleian Libraries, check out our information how to join.

NEED HELP? THEN JUST GET IN TOUCH!

There are a few other things one can try. If any Oxford researchers for British & West European history need any help, do get in touch by emailing isabel.holowaty@bodleian.ox.ac.uk or see our list of other subject librarians.

If you have a disability, you can also contact disability.librarian@bodleian.ox.ac.uk to ask if we can find an alternative.

Wishing our BL colleagues all the very best as they wrestle with a major challenge, Isabel Holowaty, Deputy Head of Humanities Libraries & History Librarian (Research)

Finding study spaces and group study rooms across Oxford

Are you looking for somewhere to study with others or have a meeting or discussion? Or do you want a quiet space to work in?

Find a Library

Selected from the 26 Bodleian Libraries sites, you can find a range of libraries and study spaces by atmosphere, services, accessibility, comfort, opening times in our Find a Library service.

A screenshot showing a list of 3 libraries (Art, Bodleian Old Library, Weston Library) which are historic, have adjustable furniture, individual carrels, and are open on SaturdaysNeed a Group Study Room?

Bodleian Libraries offer a range of group study spaces across Oxford which are available to all members of the University and many also open to external readers. Check out Group Study Rooms across the Bodleian Libraries for an overview of their locations, size, equipment, and how to book.

A list of small group study rooms upt to 4 people. Includes the Law Library, Vere Harmsworth Library and Weston Library.

We are also currently piloting a group study room tool in the Radcliffe Science Library, Social Science Library, and Vere Harmsworth Library.

The following are available to any reader to book for academic purposes via our new tool:

A photo showing the Vere Harmsworth Library Group Study Room 1: a white room with a circular table and four blue chairs.

How does the booking tool work?

The group study rooms are bookable by University members via an online form (https://ox-ac.libcal.com/reserve/vhl). You will also be able to check availability. You must make your bookings with at least 2 hours’ notice, and can only make bookings of up to 10 hours per week.

You can make bookings up to 70 days in advance, allowing for bookings to be made across an academic term. Currently the booking tool is only available to University members, and Bodleian Readers card members will need to continue making room bookings by contacting library staff either at the enquiry desk or via email.

Why are we trialing this tool?

Benefits of the new booking tool include immediate confirmation of availability, reducing the likelihood of double booking and reducing staff mediation of bookings via spreadsheets or similar methods.

The pilot is part of the wider Bodleian Libraries Strategy 2022-27 (pdf), to increase visibility and provision of bookable spaces across the Bodleian Libraries, in response to Reader Survey feedback. Statistics and feedback will be collected during the pilot and will inform any further steps towards maximising study room use and creating a common room booking policy.