From the website:

Over 34,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1527 and 1866 that have been identified and verified to have actually occurred make up the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Records of the voyages have been found in multiple archival sources which are listed in a variable in the dataset. These records provide details about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes. The database enables users to search for information about a particular voyage or group of voyages and it provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, or on a timeline. In addition to information in the database itself, specific voyages are linked to images and to copies of primary sources in the “Resources” section, and “Educational materials” like lesson-plans are linked in turn to relevant voyages in the main database. Users are encouraged to compare findings from the main database with “Estimates” in the first section. The latter are somewhat higher because they represent an attempt to take into account the number of slaves on voyages for which information is lacking or not yet included in the main database.

The the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is an invaluable resource for anyone doing research on the Atlantic African diaspora.

The website is still incomplete. There are empty links where crucial pages on methodology, authors, and lesson plans will be. There also don’t appear to be any author credits available yet. The Cambridge version for the CD-ROM is only a touch better, describing the CD-ROM “a data set compiled by respected historians and draws on the archival work of Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, English, and French scholars” without mentioning a single one anywhere on their site. To actually know that this is phenomenal work of David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen Behrendt and Herbert Klein (and many research assistants) or that the project was sponsored by the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University, requires some Google searching.

All that said, that this extensive database is now accessible online, not just on CD-ROM, is very exciting.

Visit the website (hopefully completed soon) here.

[Update:  The site should be completed and open to the public; the above link is working fine.  Thank you for the emails and comments of concern!]