This post was written by DPhil candidate Patrick Sandman, and first appeared on the RAI Events blog. It is reposted here with permission for the interest of VHL readers.
In a well-attended and interesting workshop, Nancy Smith, the Director of the Presidential Materials Division at the U.S. National Archives, discussed the history and accessibility of presidential papers to a group of undergraduates, graduates, and professional historians.
Beginning the discussion with FDR in 1939, Director Smith detailed the trajectory of presidential libraries and materials. Fifteen years after Roosevelt donated selected material to a library in Hyde Park, NY, Congress passed the Presidential Library Act in 1955. For the next two decades, presidents donated and distributed papers at their own discretion. For Director Smith and millions of Americans, however, the tradition of presidential papers would change in July 1973.
During his testimony to Sam Ervin’s Senate Committee, White House Assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of President Nixon’s infamous White House taping system. As a result of the calamity, contention, and cynicism surrounding Watergate, Congress created the Presidential Records Act in 1978 to broaden public accessibility to the office of the President.
During the last forty years, Director Smith has worked closely with Presidents and their records. She highlighted the difficulty of cataloging executive information, particularly the often-contentious process of delineating the personal and private from the public and presidential. As such, she often deals with presidential staff and lawyers in order to properly archive non-classified information.
Interestingly, the advent of electronic records has added a new, complex dimension to presidential material. For George W. Bush’s administration alone, Ms. Smith and her staff will screen more than twenty million emails. Despite the tremendous challenge of vast email compilation, the PMD, under the guidance of Director Smith, makes presidential material available faster than any other place in the world.
Before ending the discussion, Director Smith provided excellent advice to an audience of historians. She disseminated packets of information on various Presidential libraries around the United States and encouraged researchers to explore new collections and archives.
Editor's note: To add to Patrick's interesting summary, there's a lot of information about the Presidential Libraries on the National Archives website at http://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/, as well as links to the websites of the libraries themselves. Most of the Presidential Libraries are engaged in digitisation projects to a greater or lesser extent, and their websites can be a good source of documents even without travelling to visit. The National Archives has also set up the Presidential Timeline website to provide a single point of access to digitised sources from the Presidential Libraries.
You can also follow the Presidential Libraries on Twitter and Tumblr - the Tumblr in particular is fascinating.
And for even more, if you'll excuse the blatant plug, I visited two of the libraries myself last year as part of my Travelling Librarian trip - you might be interested therefore in my write-ups of my visits to the FDR Library and the JFK Library.
And finally, Nancy Smith also spoke later in the day about the role of the National Archives in presidential transitions. This talk has been written up on the RAI blog by both Skye Montgomery and Sebastian Page.
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
Friday, 27 April 2012
Finding primary sources on the web for US history: some tips
A busy few months have meant little time for blogging, but I find myself with a slight lull on a Friday afternoon at long last! The History Thesis Fair for 2nd year undergraduates is also fast approaching, and it seems timely therefore to put together a post which might help in answering one of the questions that I most frequently get asked by undergraduates considering writing their thesis on some aspect of US history: is it possible to find sufficient primary source material without travelling to the United States?
Obviously we do subscribe to many extensive electronic resources that provide a wealth of primary source material, and we also have a substantial collection of primary sources available on microfilm in the library, but increasingly you are by no means limited to what we have purchased here in Oxford. The amount of primary source material that is being digitised and made freely available on the web by all sorts of institutions, organisations, and people in the US is vast, growing, and transformative. This whole area could fill several blog posts and still only scratch the surface, but what I will do here is provide some tips and suggestions for places to start looking beyond just throwing your search terms into Google and hoping you strike lucky. I will aim to follow up with more detailed posts on some of the resources mentioned here over the next few months.
Firstly, a plug for what we’ve been doing at the VHL to help our readers find useful web resources. We have a page on a site called Delicious which we use to save links to websites that we find as and when we come across them. It would be well worth checking our delicious page for the subject or area that you are interested in first to see what we have already found – you can search or use the tags on the right-hand side of the page to filter the full list to more relevant links for you. Delicious can also be a useful site to search in general. If you haven’t come across it before, it is a site entirely devoted to lists of useful websites created by its users; anything you find on Delicious has been consciously and deliberately saved by someone, and therefore evaluated at least to a certain extent, so you can perhaps be a little more confident in its quality than just from a random Google search. Other libraries are also using Delicious to create and maintain lists of free web resources too – the History Faculty Library has a page too, for example.
A strategic way to approach your search for primary source material on the web is to think about it in terms of the libraries, archives, and other institutions that are likely to be the homes for the originals. Almost all of these institutions are engaged in some kind of digitisation to a greater or lesser extent; you may not be able to travel to them physically but it’s amazing what you can find by visiting them virtually. The websites of the Library of Congress and US National Archives are both wonderful places to start. The Library of Congress have extensive digital collections available at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html (click on the ‘Digital Collections’ button at the top of their homepage), including American Memory (numerous themed historic collections on all sorts of topics), Chronicling America (historic newspapers – see the earlier post on this blog for more information) and Prints & Photographs. They also have a huge list of thematic bibliographies and guides at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/bibhome.html to help you navigate their collections (both physical and digital) as well as pointing out to other useful online resources from elsewhere. The National Archives have less material on their main website, but are making thousands of digitised sources available on other, dedicated sites such as DocsTeach (aimed at teachers and schools) and the Digital Vaults, and subscription-based sites such as Fold3 (which has a military/veterans focus).
Other institutions are all doing the same kind of thing. If you’re interested in a particular geographical location, start with the website for the relevant State Historical Association or major universities in the area; many states also have digital library programs, designed to provide access to digitised resources from many different institutions throughout the state on a single website. Examples are Calisphere (for California), Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts), LOUISiana Digital Library, Digital NC (North Carolina), the Portal to Texas History, and so on. These kind of sites are particularly good for documents such as letters and diaries, photographs, oral history, audiovisual materials, and maps. An earlier post on this blog gives pointers to some places to look for historic American newspapers online.
Likewise, if your area is political history, particularly for 20th century Presidents, the website of the relevant Presidential Library would be a good place to start. Some of them, like the JFK Library, are engaged in particularly extensive digitisation projects. If you’re looking for material on Presidents and their administrations, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia have a really good reference resource arranged by President on their website which points to all sorts of sources both from their own collections and elsewhere on the web.
As well as looking for digitised collections, another good tip is to search for exhibitions, either fully online ones or websites set up to accompany physical exhibitions, such as those listed on the Library of Congress or National Archives websites. Exhibitions are a big driver of digitisation, but tend to be more narrowly focused on their theme than the kind of material you may find in the more extensive digital collections portals.
Another tip is to look at the various social media profiles of many of these institutions, as these are often used for outreach and promotion with digitised materials frequently posted. As well as Facebook and Twitter pages, look at institutional profiles on sites such as Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube. Flickr has a project called the Flickr Commons, where many libraries and archives are uploading their historic photographs and other images. An excellent example on Tumblr is Today’s Document from the National Archives. There are also some fantastic mash-up sites such as Old Maps Online and HistoryPin which overlay historic maps and photographs from all sorts of institutions onto Google maps, for example.
There are a few things to be aware of when looking for and making use of free web resources though. Unlike library-purchased e-resources, you will often find that these are not full-text searchable and are often just images; you may well have to decipher handwriting and may not be able to easily find which particular page of a document is going to be relevant to your needs. The cataloguing can be less extensive as well, and you may have to rely on browsing through the documents and images rather than expecting to find what you want by searching. And what is freely available can be rather hit-and-miss itself. While it’s true that there is now a huge amount of material available in this way, it’s still a tiny drop in the ocean, and so you may be lucky and find a lot for your topic, or you may find that there’s hardly anything relevant to your particular area of research. It’s always worth having a look though! And if you come across something useful that we don’t have on our Delicious list, please let us know so that we can save it for others to find too.
Obviously we do subscribe to many extensive electronic resources that provide a wealth of primary source material, and we also have a substantial collection of primary sources available on microfilm in the library, but increasingly you are by no means limited to what we have purchased here in Oxford. The amount of primary source material that is being digitised and made freely available on the web by all sorts of institutions, organisations, and people in the US is vast, growing, and transformative. This whole area could fill several blog posts and still only scratch the surface, but what I will do here is provide some tips and suggestions for places to start looking beyond just throwing your search terms into Google and hoping you strike lucky. I will aim to follow up with more detailed posts on some of the resources mentioned here over the next few months.
Firstly, a plug for what we’ve been doing at the VHL to help our readers find useful web resources. We have a page on a site called Delicious which we use to save links to websites that we find as and when we come across them. It would be well worth checking our delicious page for the subject or area that you are interested in first to see what we have already found – you can search or use the tags on the right-hand side of the page to filter the full list to more relevant links for you. Delicious can also be a useful site to search in general. If you haven’t come across it before, it is a site entirely devoted to lists of useful websites created by its users; anything you find on Delicious has been consciously and deliberately saved by someone, and therefore evaluated at least to a certain extent, so you can perhaps be a little more confident in its quality than just from a random Google search. Other libraries are also using Delicious to create and maintain lists of free web resources too – the History Faculty Library has a page too, for example.
A strategic way to approach your search for primary source material on the web is to think about it in terms of the libraries, archives, and other institutions that are likely to be the homes for the originals. Almost all of these institutions are engaged in some kind of digitisation to a greater or lesser extent; you may not be able to travel to them physically but it’s amazing what you can find by visiting them virtually. The websites of the Library of Congress and US National Archives are both wonderful places to start. The Library of Congress have extensive digital collections available at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html (click on the ‘Digital Collections’ button at the top of their homepage), including American Memory (numerous themed historic collections on all sorts of topics), Chronicling America (historic newspapers – see the earlier post on this blog for more information) and Prints & Photographs. They also have a huge list of thematic bibliographies and guides at http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/bibhome.html to help you navigate their collections (both physical and digital) as well as pointing out to other useful online resources from elsewhere. The National Archives have less material on their main website, but are making thousands of digitised sources available on other, dedicated sites such as DocsTeach (aimed at teachers and schools) and the Digital Vaults, and subscription-based sites such as Fold3 (which has a military/veterans focus).
Other institutions are all doing the same kind of thing. If you’re interested in a particular geographical location, start with the website for the relevant State Historical Association or major universities in the area; many states also have digital library programs, designed to provide access to digitised resources from many different institutions throughout the state on a single website. Examples are Calisphere (for California), Digital Commonwealth (Massachusetts), LOUISiana Digital Library, Digital NC (North Carolina), the Portal to Texas History, and so on. These kind of sites are particularly good for documents such as letters and diaries, photographs, oral history, audiovisual materials, and maps. An earlier post on this blog gives pointers to some places to look for historic American newspapers online.
Likewise, if your area is political history, particularly for 20th century Presidents, the website of the relevant Presidential Library would be a good place to start. Some of them, like the JFK Library, are engaged in particularly extensive digitisation projects. If you’re looking for material on Presidents and their administrations, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia have a really good reference resource arranged by President on their website which points to all sorts of sources both from their own collections and elsewhere on the web.
As well as looking for digitised collections, another good tip is to search for exhibitions, either fully online ones or websites set up to accompany physical exhibitions, such as those listed on the Library of Congress or National Archives websites. Exhibitions are a big driver of digitisation, but tend to be more narrowly focused on their theme than the kind of material you may find in the more extensive digital collections portals.
Another tip is to look at the various social media profiles of many of these institutions, as these are often used for outreach and promotion with digitised materials frequently posted. As well as Facebook and Twitter pages, look at institutional profiles on sites such as Flickr, Tumblr, and YouTube. Flickr has a project called the Flickr Commons, where many libraries and archives are uploading their historic photographs and other images. An excellent example on Tumblr is Today’s Document from the National Archives. There are also some fantastic mash-up sites such as Old Maps Online and HistoryPin which overlay historic maps and photographs from all sorts of institutions onto Google maps, for example.
There are a few things to be aware of when looking for and making use of free web resources though. Unlike library-purchased e-resources, you will often find that these are not full-text searchable and are often just images; you may well have to decipher handwriting and may not be able to easily find which particular page of a document is going to be relevant to your needs. The cataloguing can be less extensive as well, and you may have to rely on browsing through the documents and images rather than expecting to find what you want by searching. And what is freely available can be rather hit-and-miss itself. While it’s true that there is now a huge amount of material available in this way, it’s still a tiny drop in the ocean, and so you may be lucky and find a lot for your topic, or you may find that there’s hardly anything relevant to your particular area of research. It’s always worth having a look though! And if you come across something useful that we don’t have on our Delicious list, please let us know so that we can save it for others to find too.
Friday, 23 December 2011
Santa Claus and reindeer, Alaska, 1893
As it's the last day before the Christmas break, I've been poking around for something Christmassy to share from one of our resources, and have come across this delightful account of playing Santa Claus with real reindeer to Eskimo children in Alaska in 1893.
My favourite part though, I think, is the beautifully evocative description of the night itself:
If that doesn't make you feel all warm and festive, nothing will! Click on the images below to read the full extract from the report, which is contained in the US Congressional Serial Set (available via OxLIP+ for Oxford users).
Report on introduction of domesticated reindeer into Alaska. with maps and illustrations, by Sheldon Jackson, general agent of education in Alaska. 1894, S.Exec.Doc. 70 (53rd Congress, 2nd Session), contained in the US Congressional Serial Set.
I hope you all have a wonderful and relaxing Christmas and New Year!
I told the children about Santa Claus, and for them to tie their fur stockings up near their beds, as he was coming to visit them for the first time, and would remember every child.... It occurred to me that perhaps this was the first time in the history of civilization that a live Santa Claus made his midnight visit upon an errand of mercy with a team of reindeer.
My favourite part though, I think, is the beautifully evocative description of the night itself:
While in my stooping position at the first house, I suddenly lifted my eyes to the north and beheld the most gorgeous aurora I witnessed at any time during the winter. The night was a glorious one, cold and crisp, with the stars shining in lustrous splendor from the pale blue canopy above, and not a breath of air was stirring. Across the whole northern horizon floods of wavy light surged and swept from east to west, sending further up into the heavens streams of vapory light dancing up and down in graceful shadows, that easily led me to imagine they were caused by invisible spirits.
If that doesn't make you feel all warm and festive, nothing will! Click on the images below to read the full extract from the report, which is contained in the US Congressional Serial Set (available via OxLIP+ for Oxford users).
Report on introduction of domesticated reindeer into Alaska. with maps and illustrations, by Sheldon Jackson, general agent of education in Alaska. 1894, S.Exec.Doc. 70 (53rd Congress, 2nd Session), contained in the US Congressional Serial Set.
I hope you all have a wonderful and relaxing Christmas and New Year!
Friday, 28 October 2011
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922
Yesterday we had a visit from Deborah Thomas from the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress, who gave a presentation on the Library's Chronicling America website. I thought I'd write up my notes from her presentation here for anyone who was unable to attend and also for future reference.
About Chronicling America and the National Digital Newspaper Program
Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) is a website that provides access to digitised pages of selected American newspapers from 1836-1922, and is hosted and maintained by the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. This program is a partnership between the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been running since 2005. It funds state projects to digitise historic newspapers from this time period (each grant funds the digitisation of 100,000 pages), which are then made available through the Chronicling America site. The program builds on the earlier United States Newspaper Program, which inventoried, catalogued and microfilmed some 75 million pages from 140,000 historic American newspapers over a period of 25 years. The current programme aims to make a representative sample of those pages available online - right now there are almost 4.3 million pages from 25 states (and the District of Columbia), and it is hoped that eventually (within 15-20 years) all states will be covered. The latest three states to join in are Indiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia, and their content will start to be made available next Spring. This state-specific approach is driven by the nature of newspaper publishing and newspaper collections in the United States - local institutions have the most comprehensive collections for their area, and there is no single national US newspaper collection as in many other countries. However, aggregating the content in the website at a national level provides a much better and more accessible online service to researchers, and this is one of the main goals of the project.
Each state is responsible for selecting the newspapers and editions that they will digitise, and so the type of content that you will find within the site varies from state to state. Some have picked long runs of a few large papers; others have picked a lot of smaller titles - Kentucky, for example, wanted to ensure that each of their eighty counties were represented in their sample. As part of the process, the contributing institutions were asked to write short essays for each newspaper title that they digitised, explaining why they chose that title and its significance and context - these essays are all available as part of the bibliographic record for the title within the US Newspaper Directory (of which more later in this post), so you can see the rationale behind what could otherwise seem like a fairly arbitrary sample.
The material being digitised is all within the date range of 1836-1922. The end date is determined by US copyright law, whose threshold is 1923 - all content from before that date is in the public domain and may therefore be freely digitised and made available by the Library in this way, whereas anything more recent would require the permission of a complicated network of rights-holders. This does mean that you are able to download, copy and re-use any of the content from the site entirely freely yourself! The start date is rather more arbitrary, but was chosen because of the increasing difficulty of digitising the older material and because the format of newspapers changes and is less consistent the further back in time you go.
Searching the site
The Chronicling America interface provides several different routes in to access the content. On the main page you will find a search bar which defaults to the basic full-text search - this allows you to search for terms and restrict your search to a specific state and/or date range. The search box here acts as a proximity search, so if you put more than one term in it will search for instances where those terms appear within five words of each other. The digitised pages have been converted for full-text search using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which can have a variable success rate - it's less than 100%, and in some instances can even be less than 50% accurate. However chances are if you are searching for significant terms, those words will turn up more than once in an article which does compensate for this a little!
The advanced search gives you more options to construct your search terms, and allows you to restrict by more than one state and/or newspaper title as well as enter date ranges by day and month as well as year.
The next tab (All Digitized Newspapers) is the means by which you can browse the collection, either in its entirety, or by state, ethnicity, or language. The newspapers that are included are almost entirely English-language, though there are two in French, two Hawaiian, three Spanish and one Choctaw title and more French and Spanish content will be added later this year.
Once you have found some results, the page image interface is really nice and smooth, with scrolling zoom and click and drag, and really high quality scans. You can navigate through the full edition of that paper, and view or download page images as text and PDF (with the bibliographic information attached, ready for referencing). You can also 'clip' images to get an image of part of a page - the 'clip image' button will essentially cut out whatever is visible in the viewer at that moment. All the page images, and clipped images that you make, have persistent URLs, which means you can bookmark or save the link and you will always be able to get back to it. As an example, this link will take you to the following clipped image:
As well as the full-text material in Chronicling America, the site also provides access to the full US Newspaper Directory. This contains bibliographic information about all 140,000 titles that were catalogued as part of the United States Newspaper Program, along with information about which libraries hold them. These bibliographic records also include links to full-text digitised versions both within Chronicling America and on other sites where available. Quite often if something is in Chronicling America it will also be available online from the institution which scanned it in the first place, so you are likely to find some titles duplicated. For the titles that are included in Chronicling America, this is where you will find the contextual essays written by the people that selected the title for inclusion.
Topics in Chronicling America
The Library of Congress also provides around 100 topic guides to the site, which are designed to give you starting points in researching a whole variety of events, subjects and themes within Chronicling America. The topics available are quite a random selection, ranging from Presidential administrations and elections, to events such as the Haymarket Affair or the Annexation of Hawaii, and people like Booker T. Washington and Nikola Tesla, as well as all sorts of other things like the ping-pong craze of 1900 to 1902. Each topical guide gives you a bit of the background as well as links to sample articles and (perhaps most usefully), suggested search terms to use. You can see a full list of the topics at http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/topics/topics.html, but check back again in the future as more are being created and added.
Keeping up-to-date with the site
Chronicling America is growing rapidly and continually, so it's worth going back again and again to see if new material has been added that is relevant to your research. The site also provides you with ways to keep up with the new content as it becomes available and to be alerted when there are additions. You can subscribe to general updates (of content as well as points of interest and research) both by RSS and email, or subscribe to an RSS feed of just the new content as it is added, from the subscribe link available throughout the site.
And finally...
All the data from the site is freely available for re-use and can be obtained via the site's API. To see an example of one of the innovative uses of the data from the US Newspaper Directory, see Stanford University's data visualisation of the growth of newspapers across the United States from 1690-2011.
Thursday, 18 August 2011
Introduction to the US Congressional Serial Set
At last, the long-promised introduction to the US Congressional Serial Set, one of our major resources.
What is the Serial Set?
The US Congressional Serial Set is the official collection of reports and documents of Congress. It began with the 15th Congress in 1817; older documents (from 1789-) can be found in the American State Papers. It is as important to get to grips what the Serial Set is not as what it is, as it is very specific as to which documents/reports are included and which are published separately.
The Serial Set contains the following named categories of documents:
House & Senate Reports are the official communications of the House & Senate Committees to the full House & Senate. They are mostly legislative reports, but also include special reports on various subjects. They are numbered as H.Rpt. or S.Rpt., so if you see a reference beginning with either of these terms you will definitely be able to find it in the Serial Set.
House & Senate Documents are less closely linked to legislation. Some examples of the type of publication that would be classed as a House or Senate Document are as follows:
The House & Senate Journals are the daily record of business of each chamber. Unlike the Congressional Record they don't record the debates verbatim, but you may find excerpts of speeches included on occasion. Like the Congressional Record, they also do not include the text of bills or resolutions.
Overall, the Serial Set is a vast collection of hundreds of thousands of documents, including thousands of maps and illustrations, covering every conceivable topic and both US and worldwide events - anything Congress had an interest in. Whatever you're researching, you're sure to find something of relevance in the Serial Set, but do be aware of the limitations of the set in terms of the types of documents included.
American State Papers
The American State Papers contain legislative and executive documents of Congress from 1789 to 1838. Documents within the American State Papers are arranged into ten topical classes, as follows:
How to access the Serial Set
We have access to the electronic version of the Serial Set from Readex for 1817-1994, which is available via SOLO/OxLIP+. The easiest way to find it is to search for 'Congressional Serial Set' - the database you want is entitled US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 [in progress] (with American State Papers, 1789-1838). There is also the American State Papers (with US Congressional Serial Set) and US Congressional Serial Set Maps, which allow you to search those specifically, but if you're after access to the main thing, the option highlighted below is the one you want.
If you want to find documents in the Serial Set post-1994, they are freely available (and full-text searchable) via the GPO's Federal Digital System site - links as follows:
The VHL also has an extensive run of Serial Set volumes from the 19th century (up to approximately 1880) in print down in the stack, as well as the printed volumes of the American State Papers.
Searching the Readex Serial Set
The Readex interface offers several different ways to search or browse the Serial Set. I will concentrate here on the search and browse options available for the main Serial Set, but if you are searching the American State Papers via the Readex interface you will find it works in basically the same way.
The easiest way by far is if you know the exact document you are looking for, as you can then enter the reference in the publication search and it will take you straight to it. However, in most cases you won't necessarily know this, and will be wanting to carry out more speculative keyword searches.
When you click through from SOLO or OxLIP+, you will be taken straight to the advanced search screen. Here you can enter your search terms either in the top two boxes (which search the citations), and/or the third box down, which is the full-text search box. You can specify the Serial Set volume if you know it, and add a date range in the last box. This latter is particularly useful as the Serial Set covers such a long time period.
This allows you to be quite speculative and broad in your initial search terms, and then throw more terms in in subsequent searches (and the full text is particularly helpful at this point I find) in order to reduce your results set to something more manageable and focused.
One thing to be aware of is the 'also consider these topics' feature, which you will see on the right-hand side of your results list. This lists various associated subject/person/geographic etc terms which you can click on, but if you do click on one of these it will not narrow your search, but rather broaden it to show you all documents that are linked to that term. If you find you've carried out too narrow a search, or what you've come back with is not actually useful to you, this can be a good way to broaden things out again, but don't click on these terms expecting it to filter your existing results!
As well as search options, there is a whole variety of ways to browse the Serial Set. At the bottom of the main search screen you will see a set of tabs, which allow you to browse by a huge number of categories. Within each tab there are subcategories, so that you can drill down to find the term you want and then the documents that are associated with that subject/person/organisation/committee etc. I find that sometimes these can be very useful, but for other things they are just too broad. If you are wanting to find a specific person, or documents relating to a specific Act of Congress though, then this can be easier than conducting a keyword search. And as with searches, once you have selected a category you will find that you then have the option to conduct a search just within that category, which can again be a very useful way to start off broadly and narrow down.
What is the Serial Set?
The US Congressional Serial Set is the official collection of reports and documents of Congress. It began with the 15th Congress in 1817; older documents (from 1789-) can be found in the American State Papers. It is as important to get to grips what the Serial Set is not as what it is, as it is very specific as to which documents/reports are included and which are published separately.
The Serial Set contains the following named categories of documents:
- House & Senate Reports
- House & Senate Documents
- House & Senate Journals (until the 82nd Congress in 1952)
- Senate Executive Reports and Treaty Documents (from the 95th Congress in 1977 onwards).
House & Senate Reports are the official communications of the House & Senate Committees to the full House & Senate. They are mostly legislative reports, but also include special reports on various subjects. They are numbered as H.Rpt. or S.Rpt., so if you see a reference beginning with either of these terms you will definitely be able to find it in the Serial Set.
House & Senate Documents are less closely linked to legislation. Some examples of the type of publication that would be classed as a House or Senate Document are as follows:
- Congress's rules of operation
- Memorials, ceremonial reports
- Results of investigations (including occasionally transcripts of hearings)
- Executive Department materials (annual reports, special reports)
- Materials from outside the Federal Government which were of use to Congress
The House & Senate Journals are the daily record of business of each chamber. Unlike the Congressional Record they don't record the debates verbatim, but you may find excerpts of speeches included on occasion. Like the Congressional Record, they also do not include the text of bills or resolutions.
Overall, the Serial Set is a vast collection of hundreds of thousands of documents, including thousands of maps and illustrations, covering every conceivable topic and both US and worldwide events - anything Congress had an interest in. Whatever you're researching, you're sure to find something of relevance in the Serial Set, but do be aware of the limitations of the set in terms of the types of documents included.
American State Papers
The American State Papers contain legislative and executive documents of Congress from 1789 to 1838. Documents within the American State Papers are arranged into ten topical classes, as follows:
I. Foreign relations
II. Indian affairs
III. Finances
IV. Commerce and navigation
V. Military affairs
VI. Naval affairs
VII. Post Office Department
VIII. Public lands
IX. Claims
X. Miscellaneous
How to access the Serial Set
We have access to the electronic version of the Serial Set from Readex for 1817-1994, which is available via SOLO/OxLIP+. The easiest way to find it is to search for 'Congressional Serial Set' - the database you want is entitled US Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 [in progress] (with American State Papers, 1789-1838). There is also the American State Papers (with US Congressional Serial Set) and US Congressional Serial Set Maps, which allow you to search those specifically, but if you're after access to the main thing, the option highlighted below is the one you want.
If you want to find documents in the Serial Set post-1994, they are freely available (and full-text searchable) via the GPO's Federal Digital System site - links as follows:
The VHL also has an extensive run of Serial Set volumes from the 19th century (up to approximately 1880) in print down in the stack, as well as the printed volumes of the American State Papers.
Searching the Readex Serial Set
The Readex interface offers several different ways to search or browse the Serial Set. I will concentrate here on the search and browse options available for the main Serial Set, but if you are searching the American State Papers via the Readex interface you will find it works in basically the same way.
The easiest way by far is if you know the exact document you are looking for, as you can then enter the reference in the publication search and it will take you straight to it. However, in most cases you won't necessarily know this, and will be wanting to carry out more speculative keyword searches.
When you click through from SOLO or OxLIP+, you will be taken straight to the advanced search screen. Here you can enter your search terms either in the top two boxes (which search the citations), and/or the third box down, which is the full-text search box. You can specify the Serial Set volume if you know it, and add a date range in the last box. This latter is particularly useful as the Serial Set covers such a long time period.
(Note the links to the publication search and also the bill number search at the bottom)
As the Serial Set is such a large database, you may well find that you get back a lot of results, and it can be difficult to work out what terms to put in in the first place to bring back a manageable number. One really good feature of this database though is the ways in which it allows you to filter after you have carried out an intitial search. Once you have a set of results in the lower part of the page, you will still have your search boxes available at the top, but now you have the option to carry out further searches within your results set only:
This allows you to be quite speculative and broad in your initial search terms, and then throw more terms in in subsequent searches (and the full text is particularly helpful at this point I find) in order to reduce your results set to something more manageable and focused.
One thing to be aware of is the 'also consider these topics' feature, which you will see on the right-hand side of your results list. This lists various associated subject/person/geographic etc terms which you can click on, but if you do click on one of these it will not narrow your search, but rather broaden it to show you all documents that are linked to that term. If you find you've carried out too narrow a search, or what you've come back with is not actually useful to you, this can be a good way to broaden things out again, but don't click on these terms expecting it to filter your existing results!
As well as search options, there is a whole variety of ways to browse the Serial Set. At the bottom of the main search screen you will see a set of tabs, which allow you to browse by a huge number of categories. Within each tab there are subcategories, so that you can drill down to find the term you want and then the documents that are associated with that subject/person/organisation/committee etc. I find that sometimes these can be very useful, but for other things they are just too broad. If you are wanting to find a specific person, or documents relating to a specific Act of Congress though, then this can be easier than conducting a keyword search. And as with searches, once you have selected a category you will find that you then have the option to conduct a search just within that category, which can again be a very useful way to start off broadly and narrow down.
Finally, it is also possible to search the Serial Set for documents relating to specific bills and resolutions if you know the bill number. To do this, select the bill number search from the options below the search boxes.
Working with documents
Once you have found the document you are after, there are several things that you can do. The documents are all scanned page images which you can zoom into and move around on the page (particularly useful for maps). You can download pages either individually or in bulk, as JPGs (single pages only) or PDFs. Each document has a full citation, which you can view, download or print, and you can save documents to a temporary collection and then email yourself the links and references to come back to later. There is also a full-text search box at the top of the document view page which allows you to search within that document for specific terms, which is particularly useful for lengthy reports.
Other ways to access the Serial Set
As well as searching the Readex database, we do have a set of printed indexes to the Serial Set, which cover 1817-1969 (as well as the American State Papers from 1789-). They are available in the reference section on the ground floor, and if you use these they will give you the exact publication reference which you can then use in the publication search in the electronic version. Another useful reference is an online guide to the Serial Set which allows you to browse by agency to find publication and volume numbers.
With thanks to August Imholtz for providing me with some of the descriptions used above.
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Follow me to visit libraries and archives in the USA
(Cross-posted to the main VHL blog)
In April, I was selected as the 2011 recipient of the CILIP/ESU Travelling Librarian Award, which supports a UK librarian to travel to the United States to visit libraries and archives. The award is designed to promote and develop UK-US library links, and is an excellent opportunity for me both to learn more about historic library collections in the US and to share information on the American collections at Oxford with librarians in the United States.
I'll be flying out to the US one month today, on 17th September, and will be blogging my trip at http://travellinglibrarian2011.blogspot.com. I'll also be tweeting as @jlrawson. You can view my itinerary on the blog at http://travellinglibrarian2011.blogspot.com/p/itinerary.html - I'll be visiting a variety of libraries and archives with significant historical collections, all in the east coast area. Follow me as I travel and gain an insight into the places that I visit! If you have things you'd like to know, or questions you'd like me to ask while I'm there, feel free to let me know.
In April, I was selected as the 2011 recipient of the CILIP/ESU Travelling Librarian Award, which supports a UK librarian to travel to the United States to visit libraries and archives. The award is designed to promote and develop UK-US library links, and is an excellent opportunity for me both to learn more about historic library collections in the US and to share information on the American collections at Oxford with librarians in the United States.
I'll be flying out to the US one month today, on 17th September, and will be blogging my trip at http://travellinglibrarian2011.blogspot.com. I'll also be tweeting as @jlrawson. You can view my itinerary on the blog at http://travellinglibrarian2011.blogspot.com/p/itinerary.html - I'll be visiting a variety of libraries and archives with significant historical collections, all in the east coast area. Follow me as I travel and gain an insight into the places that I visit! If you have things you'd like to know, or questions you'd like me to ask while I'm there, feel free to let me know.
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Declassified Documents: DDRS and DNSA
In the week that the full Pentagon Papers were released online, and following the announcement of a new collection added to the Digital National Security Archive, a post on finding and accessing declassified documents seemed appropriate!
Oxford has access to two online databases of declassified documents, the aforementioned Digital National Security Archive and also the Declassified Documents Reference System, both available via OxLIP+. These two databases are complementary in that they both aim to do the same thing but have a slightly different approach.
The Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) provides access to over 500,000 pages of declassified government documents. The bulk of the documents (as advertised) cover 1945 to the 1970s, however I have found documents there from as early as 1910 and as late as 1992. They originate from many government departments and organisations: the CIA, FBI, State, Justice and Defense Departments, National Security Council and the White House among others. It includes all kinds of different materials - memos, cables, correspondence, studies and reports, and covers nearly every major domestic and international event during the period.
The Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) also provides access to over 500,000 pages of declassified documents, starting in 1945 and going right up to almost the present day for certain topics. The main way in which this resource differs from DDRS is that it is organised thematically, with documents arranged into collections on specific areas or events such as Afghanistan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, or US military uses of space. New collections are added relatively frequently, so even if your area of interest is not currently covered it is worth checking back periodically. As with DDRS, DNSA includes a diverse range of document types and sources.
How to use the database: DDRS
When you click through to DDRS from OxLIP+, you are brought to the basic search screen, which allows you to do keyword or full-text searches of the entire database. With so many documents to search, however, it can be difficult to enter search terms that are going to bring you back a useful (and not overwhelming) set of results. I'd generally advise therefore going straight to the advanced search option, which gives you a lot of ways to narrow your search.
At the top of the page you have the usual options to enter several search terms. Note that the default is to search keyword/subject, ie, the citation and not the full-text. If you want to do a full-text search, you need to select full-text from the drop down menu.
Below the search boxes there are a whole lot of different ways to limit your search and ensure that you get really relevant results. The most useful one is the issue date, which means the date of the actual document itself and allows you to restrict your search to specific time periods. Don't confuse this with the 'date declassified', which will in most cases be much later. Another useful limiter is the source institution, which allows you only to search for documents issuing from a particular agency if, for example, you're interested in just the activity of the CIA or the White House etc. You can also restrict your search by document type, sanitization, completeness or number of pages.
The documents themselves can be viewed either as page images or as transcribed text. Page images is the default; to view the text, click on 'view text' next to the page navigation at the top. What you can do with the document depends on which view you are in. If you are viewing the page image, then you can download/print the entire document as a PDF. If you are viewing the text, then you can print or email the text of the page you are viewing (but only that one page at a time). DDRS also offers a fairly basic 'mark records' function, where you can create a list of specific records from your various searches as you go along to come back to. However, this is session-bound, so you can't come back to it after exiting the database, and there is also no save/export function other than printing out the screen from your browser! Within your session, it is also possible to view your search history and get back to earlier sets of results.
How to use the database: DNSA
As described above, documents within the DNSA are arranged into thematic collections, which can be accessed individually or in conjunction with one another. Each collection also has a guide available, which provides lots of information about what it includes and any limitations, and are well worth taking a look at before you dive in to your research.
Depending on what you are looking for, there are several different ways to search the DNSA database.
Searching documents: Note that unlike DDRS, it is not possible to search the full-text of documents themselves.
Oxford has access to two online databases of declassified documents, the aforementioned Digital National Security Archive and also the Declassified Documents Reference System, both available via OxLIP+. These two databases are complementary in that they both aim to do the same thing but have a slightly different approach.
The Declassified Documents Reference System (DDRS) provides access to over 500,000 pages of declassified government documents. The bulk of the documents (as advertised) cover 1945 to the 1970s, however I have found documents there from as early as 1910 and as late as 1992. They originate from many government departments and organisations: the CIA, FBI, State, Justice and Defense Departments, National Security Council and the White House among others. It includes all kinds of different materials - memos, cables, correspondence, studies and reports, and covers nearly every major domestic and international event during the period.
The Digital National Security Archive (DNSA) also provides access to over 500,000 pages of declassified documents, starting in 1945 and going right up to almost the present day for certain topics. The main way in which this resource differs from DDRS is that it is organised thematically, with documents arranged into collections on specific areas or events such as Afghanistan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, or US military uses of space. New collections are added relatively frequently, so even if your area of interest is not currently covered it is worth checking back periodically. As with DDRS, DNSA includes a diverse range of document types and sources.
How to use the database: DDRS
When you click through to DDRS from OxLIP+, you are brought to the basic search screen, which allows you to do keyword or full-text searches of the entire database. With so many documents to search, however, it can be difficult to enter search terms that are going to bring you back a useful (and not overwhelming) set of results. I'd generally advise therefore going straight to the advanced search option, which gives you a lot of ways to narrow your search.
At the top of the page you have the usual options to enter several search terms. Note that the default is to search keyword/subject, ie, the citation and not the full-text. If you want to do a full-text search, you need to select full-text from the drop down menu.
Below the search boxes there are a whole lot of different ways to limit your search and ensure that you get really relevant results. The most useful one is the issue date, which means the date of the actual document itself and allows you to restrict your search to specific time periods. Don't confuse this with the 'date declassified', which will in most cases be much later. Another useful limiter is the source institution, which allows you only to search for documents issuing from a particular agency if, for example, you're interested in just the activity of the CIA or the White House etc. You can also restrict your search by document type, sanitization, completeness or number of pages.
The documents themselves can be viewed either as page images or as transcribed text. Page images is the default; to view the text, click on 'view text' next to the page navigation at the top. What you can do with the document depends on which view you are in. If you are viewing the page image, then you can download/print the entire document as a PDF. If you are viewing the text, then you can print or email the text of the page you are viewing (but only that one page at a time). DDRS also offers a fairly basic 'mark records' function, where you can create a list of specific records from your various searches as you go along to come back to. However, this is session-bound, so you can't come back to it after exiting the database, and there is also no save/export function other than printing out the screen from your browser! Within your session, it is also possible to view your search history and get back to earlier sets of results.
How to use the database: DNSA
As described above, documents within the DNSA are arranged into thematic collections, which can be accessed individually or in conjunction with one another. Each collection also has a guide available, which provides lots of information about what it includes and any limitations, and are well worth taking a look at before you dive in to your research.
Depending on what you are looking for, there are several different ways to search the DNSA database.
Searching documents: Note that unlike DDRS, it is not possible to search the full-text of documents themselves.
- Quick search: From the box in the top left-hand corner. This performs a basic keyword search across all collections and is therefore likely to bring back a large number of hits.
- Document search: This is the most useful search option for finding material. It offers advanced search options (keyword, name, date, document type) and the ability to select which collections you want to search - scroll down to find the tick boxes at the bottom of the page. You can therefore search only one, or a selected few, or the entire database as you choose and is the real way in which the thematic approach is beneficial as you're only searching relevant documents from the off.
- Bibliography search: This searches the bibliography of materials used by the researchers at the National Security Archive when compiling the collections. It can therefore be useful as a background bibliography of the subject area, and will point you on to relevant books and articles, but is not designed to be comprehensive.
- Chronology search: This gives you a useful summary of key events pertaining to your search.
- Glossary search: Allows you to search for basic descriptive information about significant individuals, terms and acronyms.
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