The Old Bailey Project

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey - 1674-1913 - summaries of court cases in the City of London and the County of Middlesex were published regularly until 1913. The transcripts were to provide a true, fair and perfect narrative of the court proceedings. The City of London subsidised the publishing of the proceedings from the end of the eighteenth century. As court proceedings were increasing reported in newspapers the need for a sepaprate publication diminished. These valuable resources have been available  online since 2003 at http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/.

On 30 June, as part of the Making Public Histories series at the State Library of Victoria, Professor Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield) director of the The Old Bailey Proceedings Online Project discussed digital histories as a form of public history. He also looked at what the Project team learned from its users as well as how the media have used the site, in particular the UK BBC series Garrow's Law, now in its second series and the radio program,Voices from the Old Bailey. Shane Carmody (Director of Collections Access State Library of Victoria) discussed how dispersed digital resources are linked in local projects in Victoria.

Placing the Proceedings of the Old Bailey online was only the initial project. Subsequent projects utilising the resources of the proceedings include -

•  London Lives, 1690-1800: Crime, Poverty and Social Policy in the Metropolis provides fully searchable access to 240,000 manuscripts from eight archives and fifteen datasets, giving access to 3.35 million names.
• Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900 provides access to eleven major electronic sources in British history
• Locating London's Past: A Georeferencing Tool for Mapping Historical and Archaeological Evidence, 1660-1800 will allow place name data from the Proceedings to be be mapped onto fully rasterised and georeferenced maps

 Crime in the Community: Enhancing User Engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online enabled us to carry out the first comprehensive analysis of site usage. A report was of analysis was published in 2010.

Shane Caromdy spoke about the digitisation projects at the State Library and also the shift from charging for the use of items provided online to making them freely available with users providing acknowledgement to the library.

Google Docs

Recently I have been having trouble with one of my computers so decided to try using Google Docs which I could access from any computer.

If you go to Google - www.google.com.au -  and then click the 'more' tab you will find a link to Documents.

Available resource options include Document, Presentation and Spreadsheets.

I have created a number of documents for projects and then printed or downloaded them into Word documents. Google Docs may not have all the features of the latest version of Word but the basic features are there.

For the last History Victoria Support Group seminar day, instead of using PowerPoint, I used the Presentation Resource to create the slides and then saved it to PowerPoint for use on the day as I did not have online access when giving the talk.

Advantages of using Google Docs include being able to access them anywhere there is a connection to the Internet. Documents can be shared with people designated by the creator of the documents.

Google Docs is one of several online tools available for creating documents etc. Such tools are worth investigating especially when working on a number of computers or working on a joint project.