How Digital Archives are Changing the Nature of Scholarly Research and Classroom Training 

This session will introduce you to the State Papers Online, 1509-1714 digital collection and how the ability to full-text search across the keyed calendar entries and link directly to the corresponding digital image of the manuscript is revolutionizing the study and teaching of early modern Britain.

State Papers Online, 1509-1714 is a major new resource for the study of early modern Britain and its international relations. It unites the British State Papers Domestic and Foreign, as well as Ireland, Scotland, Borders and the Registers of the Privy Council to create a new backbone for research and teaching projects in politics, government, and social, economic, and religious history covering the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Each of the original manuscript documents in the nearly 2 million digitized pages is reproduced in facsimile, with links to and from its fully searchable Calendar (transcript or abstract) entry. By overcoming the difficulty of matching an individual Calendar entry to the original Paper, State Papers Online, 1509-1714 marks a huge advance for historians in all disciplines, both as a research tool and as a teaching resource.