The History of Parliament on
CD-ROM (1998)

Price: £550

ISBN-13: 9780521629072
ISBN-10: 0521629071
Published by Cambridge University Press

The History of Parliament on CD-ROM contains the revised text of all seven of the sets of the History of Parliament published up to 1998: 1386-1421; 1509-1558; 1558-1603; 1660-1690; 1715-1754; 1754-1790 and 1790-1820 - in total twenty-three volumes containing more than 16,200 pages and 13 million words. It improves on the existing text by including lists of MPs sitting in every Parliament covered by the volumes, replacing for those periods the previously standard source, the Return published by the House of Lords in 1879. It also includes illustrations, particularly of every Speaker of the House of Commons; plans of the buildings where the Commons met, images of Parliamentary work and the Commons sitting; and illustrative documents; it also includes substantial corrections and additions to the printed text including fifteen new or heavily revised biographies for the 1558-1603 Section.  A sample biography of  Sir Thomas More may be read here.

The CD-ROM provides for the first time a full indexing facility for the History. The search engine provided with the text will rapidly locate and display all instances throughout the entire twenty-three-volume sequence of any word or string of letters, enumerating the instances found and showing where they fall. It will search by constituency (so that, for example, the entries for all members who sat for the parliamentary constituency of King’s Lynn in the periods covered can be called up within seconds); and by place of origin (calling up entries for all members who originate or reside in King’s Lynn). There is proximity searching (to home in on, say, Joseph Taylor of Devon but not on his contemporary Joseph Taylor of Middlesex; or to find mentions of Chaucer within the context of the wool trade). Boolean and wildcard searching are fully supported.
The electronic version allows the user to print out with a single key stroke selected biographies or constituency studies; to cut and paste sections into, for example, a word processing program; to make bookmarks and interactive annotations and save these to hard disk; and to record sequences of actions undertaken in a particular working session with the data.

There are many thousands of hypertext links enabling the user to call up illustrations, captions, tables and endnotes, and to follow up cross-references between different pieces of relevant information (for example, a particular member of parliament and his biographical entry). Hypertext links have also been provided to enable quick access to related supporting material. The CD-ROM offers researchers the possibility of major longitudinal and also selective studies.