The Sanborn maps. Ask any historian of early American history “what’s a Sanborn map?” and you’re likely to receive an earful. The maps, which cover American cities decade-by-decade, chart the rapid change and growth of this country’s urban areas in a way matched by few other primary sources.  The digitized versions of Sanborn maps have been used by historians for years. However, there exists a vital tool which has not been accessible in an integrated(read more)

As we head into the last quarter of 2023, we’ve been getting inquiries from researchers about what is “exclusive” to Paratext’s Eight Centuries. As a response, we’re reaching back into our blog archive to republish some posts on sources and methodologies that remain just as relevant today as when they were first posted. This article, originally published in June 2018, was part of the  “Exploring” blog series looking at various exclusive sources(read more)

As we head into the last quarter of 2023, we’ve been getting inquiries from researchers about what is “exclusive” to Paratext’s Eight Centuries. As a response, we’re reaching back into our blog archive to republish some posts on sources and methodologies that remain just as relevant today as when they were first posted. This article, originally published in September 2018, addresses one of the key central genre of source exclusive to Eight Centuries: the(read more)

As we head into the last quarter of 2023, we’ve been getting inquiries from researchers about what is “exclusive” to Paratext’s Eight Centuries. As a response, we’re reaching back into our blog archive to republish some posts on sources and methodologies that remain just as relevant today as when they were first posted. This article, originally published in August 2018, looks at a sometimes-overlooked genre of historical source: political cartoons. Though(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce a new source available to your patrons. Now ready to search in Eight Centuries: the Tate Collection. Founded in 1897 and originally named the National Gallery of British Art, the Tate has since grown into a four gallery institution spread across the UK, from London to Liverpool and Cornwall. The Tate Collection in Eight Centuries contains records for the nearly 70,000 objects that comprise the holdings of the museum. Links to the Tate catalog in each record(read more)

Another recent addition to Eight Centuries is now ready to search by your patrons: the Art Institute of Chicago Catalog. Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the premier art institutions in the United States. The catalog searchable in Eight Centuries contains over 120,000 records describing artworks from as far back as the ancient world and as recent as the contemporary period. Links to catalog entries on the Art Institute website are provided, which include full images(read more)

Another recent addition to Eight Centuries is now ready to search by your patrons: records of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection. Founded in 1870 in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest art museums in the world with a collection stretching over 5,000 years of world art history. The Met OA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises over 200 thousand records, containing links to catalog entries, as well as image links where(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: records of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Collection in New York City. Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art is one of the world’s premier collections of art from the modern period and beyond. The MoMA collection in Eight Centuries contains records to artworks dating from the eighteenth century to the present day. The MoMA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises nearly 140 thousand records,(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: records of the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection. Founded in 1913, the Cleveland Museum of Art remains one of the premier public art institutions in the United States. The CMA’s collection stretches from the ancient British Isles and Egypt to contemporary artists working in the twenty-first century. The CMA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises nearly 64 thousand records, containing links to(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). A database founded in 2006 and maintained by a consortium of United States and European libraries and academies, the BHL operates as an Open Source resource for the biological research community. The BHL data contained in Eight Centuries comprises over 166 thousand records to biology texts ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Within the Biodiversity(read more)

Data from the Mapping Early American Elections project is now available to search in Eight Centuries. A project completed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and made available for public use, Mapping Early American Elections (MEAE) is a database of United States election results from 1787 to 1825. The nearly 13 thousand MEAE records in Eight Centuries link to fully mapped election results available on the project’s website. Within(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce two new sources now available to search in Eight Centuries: the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog and the Samuel Pepys Diary. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog is a compilation of records describing printed and photographic material housed in the Library of Congress collections. This invaluable catalog contains over 1.4 million records describing material in the collection, including links to full text in many cases. The(read more)

What do two ‘80s punk rockers, a half-fish/half-woman, and a Cyprian big shot have in common? Besides sounding like the beginning of a bad joke, these are all subjects found in source material cataloged in Europeana—a massive repository of cultural heritage bringing together records from thousands of institutions across Europe which is now searchable in Eight Centuries. One of the most remarkable qualities of Europeana in Eight Centuries is its vastness: nearly 53 million records(read more)

2022 was a significant year for Eight Centuries from Paratext.   We completed our two year transition from “19th Century Masterfile” to Eight Centuries, added nearly 70 million additional records, and implemented vastly improved navigation features to all our products.   Now that the Eight Centuries name is in place we suggest:     Updating your library’s database A-Z list: replace “19th Century Masterfile” with(read more)

In 2021 we added an entirely new feature for subscribers of multiple products: Cross Search. This feature allows easy instant searching of a search term across Eight Centuries, U.S. Documents Masterfile, and Reference Universe. To celebrate this exciting new feature, we’re looking back at different sources now easily accessible across products via Cross Search. Today: the Atlantic Monthly historical index available to search in 8C. With apologies to the late columnist Syd Harris(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the addition of nearly 53 million records from Europeana into Eight Centuries, opening up unprecedented access to the cultural heritage contained in Europe’s myriad cultural institutions.   An initiative of the European Union that has been growing since its inception in 2005, Europeana brings together the collections of thousands of European archives and museums into one vast dataset for use by researchers and the general public.   By(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that two new sources of Smithsonian Institution metadata and full text links are now accessible via Eight Centuries. Not only is this important for the sheer usefulness of additional source data, these new sources represent a milestone in the history of Eight Centuries itself. When this project began in 1999 (as “Poole’s Plus,” and later, “19th Century Masterfile”) there were all of two datasets—the first: an enhanced(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the new Sources Snapshot redesign in Eight Centuries. Our new tiled system is an improvement for a number of reasons. For one, this new layout makes better use of wide screen space, giving you a clearer, easier-to-parse view of all search results at a single glance. The source tiles will still be rendered from most to least number of record hits, requiring no change in your existing Eight Centuries workflow. Furthermore, the new layout will adapt to any(read more)

Paratext began 2020 with a revamped interface and a name change for its flagship product. (With material dating back to the twelfth century, we’d outgrown 19th Century Masterfile.)   Over the course of the year Paratext has added five new collections to Eight Centuries—Documenting the American South, Chronicling America, the Modernist Journal Project, the British National Bibliography, and the Digital Walters Manuscript Collection.   While subject specialists(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that data from the Walters Art Museum’s “Digital Walters” manuscript collection is now accessible via Eight Centuries. This data—made available through the museum’s Digital Walters initiative—comprises over 150,000 records of folio that make up the nearly 900 illuminated medieval manuscripts in the Walters collection. Records includes full text links leading to high resolution scans of each page. Explore the Islamic world,(read more)

Paratext is proud to announce that we've added all pre-1961 British National Bibliography content to Eight Centuries. Originally founded by the British Museum and currently supported by the British Library, the British National Bibliography has continuously compiled the publishing output of Great Britain since its creation in 1949. Users can now search 158,000 records to magazines, books, and newspapers — some dating as far back as the 14th century. The BNB content embraces(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that records from the Modernist Journals Project is now accessible via Eight Centuries. The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) is joint cataloging and digitizing venture between Brown University and the University of Tulsa which comprises records of journal output of the modernist literary period from 1890 to 1922. The MJP adds nearly ten thousand new periodical content records to Eight Centuries. Furthermore, in addition to the records themselves, MJP(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that additional content from Adam Matthew is now accessible via Eight Centuries.   Adam Matthew, an imprint of SAGE, is an award-winning publisher of digital primary source collections for the humanities and social sciences, covering subject areas from medieval family life to 20th-century history and culture.   Nearly 40,000 links from 11 collections have been added to Eight Century’s Image/Media section, broadening research for all(read more)

This is post continues our series exploring the oddest, most out-there corners of the history of science to be found in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers and other similar sources in Eight Centuries. Those unfamiliar with this fascinating source from the Royal Society should check out our description of the CSP. I recently read this post about incredibly bad smells in the New York Time’s “Good Question” series (written by the always-great Randall Munroe).1 In the post, he(read more)

Today we continue our series exploring the most out-of-the-way corners of the history of science to be found in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers. Those unfamiliar with this fascinating source from the Royal Society should check out our description of the CSP. The first aerial photographs date from long before powered flight. Though we capture such pictures relatively easily using satellites and drones nowadays, people began taking photos from dizzying heights back when hydrogen balloons(read more)

This is the first post in a series exploring the most out-of-the-way corners of the history of science to be found in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers. Those unfamiliar with this fascinating source from the Royal Society should check out our description of the CSP. This post is about a device that was everywhere in retail and business until roughly the 1970s, at which point it quietly dropped out of the public eye. I’m talking about the mechanical calculator called the Comptometer.(read more)

With a little HTML and CSS know-how, adding our widget code to your existing library webpage is as easy as 1-2-3. Need a refresher? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered! Read on to learn where to add the code and how to customize the widget to match your library website style. These instructions will detail how to add the Eight Centuries widget code to a library website. However, fear not if you are a U.S. Documents Masterfile or Reference Universe customer: the steps are exactly the(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the addition of two Open Access resources which join the millions of proprietary primary source records in the Eight Centuries database: Documenting the American South and Chronicling America.   These two sources add over 150,000 entirely new records, with thousands of links to high quality full text and metadata.   Documenting the American South, a project of the University of North Carolina, makes digitized content from the UNC Library(read more)

Did you know that you can quickly add access to Paratext products directly to your library’s website? We’ve done all the hard work for you: just drop our widget code into your web page wherever desired.   Widgets are available for all subscribers, no matter the product:   The History Widget allows you to provide patrons with easy access to Eight Centuries via a single search box placed anywhere within your site—even in your LibGuides. Similarly, the(read more)

Over the last month, we have made some exciting new changes to 19th Century Masterfile—not least the introduction of a new name: Eight Centuries. Additionally, we have we have added new source material to our already-extensive database, and streamlined the interface to make finding sources easier, faster, and more intuitive. See below for a detailed list of the improvements made to 8C in the new year:   Name change: 19th Century Masterfile (NCM) is now Eight Centuries(read more)

“[…] what a spot of mud on your name—I was going to say on your reign—is this abominable Dreyfus affair! A council of war, under order, has just dared to acquit Esterhazy, a great blow to all truth, all justice. And it is finished, France has this stain on her cheek, History will write that it was under your presidency that such a social crime could be committed.” –Section from “J’Accuse…!,” open letter from Émile Zola to(read more)

“It is designed, that the Country shall be furnished once a month (or if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener,) with an Account of such considerable things as have arrived unto our Notice.” Opening lines of Publick Occurrences, 1690     On Thursday September 25, 1690, a singular event occurred in Boston. A collaboration between a publisher, Richard Pierce, and a Londoner-turned-colonial editor, Benjamin Harris, came to fruition in the printing of a(read more)

Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us— Cover us with your pools of fir. “Oread,” Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle, 1914     This remains poet Hilda Doolittle’s (1886 – 1961) most famous piece of work. It is a wonderful example of the Modernist poetical school of Imagism: an effort to pare down poetry to the essentials of imagery and metaphor.1 In this case,(read more)

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC recently named Lonnie G. Bunch III as its fourteenth Secretary, the first African American to hold the position. In celebration of this occasion, let’s explore the beginnings of the Smithsonian.   The Smithsonian Institution is a remarkable institution. Founded in 1846 and sometimes called “the nation’s attic,” the institution brings millions of visitors in contact with science and history each year. Scholars(read more)

We recently augmented 19th Century Masterfile with data from the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office. This index—and the library that spawned it—were largely the work of one incredible surgeon and bibliophile: Dr. John Shaw Billings.   We’ve all, while researching, thought to ourselves, “I sure wish the library had this particular book,” or lamented, “It sure would be great if this library’s collection was(read more)

Research often takes us in weird directions whether you are a scholar completing a chapter for a book, a student working on a project for class … or an editor checking sources for a piece of copy. Coming across the unexpected is one of the best parts of the process, and an experience I went through recently. –Ed. In a recent blog post, I mentioned that ephemeral common knowledge is one of the hardest things to preserve since it is never considered important enough to record(read more)

The First World War affected the world in profound and irrevocable ways, not least the field of literature. The impact of the Great War on literature has been well-documented, both in terms of how changes in outlook were reflected in the books, poems, short stories, and articles produced by during and after the war, and in terms of the generation of authors destroyed by mechanized warfare on a large scale.1 Perhaps less-studied is how the war’s effect reached the publishing industry(read more)

Exploring the Register of Debates and the Congressional Globe… Today we will look at two mainstays of early Congressional reporting: the Register of Debates and the Congressional Globe. Both dominated the journalistic world of Congress and politics in the decades before the Government Printing Office began producing its official account of Congress—the Congressional Record—in 1873. And because the two overlapped in coverage, many assumed they were partisan rivals. But(read more)

Exploring the NYPL Public Domain Collection… Today we will look at the New York Public Library’s Public Domain Collection. The NYPL recently made approximately 190,000 digitized public domain items from their special collections available online for unrestricted use. Why does the NYPL have such a large library of digitized material? Why do they have such a large special collection at all? To answer these questions, we have explore  the genesis of the NYPL collection in(read more)

Exploring the Farmers’ Bulletin… Our “Exploring” series continues with the Farmers’ Bulletin, a publication from the United States Department of Agriculture that first appeared in 1889. For over a century, the Bulletin has disseminated the latest research out of Agricultural Experiment Stations across the country with the aim of leading farmers to bigger crop yields and more rewarding home lives. Persuit of this goal has sometimes led the Bulletin to publish(read more)

Exploring the Annual Magazine Subject-Index… Our "Exploring" series continues with Frederick Faxon’s Annual Magazine Subject-Index, which ran from 1907 until 1949. When Faxon started his index in 1907, several large and mostly-comprehensive periodical indexes already dominated the library market. So why did he bother starting yet one more? As it turns out, this was a question front and center in Faxon’s mind from the outset—and one to which he had a(read more)

Exploring the Industrial Arts Index... Continuing with our “Exploring” blog series, today we will look at the Industrial Arts Index. Before the current-day crowd of scientific and engineering online discovery services existed, staying up-to-date in one’s field involved visiting the reference section of the local library and using their subject indexes. The Industrial Arts Index was one such tool, designed to make it easy to find the most widely-used and useful articles in(read more)

Exploring Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates... At Paratext, historical sources—primary, secondary, and tertiary—are our business. Not all historical sources are immediately intuitive, and many hide fascinating stories. This is the first post in our “Exploring” blog series, which will delve into various useful sources available to researchers and scholars at all levels. We address issues of historical context, illuminate methods of use, and parse out biases(read more)

Paratext celebrates 25 years of research database applications. “When Paratext began, the most significant 'disruption' came with the industry-wide pre-occupation with CD-ROM as a storage/delivery medium. At the time, CDs were rapidly replacing print and microfiche as the preferred delivery mechanism for large-volume research content,” according to Eric Calaluca, Paratext founder. “The expectation that CD publishing would lower costs was quickly(read more)

The Autumn of 2017 brings great new content to 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930, along with recently deployed new search utilities to improve search results, particularly for non-specialists. The following sources have just been added to 19th Century Masterfile. United States National Archives 19th Century Masterfile now contains over 1.5 million new citations from the United States National Archives image collection. The range of this collection is quite vast,(read more)

356 years after The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge held their first 'learned society' meeting in 1660, Paratext announces the addition of The Society's International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, 1901-1914 to 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. This is the continuation of the monumental Catalogue of Scientific Papers 1800-1900, which Paratext deployed in 2012.   The International Catalogue is the largest single editorial(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that extensive content from Adam Matthew is now accessible via 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. Adam Matthew, an imprint of SAGE, is an award-winning publisher of digital primary source collections for the humanities and social sciences, covering subject areas from medieval family life to 20th-century history and culture. Nearly 100,000 links from 33 collections are being added to 19th Century Masterfile’s Image/Media section, broadening research(read more)

After 18 years in the making, Paratext can finally introduce its newest, most exciting utility for The Commons. Library practitioners can now delve deeper into the content of 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. We’ve created a new search function which allows you to search what is inside 19th Century Masterfile by Periodical Title, Index, and by Language. This utility allows library practitioners to explore the vast coverage of historical periodical literature within 19th Century(read more)

Many bibliographers and scholars using 19th Century Masterfile have asked for expanded coverage of the visual arts. To that end, we're very happy to announce that Graves’ Indexes to Art Exhibitions 1760-1912 is now completely digitized and online in 19th Century Masterfile. Graves’ indexes are a seminal resource not only for the study of art, but for users from numerous scholarly disciplines. These indexes offer the researcher opportunities(read more)

Paratext’s 19th Century Masterfile 1106-1930 now contains links to 472,764 articles to the 380 titles within JSTOR’s Early Journal Content. The vital Early Journal Content data augments the 8,000+ journals already indexed within19th Century Masterfile, further establishing it as the essential ‘due diligence’ repository for pre-1930 studies. The Early Journal Content covers arts and humanities, economics, politics, mathematics and other sciences. Begin your(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce our new Resource Usage Platform. You can measure statistics on terms, titles found, most popular queries, and which data sources are being utilized. The platform is available for 19th Century Masterfile, Public Documents Masterfile, and Reference Universe. Observe how your reference collection is being utilized: Discover how e-resources and print usage compares. Use for deeper analysis for coordinating research programs and objectives. Use(read more)

A major enhancement to 19th Century Masterfile will be deployed in January 2013. This new enhancement includes: Faster links to the 20 million+ full text sources from both fee-based and Open Access repositories. Enhanced de-limiting functions–by date; by format; and by subject and more. Detailed resource descriptions to give users a better understanding of the context of their results. Simplified exporting of citation data in a variety of(read more)

The Granite Monthly was a New Hampshire publication that covered news, issues of import to the society of the time and general interest articles. It now joins over 70 other valuable primary source indexes that enjoy easier discovery with one searchbox in 19th Century Masterfile. The Granite Monthly file in 19th Century Masterfile contains nearly 20,000 primary source records from 1877-1930.  Most of these citations conveniently include links(read more)

Paratext announces that hundreds of thousands of citations from the ARTstor Digital Library will be indexed and integrated into Paratext’s 19th Century Masterfile database, allowing historians and scholars from many disciplines to expand their art history research. The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in a variety of subjects. The Digital Library serves educators, scholars, curators,(read more)

As we’ve all been recently reminded of the important role Congress plays in ensuring the day to day functions of democracy, it can be useful to keep in mind the history of one of our most influential government institutions. 19th Century Masterfile now includes the indexes to the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates and much of the Congressional Globe, bringing our coverage of Congressional papers up to the 39th Congress in 1867, with greater coverage(read more)

19th Century Masterfile has always been the ‘due diligence’ resource for historians. Its usefulness is now expanded to cover works in both technology and agricultural science. To that end, Paratext has significantly enhanced the scope and research value of 19th Century Masterfile for historical agricultural studies through the addition of the Index to Farmers’ Bulletin, 1889-1930. The Farmers’ Bulletin was for many years one of the most(read more)