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Overview
Atlantic Studies, 1700-1900, formerly known as British Records on the Atlantic World (BRAW), is a thematic series contained as a sub-set within the digitized archival content known as British Online Archives (BOA), distributed by Microform Academic Publishers (MAP). This series includes archival materials such as journals, correspondence, official records and personal papers over a two hundred year period, all related to British involvement in the Atlantic region, including both Africa and the Americas.
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Provider Notes
This resource is distributed by Bludeau Partners International LLC
http://www.bludeaupartnersinternational.com
CRL Review
Collection Content
Atlantic Studies, 1700-1900, formerly known as British Records on the Atlantic World (BRAW) is a thematic series contained as a sub-set within the digitized archival content known as British Online Archives (BOA), distributed by Microform Academic Publishers (MAP). This series includes archival materials such as journals, correspondence, official records and personal papers over a two hundred year period, all related to British involvement in the Atlantic region, including both Africa and the Americas.
BRAW currently is made up of sixteen different collections drawn largely from trading documents and missionary papers from various archival repositories. The mission societies include SPG (Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts), which first sent missions to America to minister to slaves and Native Americans beginning in the early 1700s. The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG), whose archives from 1710-1950 form part 11 of the BRAW collections, was formed in 1965 on the merger of the SPG and the UMCA (Universities’ Mission to Central Africa).
The total collections in BRAW as of August 2013 are:
Part 1: Records relating to the Slave Trade at the Liverpool Record Office
Part 2: American Material in the Archives of the USPG, 1635-1812
Part 3: The Papers of William Davenport & Co., 1745-1797
Part 4: Jamaican Material in the Slebech Papers
Part 5: Papers relating to the Jamaican Estates of the Goulburn Family of Betchworth House
Part 6: Papers of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, 1694-1709
Part 7: Journal, Annual Sermons and Reports of the SPG, 1701-1870
Part 8: South American Missionary Society Records, 1844-1919
Part 9: Liverpool Street and Trade Directories, 1766-1900
Part 10: Early Colonial and Missionary Records from West Africa
Part 11: West Indies Material in the Archives of the USPG, 1710-1950
Part 12: The Archives of the Associates of Dr Bray to 1900
Part 13: The Collected Papers of the Bolton Whitman Fellowship
Part 14: Canadian Papers of the 4th Earl of Minto
Part 15: American Material from the Tarleton Papers
Part 16: Liverpool Customs Bills of Entry, 1820-1939
In all, the sixteen collections currently total around 386,000 pages. The largest collection is the “Liverpool Street and Trade Directories,” with the next two largest being the archival collections from the SPG and USPG. All of this material was previously microfilmed by MAP, and distributed as British Records Relating to America in Microform (BRRAM).
2017 Updates:
The list of titles in this collection has been updated to the following:
| COLLECTION NAME | # OF IMAGES |
| America in records from colonial missionaries, 1635-1812 | 33,927 |
| Slave trade records from Liverpool, 1754-1792 | 2,974 |
| Trade and Commerce in Liverpool to 1900 | 82,026 |
| Slave trading records from William Davenport & Co., 1745-1797 | 1,891 |
| The West Indies: slavery, plantations and trade, 1756-1832 | 9,074 |
| Slavery in Jamaica, records from a family of slave owners, 1750-1860 | 6,140 |
| Scottish trade with the Americas in the early 18th century, 1694-1709 | 10,220 |
| Colonial missionaries' papers from America and the West Indies, 1701-1870 | 40,034 |
| South American missionaries' records, 1844-1919 | 20,386 |
| Ghana and Sierra Leone in colonial and missionary records, 1700-1850 | 3,980 |
| The West Indies in Records from colonial missionaries, 1710-1950 | 40,034 |
| Walt Whitman and his fellowship of supporters in Bolton, 1891-1913 | 7,401 |
| Negro Schools' in Canada, America and the Bahamas, 1701-1900 | 24,547 |
| India, uprising and reform 1905 to 1910: in the records of the Governor-General | 14,960 |
| American slave trade records and other papers of the Tarleton family, 1678-1838 | 655 |
| Liverpool shipping records: imports and exports, 1820-1900 | 85,669 |
| Antigua, slavery and emancipation in the records of a sugar plantation, 1689-1907 | 25,431 |
| Bristol shipping records: imports and exports, 1770-1917 | 29,295 |
| British Army Lists of Officers, 1740-1784 | 6,694 |
| American prisoners of war, 1812-1815 | 5,932 |
| Canada in records from colonial missionaries, 1722-1952 | 56,997 |
| The American Revolution from a British Perspective, 1764-1783 | 83,626 |
| American records in the House of Lords archive, 1621-1917 | 42,925 |
| Canada, America & the West Indies imports and exports to the UK, 1678-1825 | 22,582 |
| Slavery: supporters and abolitionists, 1675-1865 | 28,313 |
| Caribbean colonial statistics from the British Empire, 1824-1950 | 188,259 |
Delivery
Technical platform & interface
Each of the collections included within BRAW can be individually searched on the BOA platform. See the CRL review of BOA for a critique of the platform features.
Additionally, there is a separate landing page for BRAW within the BOA platform. While that would seem to be desirable, since the sixteen BRAW collections form such a large subset of the thirty-eight collections currently in BOA, there are several functional drawbacks to the design of this particular landing page:
- Only a basic keyword search is available. The advanced search option defaults to the BOA advanced search, so one cannot perform advanced search operations on the full group or selected collections specifically constituting the BRAW subject series.
- The listing of collections included in BRAW is displayed in a dynamically scrolling insert; it is difficult to grasp at once the full list of collections, and there is no apparent order to the listing. They are neither in alphabetical order by title of the collection nor in the numbering order originally assigned (part 6, part 5, part 14, part 9, etc.).
- There is no prompt to return to the full group of BOA collections; the “home” button reverts back to the BRAW landing page.
Metadata
The metadata for individual collections is quite thorough. Records appear to be based on Dublin core. These are displayed for each “series”, document, and page image. Documents are assigned digital identifiers. Document level metadata often includes lengthy title annotations for unpublished materials, and notes the original archival collection source, such as “Liverpool Record Office”. Page image records include any page level tagging, such as the date of a manuscript letter. MARC records were created for the initial eleven collections in BRAW; the publishers indicate that they will investigate the feasibility of producing more MARC records for the other collections.
Terms
The modules can be purchased as a group with a one time payment, or separately (which includes a five-year payment option per module)
The initial five-year licensed access period includes a hosting fee and, in the case of a license to the whole series, any new collections added during that period. Thereafter a hosting fee of 5% of the list price p.a. will be charged, and new collections in the series may be added on payment of a supplement.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The strengths and weaknesses pertaining to the British Online Archives (BOA) database as a whole are relevant here:
While the scope of some of the individual collections may be somewhat narrow, MAP’s effort to convert an extensive microform series is impressive. The use of a conventional hierarchical archival collection structure for the browse lists, and inclusion of contextual collection descriptions plus well-formed metadata extending down to page level are welcome features which should serve scholars and students alike. Regarding basic functional deficiencies in the platform, MAP has indicated a willingness to consider implementing features including: ability to download and print a maximum of a full document at a time rather than one page at a time; ability to apply search functions to multiple selected collections.
Also as noted, there are also a number of deficiencies inherent in the BRAW series search page (as distinct from the main BOA search interface), which make it an unsatisfactory way to search these collections.
Reviewers
Center for Research Libraries
- Carolyn Ciesla, Research Assistant
- Virginia Kerr, Digital Program Manager
Community Ratings
Content scope and completeness
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