eReviews

Adam Matthew Digital, www.amdigital.co.uk

The Grand Tour is a collection of manuscripts, visuals, and printed works, including account books, architectural drawings, diaries, guidebooks, journals, letters, maps, paintings, and sketches detailing English men and women journeying abroad, circa 1550 to 1850 (that is, "doing the Grand Tour"). Materials come from Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, as well as from the Chaney Library, the British Library, London, and other private archives. Material contents address 18th century communication, diplomacy, food and drink, health, money, politics, religion, sex, social customs, street life, transportation, and urban planning. Manuscripts, travel accounts, and visuals featured include primary materials from Pompeo Batoni, Charles Burney, J. Fenimore Cooper, Elizabeth Craven, Sir William Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney, Tobias Smollett, Joseph Spence, Lady Hester Stanhope, Mariana Starke, Henry Swinburne, J.M.W. Turner, and Richard Wilson, among others.

Secondary materials in the collection include John Ingamells's searchable, full-text Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800, which provides biographies and tour details for over 6000 "Grand Tourists"; selected digitized materials from the Brinsley Ford Archive at the Paul Mellon Centre, London (with the notes, clippings, and research gathered by Sir Brinsley Ford); and an indexed collection of hundreds of modern photographs of Italy, providing a visual source of all the historical sites visited by tourists.

HOW DOES IT WORK? The work opens with an eponymous banner in an appropriately florid style, which ends with a Search box, under which are links to Advanced Search and Popular Searches (more on these later). Beneath the Grand Tour banner is a toolbar of links to the Introduction, Documents, Visual Sources, Dictionary and Archive of Travellers, Essays, and Help. Beneath that toolbar is a continuously shifting slideshow of stunning visuals from the collection, with 12 "step" links that lead you through the resource.

Beneath that slideshow is another set of features that change each time you refresh the file—these include Browning in Florence (with a link to his letters), Vesuvius Erupts (linking to Sir William Hamilton's sketches of the volcano's explosion in 1767), J. Fenimore Cooper in Italy (with links to his letters)...you get the idea. There are enough different ways of accessing the information here to satisfy every possible type of researcher.

CAN YOU USE IT? I explored the Popular Searches first, since I thought they could quickly give me an idea of what was in this file—which they did—but there are over 1000 of them! They're organized into Countries, Regions, Cities/Towns, Featured Places, People, and Topics, and range from Albania to Women Writers, so the scope is pretty broad.

My first Search was for "hester stanhope" (just because I'm always interested in seeing anything connected to her), and it found a letter from Lady Hester to Sir Joseph Banks. So then I searched "sir joseph banks" and got 40 results—but looking at them I realized the Search feature did my search as "sir and joseph and banks." When I tried again, searching for "sir joseph banks" (in quotation marks), I got two results, one of which was the Stanhope entry.

Next I started working my way through the links in the main toolbar. The Introduction includes, among other features, an Editor's Choice section in which Martha Fogg, Project Editor, "picks highlights from the collection." It also includes a Chronology running from 1700 to 1901, as well as a bibliography of books and web sites for further research. In Documents I found an A-to-Z listing of all the documents in the collection, arranged by title, with their authors, dates, and document type (correspondence, rare book, travel diary, manuscript journal, sketchbook, etc.).

I could select documents and then export them automatically into EndNote or RefWorks, or I could go into an entry and download the document or a PDF range, or I could simply view it, page by page. The images I pulled up were crisp and clear and quite readable—even Lady Hester's handwritten letter.

Clicking on Visual Sources let me look at all 26 pages of visual sources, or I could use the extremely cool interactive maps to follow individuals' journeys, or I could view the 50 or so research paintings and sketches inspired by the Grand Tour (I could download these if I wanted to). Completely captivating! The Dictionary and Archive of Travellers is a searchable, alphabetical list of British and Irish travelers who toured Italy in the 18th century—it will be a boon to researchers of the period—while the Essay section includes three scholarly essays: "The Grand Tour: An Introduction," by Professor Jeremy Black, University of Exeter; "Cities of the Grand Tour: Changing Perceptions of Italian Cities in the long Eighteenth Century," by Professor Rosemary Sweet, University of Leicester; and "Grand Tour Scholarship Since 1900: A Personal Account," by Professor Edward Chaney, Southampton Solent University.

I read through the Help section last (a habit of mine; I want to be able to carry out basic tasks without consulting Help, but I want it there for when I need it), and it provided detailed assistance with searching, viewing, exporting, downloading, and printing materials in the collection. Very nice.

WHAT'S THE COST? The one-time purchase price for the collection is $29,000 (there is no annual maintenance or cost-per-user fee). Discounts can be negotiated on an individual basis; Adam Matthew Digital uses an internal banding structure to determine levels of discounts, and this is influenced by the Carnegie Classification of 2005 and JISC.

HOW GOOD IS IT? My call on this has to be contextual. As a historical e-product, this rates a strong ten, perhaps even higher. Given the narrow focus of the collection, I have to give it an overall nine, based on scope and price.

BOTTOM LINE A beguiling and effective tool for research into Grand Tour travel, this title is recommended for comprehensive electronic collections, as well as for college and university libraries serving European historians.