This is not the same project that I posted about back in November and 85% of this project is available for free. See more info below:
Putting the Complete Calendars of State Papers Online
www.british-history.ac.ukBritish History Online is pleased to announce that 200 volumes in the AHRC-funded State Papers project are now live. The goal of the project is to complete the digitisation of the Calendars of State Papers in verbatim transcriptions of at least 99.9% accuracy.
The Calendars of State Papers are summaries of hundreds of thousands of handwritten documents relating to the administration of England, and its foreign relations, in the early modern period. Highlights of the AHRC project are Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth I, and State Papers, Colonial; these important documents are now freely accessible to the academic community and the general public alike.
In order to foster scholarly collaboration we have also included a feature which allows any interested user to update, correct, or enhance the calendars for the benefit of all. We plan to make the remaining 150 books in this project live within the next twelve months.
The total number of volumes on British History Online is now just over 800, of which 85 percent are completely free; the remainder
Ahhh mystery solved! I have been using the site for the last month but I kept thinking
I pay either 30 USD or 30 GBP (can’t remember which-think I ran it through paypal) for full access to the state papers on this site. It’s incredibly useful.
HOWEVER, The page numbers are not available so you must reference using the supplied url. The display is not a traditional page display, as are the Tanner Ritchie products, making the visual format a little different to read and use – a bit difficult reading the next page of a search instead of the next searched page. I am not convinced that the searching is 100% complete. Nevertheless it is extremely useful to have so much information at one’s fingertips. Cengage-the publisher of the state papers for institutional libraries mentioned back in November – has their work cut out for them if they want to stay competitive.
I understand British History Online is transcribing from the calendars of State Papers rather than digitising ? Does anyone know whether British History Online or Cengage are publishing the manuscripts as some of the calendars are very questionable indeed. Any transcription of the calendars regardless of the accuracy is no replacement for viewing the original manuscript.
The Cengage database has scans of the original handwritten documents.