Research in British and Irish history and literature has become a great deal easier at Duke with the libraries' recent addition of several major full-text databases that provide online access to primary sources and biographies. Now, researchers have the full-text of books, newspaper articles, diaries and letters at their fingertips, and they can perform far more sophisticated and detailed searches of the contents than ever would have been possible using print sources. History professor Susan Thorne writes, "Teaching British history at Duke is a pedagogical dream come true. Our access to primary sources has been greatly enhanced by recent acquisitions, which are so usefully outlined in Perkins Subject Guide to British and Irish Studies. Undergraduates do not need much specialized preparation to make their way via the index through the Times Digital Archive. And the rewards of reading contemporary coverage of the events we are studying in class are tremendous." It should be noted that because British influence extended throughout the world from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, researchers and students of Africa, South Asia, Canada, Australia and the American colonies also find these resources pertinent.   

The database that is the most generally interesting and useful for researchers in many different disciplines is the Times Digital Archive, containing the full-text of the Times of London from 1785 to 1985, or from the French Revolution to the Falklands War. The Archive comprises some ten million digitized articles. The entire newspaper has been captured, with all articles, advertisements and illustrations/photos divided into categories to facilitate searching. Using keywords, researchers can search through the digital edition of the Times to retrieve facsimile images of either a specific article or a full page.  It is also possible to view the complete newspaper for a specific date.

The Times newspaper archive is complemented by the Times Literary Supplement Centenary Archive 1902-1990. This rich, easy-to-navigate database is ideal for students and researchers of English literature and other humanities or social science subjects. Unparalleled opportunities for tracking the literary activity and critical opinion makers of the 20th century are now available in a powerful digital environment. More than 250,000 reviews, letters, poems and articles from more than 5,000 issues of the TLS are available, and, for the first time, the identities of anonymous contributors are disclosed.

Another new resource with multidisciplinary appeal is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is available to the Duke community both online and in a print edition. The arrival of the print edition has been described by the New York Times as the "publishing event of the year—maybe of the decade." The sixty-volume Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is now on the shelves at Perkins in the reference collection (920.041 O98, 2004). The Dictionary, whose contributors include Duke's Cynthia Herrup and Dale Randall, contains biographies of nearly 55,000 non-living people who are considered to have been important to British history from the 4th century BC to the year 2001. This new edition is much more inclusive than the previous one, which was published between 1885 and 1900. Many more women are now represented as are notables from British territories overseas, including Americans up to the time of the colonies' independence. Following the more liberal editorial policy of the present edition, the Dictionary encompasses the "great and good to the popular, philanthropic, pioneering, social, curious or criminal."

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is also available online to Duke users at http://www.oxforddnb.com/search/ (you will need to use the VPN when you connect from off-campus). Guests can use the online service in any of the libraries.  The online edition of the Dictionary offers flexible searching options in addition to personal name and full-text by keyword. There are categories such as fields of interest or religious affiliation as well as themes such as musical chart toppers, Oscar winners or Nobel Prize winners, and essays on selected topics.

Of particular interest to history students is the collection British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries from Alexander Street Press. Users can search the online database by author, place, occupation, marital status, personal event (for example, "pregnancy" or "death of a spouse") or historical event (such as the Indian Mutiny of the Irish Famine). Entries are still being added to the project, which upon completion will be the largest collection of British and Irish women's diaries and correspondence every assembled.

Spanning four hundred years, the database delivers the personal experiences of more than one thousand women to researchers, students, and general readers. The uses for the collection will be many and varied. For historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy, and others, BIWLD will prove a dramatic new resource. These diaries provide a detailed record of what women wore, the conditions under which they worked, what they ate, what they read, and how they amused themselves.

The finished collection will include approximately 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries from individuals writing from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, plus several thousand pages of previously unpublished materials, and more than five hundred biographies. Entries are drawn from more than one thousand sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings, much of the material is in copyright and represent all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.

Finally, the Duke University Libraries have also recently added Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECO), with digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th century. Offering full-text searching of approximately thirty-three million pages, ECO gives researchers new means of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more. ECO includes a variety of materials—from books and directories, Bibles, sheet music and sermons to advertisements—and writings of many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century. There are works from women writers of the eighteenth century; collections on the French Revolution; and numerous editions of the works of Shakespeare. Multiple editions of each individual work are included, which enables scholars to make textual comparisons of the works.