Monday, July 14, 2008

Vancouver Harbour Centre Power Outage - 14 July 2008

For several hours today MEMSO and all TannerRitchie's websites were offline because of a major fire/explosion and power failure in downtown Vancouver, which cut power to our servers in the Vancouver Harbour Centre. The Harbour Centre is one of North America's main internet and telecommunications hubs, but although it has a large backup power system, it was unable to cope with the prolonged outage.

A news story connected to this power outage and the associated disruption can be found at The Vancouver Sun website.

We sincerely apologise for the disruption and inconvenience. Although the Vancouver Harbour Centre is one of the two most highly trusted and respected locations for servers in Canada, we are coincidentally moving our web servers to the Toronto telecommunications hub in August this year, as part of a major expansion of our hardware.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Additional Manuscripts from the State Papers, Foreign, & State Papers, Spain (1553-1780)


(TNA SP 70/87, f. 642r. MEMSO Permalink )


Users will already have noticed that manuscript images from the The National Archives (UK) are increasingly a key element in Medieval and Early Modern Sources Online (MEMSO). The first wave of a major expansion of our manuscript images was launched on Friday, 4 July, with the availibility of TNA SP 70, The State Papers, Foreign, Elizabeth I (1558-1577) (part I of II, with the remaining MSS appearing in August), and SP 94, State Papers, Foreign, Spain (1577-1780).


The manuscripts are arranged for ease of use and access in high definition greyscale images, and we will be adding further metadata and links between printed books and manuscripts over the coming weeks. However, of particular interest to many users will be the fact that most of the new images from the State Papers, Spain, are absent from the printed volumes of Calendars of State Papers, Spain, and Calendars of State Papers, Foreign.