British Online Archives: Communist Party of Great Britain

Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 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). CPGB currently is made up of eighteen different archival collections groups. These papers, covering the period 1943-1991, were not available for research consultation prior to the early 1990s. The publishers indicate: “With the dissolution of the Communist Party of Great Britain. . . the decision was taken to deposit the archives alongside those of the Labour Party in Manchester's People's History Museum. [Now held at the Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC) in Manchester.] Catalogued in 1993-1994, these turned out to be one of the outstanding national collections for the political history of the British left . . . from the 1940s, records of the party's central leading bodies have been meticulously preserved and include notes taken at meetings by leading party officials.” In addition to recording general meetings, the papers cover trade union activities and relations with communist parties overseas. Papers covering the period prior to 1943 had been transferred to Moscow.

The total collections in CPGB as of August 2013 are:

Ben Bradley Papers
Campaigns and Events
Dona Torr Papers
EC Commissions and Suchlike Bodies
ETU Ballot-rigging Trial Proceedings
Executive Committee
Harry Pollitt Papers
Industrial Department
International Department, International Affairs Committee and External Relations
Ivor Montagu Papers
J.T. & Molly Murphy Papers
John Gollan Papers
Miscellaneous EC Sub-committees & Non-industrial Advisory Committees, etc.
Miscellaneous Individuals
National Congresses and Similar Conferences
National Cultural Committee
Political Committee
William Wainwright Papers
Women's Department

In all, the eighteen collections currently total around 256,000 pages. Among the largest collection groups are: Ivor Montagu Papers, International Department, and Political Committee. The Archive Trust of the Communist Party authorized making the content available online and in microfilm.

Delivery

Technical platform & interface

Each of the collections included within CPGB 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 CPGB within the BOA platform. While that would seem to be desirable, since the eighteen CPGB 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 CPGB 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.
There is no prompt to return to the full group of BOA collections; the “home” button reverts back to the CPGB landing page.

Metadata

The metadata is based on cataloging by the LHASC. Records are intended to display for each “series”, document, and page image. However, the metadata display window did not work intuitively in a Firefox browser.

Terms

There are several payment options: as an annual subscription, five-year license, or perpetual license.

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 CPGB 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

Virginia Kerr - Digital Program Manager

Community Ratings

Content scope and completeness

Cost and price-structure

Platform and user interface