What's in the digital library?

I have included printed material from several sources in the digital library that is generally not available on-line elsewhere. This includes local history books, directories, military histories, electoral roll and a few indexes produced by family history societies and others.

What is the value of these items for family and local history research? I shall be exploring that in more detail in future blogs. But in summary, these sources will help to fill in the details and provide more background information for research.

Take directories as an example. They list residents and businesses, and often contain descriptions of a town, its notable local events and its socitieis and associations. As such they are a valuable insight into local life,culture and commerce.

They started in the 17th century, initially as listings of businesses. By the mid 19th century companies like Kelly's were providing more comprehensive coverage, including some individuals, but the evidence is that coverage was best in the urban centres, and rather sparse in the rural areas. Indeed, Kelly's started in London and owed its existence to work done by the Post Office to list postal adresses for London residents. Frederick Kelly, who was at the time chief inspector of inland letter carriers for the Post Office, bought the copyright for the directories in 1835 and developed his business from there.

Initially, Kelly used Post Office employees to gather information on residents and businesses, but this lead to complaints of unfair competition from other directory publishers. Latterly he employed his own canvassers who provided the information.

As more local directories were produced, and the electoral register expanded to cover a greater proportion of the population, so this was used as an important information source for directories.
What does all this mean for historical research? It means that directories are a useful source of information if you can find what you want, but that they are not complete information sources. Some research has been done on this subject, and this shows that, for example in 1890, coverage may only have been about 60% of local residents in comparison with census of the same period.

I hope to provide more insights into the quality of the resources in my digital library to assist historical research.