UBC Library has recently licensed a new electronic resource that will no doubt be of interest to many humanities and social science scholars.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online is a multi-year, international digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century. Content is full-text searchable.   Archives published in the program include works in Western as well as non-Western languages and are sourced from rare collections at libraries and other venerable institutions from around the globe.

 UBC has licensed access to four collections:

• Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange:  This archive will enable students and scholars to examine a selection of records that constitute a political and social history of Western interaction with a number of Asian countries during the nineteenth century.  Most of the manuscript collections in this archive consist of the British Foreign Office and United States consular and diplomatic records. In addition, a selection of missionary correspondence and journals has been included, as missionaries usually provided some of the earliest contact in various Asian locales with Western ideals.

• British Politics and Society:  This archive is packed with primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The archive is composed of a number of individual collections, drawn together from a variety of sources.

• British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture:  This archive features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history.

• European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection:  This archive includes a considerable number of exceedingly rare publications—and even numerous previously unknown works—by British writers (and women writers in particular, whose works comprise over 1,000 of the titles) who were active during the Romantic period. In addition to this remarkable trove of English-language literary texts, it also includes 3,658 works in French (including more than 500 by women) and 2,653 works in German, all of them dating primarily from the period 1790–1840.