Wednesday 22 August 2012

Mass Observation Online: British Social History 1937-1972

An important purchase by the University Library


Visit Mass Observation Online: http://www.massobservation.amdigital.co.uk/
Find it also via Databases A-Z in Primo . Off campus access is available via Shibboleth (Sign in to Primo) and VPN.
Mass Observation Online is now available for students and staff at Aberystwyth University following an in-perpetuity license purchase by the University Library.
The famous Mass Observation research project gathered data about the social attitudes of Britons via questionnaires completed by volunteers, by investigators recording behaviour and conversation in public places and events, and through a panel of diarists.
Find instructions here to start exploring straight away.

In Mass Observation Online we can search the Archive, filtering results by document type and date. A search for weather finds many results including this this snippet from a Northamptonshire farm worker in July 1944 coping with a British summer amongst other things: [click the image to expand it]

Browsing the contents is also rewarding: try the Topic Collections and browse the digitised transcripts about capital punishment, religion or juvenile delinquency. PDF downloads of the content are provided.
This Nature and Scope page gives a full description of the methodologies used, followed by a detailed breakdown of the online content with date ranges. Further updates to the content will be released by the Archive’s online publisher Adam Matthew.
The Resources tab provides interactive maps e.g. to see where the anonymised diarists lived, a chronology, bibliography, useful links and a gallery of contemporary photographs.
For more background on the Archive, see the Mass Observation latest news blog for announcements about lecture series, projects and other events emerging from use of the Archive.
Please email us: acastaff@aber.ac.uk with any comments or questions you have about Mass Observation Online.

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