In 1834 the Old Bailey, the court where London’s serious crimes were tried, was given a new title and jurisdiction, and the established periodical which provided extensive accounts of its trials was renamed the Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court. This project, a continuation of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online 1674-1834, added a further 97,000 trials and 70 million words of text from the printed Proceedings to this database, extending the period covered to 1913, when publication of the Proceedings ceased.
The website also includes all surviving editions of the Proceeding’s sister publication, the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts, biographies of some 2,500 convicts executed between 1679 and 1772, compiled by the chaplain of Newgate Prison. These were digitized as part of a parallel project, Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London, which is digitising a wide range of additional primary sources about the lives of eighteenth-century Londoners.
Approximately 122,000 pages of text were digitised under the supervision of the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire, using a combination of single rekeying and optical character recognition. Once the digitised page images and texts were transferred to the HRI, they were marked up with XML tags to identify key information such as names, locations, and types of crimes, verdicts and punishments, to facilitate online searching and statistical analysis. A combination of automated markup and manual tagging was used. The website, allowing users to search all the Proceedings published between 1674 and 1913, was launched in 2008.
