Digitisation: House of Commons division lists, 1836-1910

The History has now digitised the House of Commons divisions of the nineteenth century, in order to provide a key resource for our research on the House of Commons, 1832-1868 project. A specialist company, Innodata, was identified to undertake high quality digitisation from the poor quality microfiche produced during the 1970s, thus avoiding the need to handle scarce copies of the lists. Following an initial pilot project, we now have digital images of all of the 45,000 pages, and html files of all of the divisions. These are already being used by the 1832-68 project, but will also enable us to produce a full and manipulable database of the divisions. We are discussing with potential university partners how this might best be achieved.