Archives and Special Collections: Online archival resources

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture from Roman times to the twenty-first century. Entries are for those who died in or before the year 2012. It contains over 60,300 biographies and over 11,400 portraits.

Full text or page images of over 400,000 books published in England from 1475 to 1900. The service includes EEBO (Early English Books Online), ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online), Nineteenth Century Books from the British Library Collection, and also the UK Medical Heritage Library.

Content in JSTOR spans many disciplines, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The Library subscribes to the following JSTOR journal collections: Arts & Sciences I,II,III,IV & VII, and Business II. JSTOR archives contains the full-text of non-current issues of journals digitised back to the first issue published to a date generally 3 to 5 years from the most current published issue. We also have access to current content for a few publications on the JSTOR platform. The Library also has access to the JSTOR digitised collection of 19th Century British Pamphlets.

Provides over 48,000 zoomable maps mainly covering Scotland and the rest of the UK between the 16th and 20th centuries.
Map categories include: maps of Scotland, county maps, town plans and views, Ordnance Survey maps, Bartholomew maps, land utitlisation survey, soil survey of Scotland, coastal charts, military maps, estate maps, bathymetrical survey and trench maps (WWI).

Scran is an online learning service from the charity Historic Environment Scotland. It contains over 490,000 images and media from museums, galleries, and archives. It provides access to resources relating to Scotland's culture and heritage.

Mass Observation Online provides access to digitised versions of manuscripts and papers collected by the Mass Observation organisation in Britain during the period 1937 to the mid 1950s. It provides insights into daily lives and routines and provides access to primary sources of interest to those researching or studying historical, sociological or anthropological subjects.

See also Mass Observation Project.

The Runaway Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Britain project provides access to over 800 newspaper advertisements placed by masters and owners seeking the capture and return of enslaved and bound people who had escaped. The principal sources for this project are English and Scottish newspapers published between 1700 and 1780.

Archives Unbound contains subject based digital collections of historical documents covering a broad range of topics including: American history, British history, European history, Gender Studies, History of Health and Medicine, Journalism and Literature.