BT Archives to be digitised

BT Archives to be digitised
The National Archives, in partnership with Coventry University and BT Plc, has been awarded a grant to digitise BT’s physical archive, making almost half a million photographs, documents and correspondence preserved by BT over 165 years available online as part of the New Connections project.

Merry Christmas

At this time of seasonal indulgence, I just had to share something with you from the Wellcome Trust blog’s “Film of the Month” produced by the Scottish Health Education Unit in 1978. Apart from digging those 1970s fashions, look out for a very young Gregor Fisher (famous as Rab C. Nesbitt) overdoing it down the pub.
Post taken from It’s Official Blog of the NLS’s Official Publications Unit.

Plan your Christmas journey with Directgov

Directgov’s Journey Planner offers a full range of information and route planning services for every journey. The Highways Agency offers live traffic updates, feeds and alerts, and information on weather conditions and planned roadworks on England’s motorways and trunk roads. Get the information you need before you set off.

Merry Christmas!!

P.S. It does include live travel news for Scotland too!

Finding Official British Information: Official publishing in the digital age

Just published -

Finding Official British Information focuses on the digital availability of official information and considers how much is now freely available on the web and how to locate it as well as addressing issues of web only publishing.

Veterinary medicine reports now available for free

I’m delighted to announce that 146 volumes of Veterinary medicine reports are now available on the National Library of Scotland’s Medical History of British India website. Click the link to browse and search 40,000 pages for free.

The Veterinary collection covers 1864-1959, focusing on veterinary diseases, colleges and laboratories and Civil Veterinary Departments. This free to access, important material provides extensive research on animal diseases such as surra and rinderpest. Detailed reports show how veterinary medicine was used by the British colonists to control disease, maintain livestock and alleviate famine and its effect on military and local communities.

Illustrated with many photographs, maps and charts, this material will be useful to those interested in veterinary science, military medicine, animal husbandry and agriculture.

A new viewing function enables up to 30 pdf pages to be selected and then ’stitched’ together for easier reading.

The material, from the National Library’s India Papers, was microfilmed and digitised using a grant from the Wellcome Trust.

A dedicated Medical History of British India blog

The National Library of Scotland is now hosting a blog solely dedicated to the Medical History of British India Online project.
The blog will cover topics such as digitisation issues, updates of the project’s progress in microfilming, digitisation and OCR, medical history and modern health issues and India.
The WordPress blog appears here on the Medical History of British India website and is listed here on the NLS blogs page.
The blog also features pages about the current specifications for the project which may be useful to those involved in digitisation projects.

Comments about the project and blog are most welcome and should be sent to Francine Millard f.millard@nls.uk

Modernising governance arrangements at National Library of Scotland

The Scottish Government has published legislation to modernise governance arrangements at the NLS

Here is the news release announcing the changes and a copy of the Bill

Microsoft on Government

Thoughts, comments, news, and reflection from the Microsoft Government team
Our goal for this blog is to bring the conversation online to engage a broader community of international stakeholders in the public sector. By looking at what works in government, uncovering emerging trends, and debating strategies to tackling common public sector challenges—from cities to central governments—we hope to provide you with insights, inspiration, and new ways of looking at how to deliver smarter governance through technology.

Welsh Government

Rob Phillips, Head of  Official Publications  at the National Library of Wales has drawn my attention to the newly renamed Welsh Government  (formerly Welsh Assembly Government)

Change to parliamentary session at Westminster

As there is to be no official announcement of this change I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the parliamentary session will now run until Spring  2012.  Some (but not all) publications are coming through with the session 2010-2012 printed on them.

This was the information supplied to me from the Parliamentary Liaison Officer “As you know, although the Government announced an intention last year that the present session should end in spring 2012, no change was made at that time to the House’s formal use of the standard ‘session 2010-11’ terminology to describe the current session. This reflected the fact that the House itself had not taken any formal steps to endorse the proposal. In agreeing on Wednesday 30 March to a revised set of dates for private members’ bills it has now done so, and accordingly the House’s documents—including select committee reports and other material—will be referring instead to ‘session 2010-12’. This should take effect from after Easter (ie from Tuesday 26 April).”