A century of telephony: digital capture of British telephone directories, 1880-1984

Abstract

We describe the creation of a data resource for charting the adoption of fixed line telephony in Great Britain over the period 1880–1984, of which the period 1880–1951 is available for wide research use. We first evaluate the use of various open-source software and then develop the novel teldiR open-source package to capture digitally encoded scans of all available telephone directories at ten-yearly intervals throughout this period and document the quality control checks used to establish the provenance of the resulting digital records. Our research demonstrates the feasibility of digitally encoding scans of historical telephone directories, and suggests potential analytical extensions to this work, including georeferencing of subscriber records. This research is seen not only as facilitating geographical analysis of the adoption of fixed line telephony, but also as creating a bridge between historical analysis of residential mobility, migration, and changing geodemographic structure in the years between (now digitized) historical censuses and present day digital sources. The digital resource arising from this research is available for bona fide research use.