Law

During the eighteenth century the British Parliament ruled over one of the most powerful nations on earth. The matters it debated ranged from the minutely personal, such as individual divorce cases or family financial affairs, through the local, for example the construction or roads or harbours, to matters of the most central national importance, like electoral reform, wars and treaties, catholic emancipation or law and order.

Information norms (and in particular the laws of intellectual property) are constitutive of modern societies. An understanding of the sources of these norms is critical to understanding the scope and direction of current laws. The resource relates to key historical documents in the field of copyright, from the invention of the printing press (ca1450) to the blue print of an international author rights regime devised with the Berne Convention of 1886.

The Pliny project aims to promote some thinking that looks broadly at the provision of tools to support scholarship. One of its products is a piece of free software, also called Pliny, which facilitates note-taking and annotation, allowing its user to integrate these initial notes into a representation of an evolving personal interpretation.

The Cabinet Papers Project aimed to provide an online resource for learning and research that would make The National Archives’ holdings of the Cabinet Papers available to the public, and in particular to Higher Education and A-level students. The National Archives is now able to provide an entire collection of searchable digitised images of the Cabinet Papers to users of the site as well as providing relevant information and study guidance for both teachers and students of British 20th century history.