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The Collation

State Papers Online: tips and tricks, part 1

The Calendar of State Papers is a well-known historical resource for early modernists across a variety of disciplines. This “calendar,” or register, documents the workings of the British government during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, 1509–1714. For decades, researchers used printed volumes of these calendars to search for the existence of specific documents.

Print edition of the Calendar of State Papers

Just some of the many volumes of the State Papers in the Folger’s Reading Room.

With the advent of online databases, and the cooperation of repositories such as the British Library and National Archives (where many of the documents recorded by the calendars are preserved), a database called the State Papers Online was created. It brings together not only all of the calendars but digitized versions of many of the actual documents, giving researchers a one-stop shop for their needs.

Sounds like a dream, right?

In some ways, it is. But it can also be a very frustrating experience for researcher, as they try to find the materials that they think ought to be in this database. This series of posts will hopefully help to alleviate some of that frustration, by providing some tips and tricks for working with the State Papers Online. 1 

  1. and, if nothing else, letting readers know that no, it isn’t just you!
  2. If you only see a button that says “View Calendar” it is because the manuscript for that entry has not yet been digitized, so all you will have is the calendar entry.
  3. When in doubt, pick a random manuscript from the collection you need and see how the DRN is formatted for that manuscript. The format should be consistent within a collection.
  4. And for goodness sake, be flexible! I encountered a situation where a reader and I knew, without a doubt, that a document existed. We were reasonably confident that the document had been digitized. But it wasn’t linked from the calendar entry. We were stumped, until we started flipping through the manuscript volume, page by page. Whereupon we discovered that only the odd numbered pages were indexed in the volume, and thus only the calendar entries on the odd numbered pages were linked. So we went to the odd numbered page near the document in question, and oh look what we found.

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