Eavesdropping on the past

Today sees the launch of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, the product of a unique partnership between JISC’s  Digitisation Programme, the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and ProQuest to conserve, catalogue and digitise more than 65,000 items drawn from the collection.

The material selected for conservation, cataloguing and digitisation comprises a wide array of different types of printed document, including posters and handbills for theatrical and non-theatrical entertainments, broadsides relating to murders and executions, book and journal prospectuses, popular topographical prints, and a wealth of different kinds of printed advertising material. The resulting online collection will form an invaluable resource for researchers interested in the histories of consumption, leisure, gender, popular culture, commerce, technology, crime, and a host of other areas. With each item presented as a full-colour, high-resolution facsimile, the John Johnson Collection will also be indispensable for researchers studying the development of printing and visual culture in modern Britain.

More information and a short video about the project can be found at JISC's website.

Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports - free!

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Report has been purchased by JISC Collections and is available free of charge to UK Higher and Further Education institutions and Research Councils as part of the UK National Academic Archive.

Covering the period 1974–1996 in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe, the JISC selection of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports includes a wealth of transcripts of broadcasts and news from around the world all translated into the English language.

The FBIS Daily Report series:

• contains significant, critical material unavailable from any other source. The newspaper, short-wave, radio, and television broadcast texts in many cases exist nowhere else but in the English transcription or translation of those broadcasts which have vanished into the airways.


• shows what the US government knew from the open source intelligence and when they knew it.


• shows what the world thought of the U.S. and its democratic allies, “the West,” in often harsh and critical assessments.

The FBIS Daily Report has been the United States' principal record of
political and historical open source intelligence for nearly 70 years.
it provides an archive of translated broadcasts, news agency
transmissions, newspapers, periodicals, and government statements from
around the world. It also includes many firsthand reports of events as
they occurred.

The archive collection covers the following regions and dates:

* Middle East and North Africa, 1974-1987
* Near East and South Asia, 1987-1996
* South Asia, 1980-1987
* Sub-Saharan Africa, 1974-1980
* Africa, 1987-1996
* Eastern Europe, 1974-1996