BLDS Digital Library

Very pleased to be helping to promote a digital initiative form colleagues at the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS:

New BLDS Digital Library is helping research from developing countries enjoy a wider global readership


"With so many library users now expecting to access information through search engines, developing country publications tend to get overlooked in favour of the wealth of research available online from American and European academic institutions.

The British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) has the largest collection of economic and social development materials in Europe and over half of it originates from developing countries. But until now, much of the BLDS physical collection has only been available to visitors to the library or users of its Document Delivery service. BLDS is hoping that its newly-launched Digital Library will help redress the situation by making developing country research more accessible and visible online

The new service, funded by the UK’s Department for International Development, has been created to help decades of research from developing country institutions enjoy a wider global readership. BLDS is working with partner research institutes in Africa and Asia, to digitise their printed publications and host them online so they can be easily found through search engines. Nearly 600 papers have been digitised so far from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and India, with more to be added in coming months as BLDS continues building partnerships with research institutes. The publications in the BLDS Digital Library are being made available through a Creative Commons licence which enables future sharing and dissemination of this content by others.

For more information on the BLDS Digital Library, contact Henry Rowsell

or visit the BLDS Global Projects webpage at http://blds.ids.ac.uk/global-projects

Electronic version of Richard Ligon's "A True and Exact History of Barbados" (1657)

Thanks to David Chan Smith, Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University an electronic teaching edition of Richard Ligon's "A True and Exact History of Barbados" (1657) is now available at:


The edition includes a basic introduction and footnotes for this important early modern Caribbean text. The text is also set in modern typescript. It is freely available for public distribution and undergraduate teaching thanks to the generosity of the Text Creation Partnership and Harvard University Libraries.

It is hoped that the text will evolve as a collaborative editing project whereby readers can contribute additional footnotes or information that will then be recompiled into a new edition.

http://www.wlu.ca/docsnpubs.php?grp_id=12753