JISC

This collection is now live  English and Welsh

All academically significant Welsh periodicals published since 1900 are being digitised by the National Library of Wales, to provide, for the first time, a substantial corpus of material in the Welsh language freely available online, in perpetuity, to readers in all parts of the world.

The project

Welsh Journals Online will provide students, teachers and researchers with free online, searchable, access to a selection of 20th and 21st century Welsh and Wales-related journals held at the National Library of Wales and partner institutions. These materials cover a very wide range of subject areas, including humanities, social sciences, science and technology.

An innovative and dynamic web delivery interface will allow the user to both browse and keyword-search a selection of the most significant journal and periodical titles published after 1900 – a resource estimated to contain 400,000 pages of text in both Welsh and English. For the benefit of non-Welsh readers, the bilingual interface will guide users to the text and allow them to conduct searches that could provide indicative results for, at the very least, personal, corporate and place names and dates. An interactive interface will also allow readers to create and upload presentations and other learning objects based on the resource.

In an age that has seen a massive change in learning patterns and student profiles alike it is crucial to provide students who work or raise families with around-the-clock access to printed resources that are geographically disparate and often confined to a few copies with time restricted access. These materials are often used exclusively by advanced postgraduate students and researchers but this project will enable all students to realise the full value of this enormously important collection. Such a resource will ‘democratise’ knowledge by allowing non-specialists direct access to important primary materials that have hitherto been the preserve of professional scholars.

The content

This collection is a selection of about 50 titles in both Welsh and English, including learned publications, literary journals, science and social science titles, the transactions of county historical societies and denominational publications, and popular publications discussing current affairs in Wales and beyond. This amounts to an estimated 400,000 pages – 160,000 in Welsh, 240,000 in English.

The inclusion of titles in the Welsh language is deliberate and important - without them it would be impossible to offer a full range of the intellectual output of Wales in the 20th century.

The list of titles below is only a small part of a much wide selection.

The process

A crucial feature of this project is that the bulk of its material is in copyright. However, most publications in Wales are not produced by large organisations jealous of the intellectual property rights. On the contrary, many are non-commercial, and many are subsidised from the public purse. This project is an important test-bed for JISC by gathering transferable experience of digitisation rights management in a non-commercial environment. The project is seeking the consent of the copyright holders through licence agreements with the publishers.

The future

After the project launch at the end of 2009, a community of users of the resource from all groups, including both academic and non-academic users, will be encouraged to deposit any learning objects developed based on the resource at the project website. The library is also committed to the continuing upload of current or semi-current issues of on-going periodicals.

The project plan

Download the project plan and the final report to find out more about the project.

Lead site: National Library of Wales
Project partners: WHELF (Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum), National Assembly for Wales