The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED), housed and developed at the OU is the world's largest database about reading habits. An online, open-access project with over 30,000 entries, it is revolutionising public understanding of the history of reading. RED is democratising scholarship about the history of reading by encouraging ordinary members of the public from any location to contribute and use information about readers through history. 120+ volunteers from outside academia have already contributed some 6,000 entries. RED attracts over 1500 users per month from over 135 countries and has inspired partner projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand.
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to 197,752 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use. In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings and 4,000 pages of Ordinary’s Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered.
Marie Duval was one of the most unusual, pioneering and boisterous cartoonists of the nineteenth century. This archive offers for scrutiny high resolution scans of as much of Duval’s published work as possible, organised according to date and details of publication.
Details of over 200 Scottish printed sources of vernacular violin music from before 1850, along with images and indexes of 22 books from the University of Glasgow and Perth's A K Bell Library. You can browse the collection, search for tunes and composers, and play the tunes.
A comprehensive catalogue of 27 Scottish manuscript sources of violin music from before 1750, with around 3500 tunes all searchable by name, Theme Code and other features.
This [dataset] allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.
The Baudelaire Song Project researches and brings together for the first time all the song settings ever of Baudelaire’s poetry, looking at classical music and popular music settings, in French original and in translation, with music scores and in audio format.
Russian Visual Arts: Art Criticism in Context, 1814-1909 is an online research archive documenting the growth of diverse forms of commentary on the visual arts (particularly painting) in Russia from the early ninteenth- to early twentieth centuries. The archive contains over 100 hundred primary texts, in Russian and in many cases in new English translations, as well as over 300 digital images of journal and newspaper reproductions of works of art. A comprehensive editorial structure places these rare and/or previously unpublished works in their cultural and historical context. This editorial work includes introductions to the critics and the texts, new annotations to the translations, a glossary, a timeline of the development of art criticism, and an extensive bibliographical database.
Here you can search or browse our records of industrial workers and literary culture across Scotland and the North of England. We have entries for individuals, for literary works (many including transcriptions of poems, songs or prose extracts), and for associations that sponsored literary activities and were connected to industry.