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JISC Collections has licensed this archive in perpetuity to provide higher and further education and research councils with 6,000 volumes and 4 million pages of documents from core 19th century official Parliamentary publication. This includes debates, proceedings and reports of their committees and more going back to 1801. The content can be accessed via the publishers’ server.
When JISC Collections licensed the above archives, we also paid access fees for the all higher and further education institutions of five-years. This paid for period is coming to an end and as each sub-licence agreement comes up for renewal we have to introduce access fees. We have negotiated with the publisher the lowest access fees possible and the schedule of fees we hope to charge for the next three-years is listed below.
Please note the fees for the 1st term from 1 November 2011 to 31 October 2012 are fixed. The other fees are estimated and will be confirmed when the number of instituions participating is established. Therefore for the time being we will only charge institutions that renew their subscription to the 19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers the access fees for the first term i.e. 1 November 2011 - 31 October 2012.
Institutions paying access fees for access to 19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary may opt-out by the 31st August 2012 and will be notified for the fees for the following year* by July 2012 which will include access to 18th and 20th Century Parliamentary Papers.
*Institutuions will need to place a new order for the 18th, 19th and 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers for the period 1 November 2012 - 31 October 2013. Similarly institutuons will need to place a new order to access the 18th and 19th and 20th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, British Periodicals Collections I and II and Periodicals Archive Online: JISC Collections Selection for the period 1 November 2013 - 31 October 2014.
Before the advent of a fully formed Whitehall departmental system, Parliament was the main source of public information, ordering the publication of papers, returns, reports and evidence on a grand scale. These papers and reports are often fascinating and exhaustive in their detail. In an environment of relatively inexpensive printing, the result was around 5,900 bound volumes and 4.2 million pages of papers for the 19th century alone.19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers includes digital versions of these sessional papers. It does not include debates (Hansard), the House of Commons Journal, or daily business papers, such as Order papers and Votes and Proceedings. These are outside the scope of a precise application of the term parliamentary papers.Sessional papers, sometimes called blue books, were required for the work of the House of Commons, providing information on matters of policy and administration, and ordered by the House to be printed. They fall into the following three categories:Bills – drafts of legislation, to be reviewed through various parliamentary stages. If the Bill passes through these stages, it will become an Act of Parliament.House Papers – documents resulting from the work of the House and its Committees.Command Papers – Government papers (from Ministers) conveying information or decisions the Government wishes to draw to the attention of the House, presented by Command of Her Majesty.Both Houses of Parliament, the Commons and the Lords, produce parliamentary papers. Although House of Commons Parliamentary Papers is a collection of Commons papers, some from the Lords are also included. This is because the Lords often presented papers to the Commons, such as reports prepared by Lords Select Committees. These reports were then included in the House of Commons Papers, and therefore appear in 19th Century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.
