Just
over a year ago at the University of Leicester Library, we were looking at the
download stats for our online PhD theses and noticed that a study of the village of Wrangle in the early
modern period was the most downloaded item that month.
This
got us thinking. Of all the open access theses and research publications in our
online archive what is actually popular with users? Medicine and health related
items do well, presumably from people searching for information on illnesses
and conditions. The other studies that consistently attract downloads are those
about a particular place. Broadly speaking these are from geography,
archaeology and history.
Open
access policy has been driven by the sciences and has tended to assume that
freely available publications are an unproblematic ‘good thing’. It has paid less
attention to what is popular, with whom and why.
Inspired
by the example of Wrangle, we decided to explore creating a new resource to
promote the open access local history material we had. The Centre for English
Local History Theses Collection is the result. The website makes available all the PhD theses completed by students
at the Centre for English Local History. The collection comprises 100 theses
covering subjects from medieval moats to hunting in Northamptonshire. The full
text is available to read and download in the majority of cases. Founded in
1948, the Centre pioneered local history as an academic discipline in Britain.
Research students have been central to its activities, and the theses are
important research publications in their own right. We hope that improved
access and discovery tools make this collection a useful resource for local historians and local
studies librarians, among others.
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| English local history mapped |
In design it is similar to the concept of an overlay journal which
has been kicking around for some years. The challenge was to present the theses
in an attractive and coherent way. We decided to use Omeka, a
platform designed to publish digitised primary source material. However, we
found it worked well for our purposes. As the pdfs were already hosted on
another site, we could just point readers to the existing full text rather than
uploading lots of files. This made the site much ‘lighter’ as a result. A range
of plug-ins allows you to add extra features to aid discovery and
interpretation, the most useful being the interactive map.
There
are great free resources for local studies, but they tend to be collections of
primary sources (like British History Online) or long-standing publication
series (like Victoria County History). Recent research publications can be
harder for the public to access, due to the cost of books and journal subscriptions.
Some areas, such as archaeology, are also ‘messy’ with a large amount of grey
literature and small society publication. There are journals like the Local Historian
and Local
Population Studies who have made their archives freely available, but the
discipline as a whole could have better coordination.