UK legislation online

New from the Ministry of Justice and the TNA a website that "brings together every single piece of UK legislation from the magna carta to the present day".

The site is called legislation.gov.uk and its a great resource, very easy to navigate around and identify what changes have been made to legislation. Because it goes back to the 13th century it also makes if very easy to view historical Acts of Parliament, for example the Act of Union in 1707, the Libraries Offences Act 1898 and the Public Records (Scotland) Act 1809

According to the press release the site now contains 6.5 million pdf documents and will be updated every day at 2.30 pm with the latest changes to legislation. And you can hear Lord McNally (Minister of State for the MofJ) talking about it on the BBC here.

London Lives

Is a project that has been funded by the ESRC, and implemented by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire.

The London Lives website has brought together 240,000 manuscripts from 14 archives giving access to 3.35 million names. It provides access to documents from parish registers, criminal records, coroners' records and hospital records. There are also plans for a wiki to be launched in the future.

If you register with the site it allows you to save documents in your own personal workspace. The site has a lives page that contains information about individuals, some with some brilliant names like Repentance Hedges and Quilt Arnold.

There was a good write up about it in the guardian if you want to know more.

NARA gets a wiki

The National Archives in American have launched their own wiki called Our Archives

From their press release the wiki:

“Our Archives” provides a collaborative space for members of the public, researchers, and staff to share knowledge about National Archives records, resources and research. The wiki is an opportunity for researchers, historians, archivists, and citizen archivists to work together to create pages on specific records or topics as well as to share information and resources to connect with other researchers.

Users may participate in the wiki in the following ways:

• Create new pages and edit pre-existing pages about historical subjects and records held by the National Archives;
• Expand upon a description in the National Archives online catalog;
• Publish a transcription of a document;
• Add information to build upon other resources;
• Collaborate with other users working on similar subjects or to work together on research projects;
• Join in the discussions for various pages

Is there an app for that?

While I don't personally have an iphone, (I went android instead) there loads of fun apps for the iphone from archives and museums. There a list of apps here but these are some of my favourites:

The John Murray Archive app (for iphone) from the NLS

This app gives you information about the 7 generations of the publishing dynasty and "includes audio-visual introductions, zoomable images, audio descriptions and collection galleries so you can discover and enjoy just some of the hundreds of thousands of items in this unique collection."

Walking through time app (for iphone & android) by Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University.

This isn't publicly available yet but the idea is to allow users to view historical maps of their real-time location on their smartphone.

**Update** This is now available for public download and its free through the itunes store.

TNA app (for iphone)

This app from the national archives gives users a selection of images from the archives with the option to order prints of them as well as some background information and historical context.