Papers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 - 1859)

The University of Bristol, UK, holds over 33,000 pages in the Brunel Collection. This collection contains the personal papers of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. However, despite its importance as a scholarly resource, no electronic catalogue of the collection exists and physical access is limited. In 2003 the University was awarded an AHRB resource enhancement grant to carry out a pilot digitization project to bring this resource to a wider audience via the Internet. This resource will be freely available online by Brunel's bicentenary in 2006. The aims of providing access to a larger audience and understanding more about such a key historical figure sit alongside the technical goals of an open source, open standard, easily extensible and migratable image database and electronic catalogue.