19th century Britain goes online

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has joined forces with Essex University to launch an online picture of Britain's changing population

The Online Historical Populations Reports (OHPR) website, launched last week, holds more than 200,000 pages of digitised reports and data showing changes in population from 1800 up to the Second World War.

Developed by AHDS History at the University of Essex and through Jisc's digitisation programme, the new resource allows users to search by date or geographical area. They can zoom in or out, rotate pages and download statistics into spreadsheet format.

It also contains the registrar general's reports of the period along with documents relating to the administration of the census and specially commissioned essays.

Matthew Woollard, project director at AHDS History, said: "The Online Historical Population Reports (OHPR) website will provide an extremely valuable tool for learning, teaching and research and is yet another milestone in the growth of vital historical documents which are now freely available online."

The OHPR website is part of Jisc's £10m programme to digitise content, including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data and parliamentary papers for long term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK.

This article was originally published at Kablenet.

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