Datasets from the India Office Records and Private Papers

Datasets from the India Office Records and Private Papers

The datasets in this collection are based on the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers. The India Office Records are the archives of the administration in London of the East India Company and the pre-1947 Government of India. The official archives of the India Office Records are complemented by deposits of private papers relating to the British experience of India. The central focus of the India Office Records is in the territories now included in India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh, but the records also include source materials for neighbouring or connected areas at different times, covering not only South Asia but also Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. The records consist of over 14 kilometres of volumes, files and boxes of papers, together with 70,000 volumes of official publications and over 100,000 manuscripts and printed maps. A small but growing proportion of these materials have been digitised, and these digitised records are the main source of these datasets, alongside metadata taken from the Search Archives and Manuscripts catalogue.

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    India Office Lists
    (2020)
    British Library
    The India Office Lists are annual reference works giving details of departments and post holders in: the India Office, London, 1858-1947; the Burma Office, 1935-47; the Government of India, Calcutta, later Delhi, 1858-1947; the main provincial administrations of Bengal, Bombay and Madras and minor administrations for the same dates. From 1886, brief ‘Who’s Who’ biographies are included for senior post-holders. The Lists include military personnel until 1899, when a separate Indian Army List was begun. The Lists were digitised in 2014 with funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There are two copies of each List in the British Library holdings. One set can be found in the India Office Records under references IOR/V/6/125-247; the other set is available on the Open Access shelves in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room at reference OIR 354.54. For conservation reasons, the OIR 354.54 copies were used for digitisation in the first instance, with IOR/V volumes used when pages were discovered to be damaged or missing. The physical volumes contain large numbers of advertisements which for copyright reasons were not included in the 2014 digitisation. The Lists are Public Domain.
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    Ground truth transcriptions of 18th &19th century English language documents relating to botany from the India Office Records
    (2024-12)
    Hailey, Alex
    ;
    India Office Records
    This dataset comprises ground truth transcriptions of English language documents relating to botany, dated 1789-1854, from the India Office Records. 27 documents, consisting of 395 pages, 2399 regions, 11,554 lines, and 67,036 words, written in multiple hands. The transcriptions were produced using Transkribus, and are presented as PAGE and ALTO xml files, at line level, with accompanying METS files and jpeg images. Further information on the collection context and dataset composition can be found in the accompanying data card.
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    Government of India, Annual Administration Reports
    (2020)
    British Library
    Annual administration reports of the territories of British India for the following areas: Government of India 1870-1871; Government of Bengal, 1871-1936 ; Government of Burma, 1872-1899 ; Chin Hills, 1909-1923; Shan and Karenni States, 1889. For researchers seeking an overview of events and developments in the territories of British India from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the annual reports of the provincial administrations are a key source. Aimed at both the general reader and the specialist, the reports address the business of government in all its internal affairs: politics, legislation, the police, finance, trade, agriculture, industry, the press, public health, public works, and education. Accounts of the year’s events are supplemented by statistics, maps and plans, while the larger context is provided by the inclusion, every tenth year, of a geographical and historical survey of the region in question. This selection of reports from the Official Publications series, IOR/V/10, were digitised from microfilm as part of the World Collections Programme. The materials are in the Public Domain.
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    Indexes to the Dispatches of the East India Company Court of Directors to Indian Governments
    (2020)
    Hailey, Alex
    ;
    India Office Library and Records
    ;
    British Library
    The IOR/E/4 Correspondence with India comprises 1112 volumes dating from 1703-1858. The material is arranged into eight series: four series of letters received by the Court of Directors from the administration in India; and four series of dispatches sent by the Court to the same administrations. Subject, name and place access for the dispatches to India is provided through 72 index volumes, catalogued as IOR/Z/E/4, which contain around 430,000 entries. The original indexes were produced between 1901 and 1929 by the staff of the Secretarial Bureau, led by indexing pioneer Mary Petherbridge. When these index entries came to be converted to the British Library archives catalogue in the early 2010s, a decision was made that entries were to be child items of the index volumes themselves, with related correspondence volumes and page ranges entered as a text string in the Related Material field. This made it difficult to determine the contents of particular volumes, and to identify incomplete references. Using Python and the Pandas library information in the Related Material fields has been separated out, and entries re-written so that each individual index entry and correspondence volume reference occupies a single row. This work was undertaken as part of a work-based project for the post-graduate certificate in Data Science for Information Professionals at Birkbeck University.
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