UK Parliamentary Papers website regenerates

The House of Commons Parliamentary Papers website, which hosts online records dating back to 1688, has been given a facelift by hosts Proquest. Now known as the Proquest U.K. Parliamentary Papers site (http://parlipapers.proquest.com), it can be accessed for free through many subscribing universities and libraries, including the National Library of Scotland's Licensed Digital Collections (subscribe via www.nls.uk if you have a residential address in Scotland).

Here's the official blurb regarding the differences to be found with the new version of the site (accessible via http://proquest.libguides.com/parliamentary):

New and Better
• Faster, more intuitive searching
• Post-search faceting to get to relevant documents
• Full-text PDFs (rather than individual page images)
• Bookmarking of search forms
• Dedicated Search by Number form including searches for bills, Command Papers, and Sessional Paper numbers
• Dedicated Member search form including search by office, party affiliation, and nation (England, Wales, Scotland etc)
• On the document results page, users will also see relevant results from historical newspapers and Congressional (based on institutional purchases)

Different
• Search prioritized over browse (Usage and focus groups proved that few people use the browse functionality)
• 4 search forms: basic; advanced; search by number; and members, offices and constituencies
• Basic search from includes links to highlight search functionality for new users

Usage Statistics
• Legacy usage statistics will not be migrated but will be available as they currently are through at least 2016
• Usage statistics for the new application will be available through the ProQuest Administrator Module (PAM)

MARC Records
• Legacy site MARCs available at item/paper level from 19th century forward
• Also includes 17 18th century collection level MARC records
• Hansard has a collection level MARC record
• HCPP contains non-serial content; we will load updated MARCs to FTP site, and link to it from PAM.
• Existing (legacy site) record links will be redirected after cutover.

I've not had a chance to play with it properly, so would be very interested in user's experiences with the new site - and thanks to Janet Mackay from the University of Aberdeen's Library for flagging up the new edition of the site when I mentioned the previous version in a talk on Friday morning in Glasgow (in which I flagged up its usefulness for its tables of poor law returns from Scotland to Ireland in the late 19th Century)!!!

Chris

For details on my genealogy guide books, including A Decade of Irish Centenaries: Researching Ireland 1912-1923, Discover Scottish Church Records (2nd edition), Discover Irish Land Records and Down and Out in Scotland: Researching Ancestral Crisis, please visit http://britishgenes.blogspot.co.uk/p/my-books.html.