Three sources of data immediately spring to mind as ripe for presentation in
digital form:
i) The annual "List of Mines" (as far as I know, there is no easily accessible
complete collection of these anywhere in the UK apart from that at the British
Library).
ii) The reports of the various Royal Commissions on the coal industry.
iii) The Regional Survey Reports published in the run-up to the nationalisation
of the coal industry.
Members of this list may be aware that I have been researching the history of
the Bristol and Somerset coalfield for some time now, and in the course of that
research, I have been struck by the amount of mining data which is held in local
archives but which is not catalogued in detail. This is not intended as a
criticism of the archives concerned, as, of course, they have limited time and
resources to undertake cataloguing, and the work could, perhaps, better be
carried out by researchers with some specialist knowledge of the field. Would I
be correct in supposing that the situation in other mining areas is much the
same?
Keith Ramsey
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