Students can now access centuries-old reproductions of British government documents from home.

Bizzell Memorial Library is expanding its collection of primary source online documents this semester to provide better resources for student and faculty research, said Karen Rupp-Serrano, librarian and associate professor of collection development.

OU is one of the first universities to purchase State Papers Online, an online database that includes million of pages of British government documents. Among them are 380,000 reproductions of manuscript documents that are linked to fully searchable calendar entries of documents produced by the government of Great Britain between 1509 and 1714, according to a publication produced by the database’s developer, Gale Cengage Learning.

The database also contains scanned images of the documents produced by the government of Great Britain.

“In the past, we haven’t had access to this kind of primary source material,” Rupp-Serrano said. “You can read [these documents] for yourself and draw your own conclusions.”

The database, which is accessible to anyone online, also has helpful tools like guides to Latin and paleography, which helps students read archaic script, as contemporary readers might not be familiar with the material, Rupp-Serrano said. The database also has a feature that allows students to make their own notes and save them for their next log-in.

The database cost OU more than $50,000, but many professors and students say the resource is well worth the cost.

“I know that the price seems high, but in my view it is absolutely worth it,” Roberta Magnusson, professor and director of undergraduate studies for the history department, said in an e-mail. “I have already used it for my own research ... and was able to track down more information in a single afternoon from the comfort of my home computer than I could have found in weeks spent at a library housing the printed collection.”

Magnusson also said she appreciates that the database is easily searchable.

But the database isn’t always easy to find the first time around.

Taylor Krebs, international and area studies and economics sophomore, said she had some trouble navigating through LORA to find State Papers Online while researching for her Irish history class.

“Even with an interest in the history of the geographic area, it’s difficult to find what you’re looking for,” Krebs said.

Finding the database might have taken her some time, but Krebs said it won’t keep her from using it in the future. She said users need a working knowledge of English history to navigate the database but the tools are very helpful.

She said tools like the monarch timeline and money converters put historical figures into modern terms and helped her put history in perspective.

OU Libraries plan to make the database’s second, third and fourth installments available when they are released later this year and in 2010. Students and faculty will have access to hundreds of thousands of foreign and domestic British historical documents once the collection is complete.

The database will be most useful to history, religious studies and English students, Rupp-Serrano said, but also will help science students with the addition of the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, a source of classical biological research techniques.

To access the database, log on to http://library.ou.edu/eresources/LORA and search “State Papers Online.”