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.

Settings

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Some of the metrics are blocked by your 
    consent settings
    Item type:Dataset,
    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.
      22  12