The Nottinghamshire Bibliography Online Project
Background
The first comprehensive bibliography of Nottinghamshire history was compiled by Michael Brook and published by the Thoroton Society in 2002. Brook’s bibliography includes 8707 items relating to “books (and discrete portions of books), pamphlets, periodical articles, and academic theses at doctoral and master’s levels” published before 1998. The printed version of the Bibliography has been converted to a downloadable PDF (available on the Thoroton Society website) that is searchable at a basic level but cannot be easily updated.
Aims and objectives
The aim of the Nottinghamshire History Online Bibliography project is to provide a single web-based means of access to all bibliographic sources for the history of the city of Nottingham and county of Nottinghamshire, including published books, journal articles and unpublished theses and ‘grey literature’.
Key components:
- To design and implement an open source bibliographical database
- To create rich descriptive metadata for each bibliographic record to facilitate resource discovery
- To create an appropriate web front-end for search and display of the bibliographical data to be hosted by the Thoroton Society
- To collect and maintain bibliographical data produced since 1997
Overall approach
- Agree and form ‘virtual project team’
- Bibliographic data for resources published after 1997 to continue to be collected and recorded on Access database (CF and team)
- Agree database structure and subject/place tagging schema (virtual team)
- ‘Retro-convert’ 8700 items recorded by Brooke to database records
- Design, develop and test web-based bibliographical database
- Upload both Brooke records and post-1997 data
- Quality assurance of bibliographic records
- Launch web-based database on Thoroton Society website
Project outputs/deliverables
- Technical specifications
- Tagging guidelines
- Online biographical database
Project outcomes
The bibliographical database will become a significant aid to researchers and students by:
- Providing easy access to obscure and largely forgotten books and journal articles through searching
- Providing simple cross-searching across a range of titles of varying dates
- Enabling a ready appreciation of the bibliographical history of Nottinghamshire
- Facilitating access to a range of academic writing dealing with a single topic