Nursing Record/British Journal of Nursing archives, 1888-1956

This article centres on the experience of using a new database comprising a digitised historical journal - the Nursing Record/British Journal of Nursing from 1888 to 1956, when the journal ceased publication. The project was initiated by the UK Centre for the History of Nursing, a collaboration between a number of academic bodies, including the Wellcome Trust and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). The database was launched at Oxford in September 2003 and is freely available via the RCN website. The database was searched for material concerning emotion, as there has been increasing interest in this topic among service professionals, including nurses, during the past few decades (Hochschild, 1983; Smith, 1992; James et al, 2003). It seemed interesting to explore the same topic, as discussed in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Search terms used were "emotion", "feeling", "sympathy", "comfort" and "compassion". Most hits were achieved with "sympathy" and "feeling", but the majority of these were not strictly relevant to the discussion. This pilot search indicates that hand searching of paper copies still represents the "gold standard", in terms of identifying relevant material and interesting context data, not necessarily found when feeding specific search terms into a computer. The main advantages of the digitized journal are much wider access to this source and protection of fragile archival material.