Early modern online primary sources

Update: Early Modern Resources is back up, though not as yet fully restored.

Some readers may have noticed that my Early Modern Resources website has been down for a couple of months now. I’m rebuilding it, but it’s going to be a little while. In the meantime, here is a google spreadsheet of about 150 online primary source collections from the EMR database.

Link to download the spreadsheet.

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An Online Hub for Early Modernists

Early Modern Resources is going to change. The site has been accumulating content for more than a decade now without changing significantly in its functions or intent. Meanwhile, the Web has expanded dramatically. There are now far more high-quality scholarly resources, especially collections of primary sources. But, just as important, there is also a much larger community of early modernists online.

As I began a very overdue review of links in the EMR database in April 2013, I soon began to feel that it needed something more drastic than another spring clean. Many of my older summaries were too short and unspecific to be at all helpful. Over time (unsurprisingly enough) my editorial decisions have been inconsistent (and occasionally mildly puzzling). Not all the early content had much substance, and some pages, though still accessible, were completely out of date. Conversely, however, some websites that I had linked when they were first established have grown far beyond my original summaries.

I’m not taking down Early Modern Resources “v.1” for the moment: it can be found at http://earlymodernweb.org/emr where it will be fully searchable, as at present (there might be the occasional broken internal link and, of course, a growing number of dead links to resources). However, I will not be doing any further updates to the site, and eventually it will go away altogether.

Instead, I’ve started building a new website, an ‘Early Modern Hub’, with a number of interconnected areas:

1. resources will be more tightly focused, emphasising resources for researchers (whether students, academics, independent scholars), especially online primary sources, and sites of scholarship. Hopefully, listings will provide more detailed and useful information, especially about large resources. I will continue to include only content that is free to access.
2. news and events – this will include the Early Modern News blog which is currently hosted at WordPress.com; it may also add links to external resources that I’ve been unable to include in EMR previously, such as blogs/sites set up specifically for conferences and short term projects.
3. blogs – I’d like to integrate Early Modern Commons more closely into the site; and think about ways to bring in Twitter links and conversations
4. people – I’m not quite sure yet what this might consist of, but I’d particularly like to facilitate a network to support postgraduate students, early career researchers, independent scholars and alt-academics. This might involve setting up a network along the lines of MLA Commons, if there’s enough demand for it. At the very least I’d like to have some kind of directory to which researchers would submit their own online profile. (Suggestions welcome.)

This will take a while to come together – watch out for news!