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Editorial
Our special issue on COVID-19
It has now become a cliché to say that 2020 has taken us all by surprise. Pandemics are nothing new, but for most of us alive today, COVID-19 has been – still is – the gateway to a new, unwelcome reality to which we are all still trying to adapt,...Bacchini, Simone
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Journal article
Dilemmas in archiving contemporary material: the example of the British Library
The dilemmas faced by institutions in archiving contemporary materials are exemplified by current practices at the British Library. With a growing collection aiming to be comprehensive and of use to researchers, tensions between selectivity and universality in acquisition are soon brought to the fore. Similarly, a sensible collection strategy must...England, Jude ; Bacchini, Simone
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Journal article
A Silent Minority, unheard and unseen? A reflective account of methodological and linguistic challenges in research with older people ageing with Deafblindness
With reference to a specific, ongoing doctoral research project on the lived experience of vulnerability among older deafblind people (DBV), this paper aims to present and discuss some of the unique challenges, as well as opportunities, that investigators are likely to encounter when conducting research with older deafblind people, as...Bacchini, Simone ; Simcock, Peter
deafblindness, qualitative research, older people, communication
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Journal article
Some Unexpected Sources for Paintings by the Artist Mihr Chand (fl.c.1759–86), Son of Ganga Ram
Scholars have acknowledged that Mihr Chand, son of Ganga Ram (flourished c. 1759–86) is one of the finest artists to have flourished in the Mughal province of Awadh, at Faizabad and Lucknow, during the second half of the eighteenth century. Whilst it has been known that Mihr Chand received patronage...Roy, Malini
Antoine Polier, Jean Baptiste Gentil, later Mughal painting, Lucknow, Faizabad, and Mihr Chand
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Journal article
Re-viewing William Blake’s Paradise Regained (c. 1816–1820)
This article presents a revisionist reading of William Blake’s (1757–1827) twelve watercolor designs for John Milton’s “Paradise Regained” (c. 1816–1820). The designs have previously been dismissed in critical commentary as of little interest to Blake scholarship, or regarded as a narrative merely about Christ’s human nature. This article argues that they...Billingsley, Naomi
Baptism of Christ, cosmology, Temptations of Christ, William Blake, Satan, Paradise Regained, and John Milton
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Journal article
An ‘Apostle of Futurity’: William Blake as Herald of a Universal Religious Worldview
This article examines a strand of William Blake criticism from the second quarter of the twentieth century that styled his work as an embodiment of a universal religious worldview. In particular, it focuses on the writings of Max Plowman and John Middleton Murry from the mid 1920s to the early...Billingsley, Naomi
vision, pacifism, William Blake, Max Plowman, John Middleton Murry, and religion
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Journal article
Taking library collections Off The Map
The ‘Off the Map’ competition is an unusual collaboration between the British Library and GameCity; a videogame culture festival, which takes place annually in the UK city of Nottingham. The competition challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames, explorable virtual environments and interactive fiction inspired by...Wisdom, Stella
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Journal article
‘No Mercenary Views’? Constable’s English Landscape
Constable’s English Landscape 1830–2, a set of twenty-two mezzotints by David Lucas after paintings by the artist, has generally been viewed from art historical and biographical perspectives that connect its irregular production, aesthetic character and commercial failure to the artist’s creative and personal life or the development of Romanticism. This...Myrone, Felicity
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Journal article
Consul Joseph Smith’s Gold-Tooled Leather Bookbindings
To some researchers Consul Joseph Smith's (1682-1770) favoured binding style would comprise plain white/cream parchment covers and coloured spine pieces. There are many examples in the library of George III. This tells only part of the whole story, however, as more elaborate styles exist. As a bibliophile Smith would at...Marks, P. J. M.
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Journal article
Biographical Myth and the Publication of Mozart's Piano Quartets
The story that Mozart was commissioned to write three piano quartets for publication in Franz Anton Hoffmeister's subscription series has proved to be remarkably resilient in the Mozart literature. According to the account that first appeared in Georg Nikolaus von Nissen's biography (1828), Hoffmeister gave Mozart an advance payment for...Ridgewell, Rupert
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Journal article
The Concert Programmes Project: History, progress and future directions
The Concert Programmes Project (CPP) was formally established in 2003, following discussions concerning the need for an inventory of programmes initiated by a IAML symposium in Cambridge in 1981.The preliminary work of the Project was to create a collection-level approach towards improving programme access with the final goal of creating...Ridgewell, Rupert
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Journal article
Mozart's Publishing Plans With Artaria in 1787: New Archival Evidence
A previously unknown document witnessing a transaction between Mozart and his principal Viennese publisher, Artaria, appears in an inventory ledger compiled by the firm in 1787. The documentary, financial, and bibliographical contexts suggest that Mozart was paid in advance for six piano trios and twelve songs, but failed to complete...Ridgewell, Rupert
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Journal article
Reviewing football history through the UK Web Archive
The UK Web Archive aims to archive, preserve and give access to the UK webspace. This aim is achieved through an annual domain crawl, in addition to frequent crawls of selected websites and specially curated collections. These collections reflect important aspects of British culture and events that shape society. Sport...Byrne, Helena
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Journal article
‘An ‘authentic’ performance?: The cultural politics of ‘folk’ in Bengal and Bangladesh’ (part 2)
Folk performance genres have long been adapted to shorter formats for festivals, films, television and the new media. Contemporary practices of Kobigaan (a verse-duelling/song theatre genre) reveal how it functions differently for different communities relying on their cultural/collective memory of the genre. This section of the article first engages with...Basu, Priyanka
cultural memory, souvenir, festivals, sound chronotope, and Bengali cinema
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Journal article
Turkic Typologies: Ideology and Indigenous Linguistic Knowledge in the Work of Bekir Çobanzade
The current work is an exploration of the life and linguistic scholarship of the Crimean Tatar linguist Bekir Çobanzade. In it, I pay particular attention to the impact of the author's socio-political environment, especially the rise of Stalinism, on his works relating to the history and classification of the Turkic...Erdman, Michael
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Journal article
James McNeill Whistler to Richard D’Oyly Carte: A Letter Comes to Light at the British Library
Recently catalogued papers of the Doyly Carte family held at the British Library have brought to light a ‘lost’ letter from the American artist James McNeill Whistler to theatrical impresario and hotelier Richard D’Oyly Carte. The letter refers to Whistler’s decoration scheme for Carte’s home at No. 4 Adelphi Terrace...Beckett, Chris
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Journal article
Edward Spencer Dodgson, the Basque language, and the British Museum Library
Edward Spencer Dodgson (1857-1922) studied Classics at Oxford University, but there is no evidence that he sat his Finals. A visit to the Basque Country in 1886 began a life-long, passionate devotion to the Basque language and bibliography. He published new editions of important early texts and a series of...West, Geoffrey
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Magazine article
Passing Traditional Knowledge to Youth - A New Mythology
In globalizing India, the traditional knowledge-practice-belief complex passed through generations is challenged by the younger generation. CEC member Andrea Deri and Rushikesh Chavan ask, "Can Western scientific knowledge provide a new belief system and motivate decisions?"Déri, Andrea ; Chavan, Rushikesh
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Magazine article
Knowledge for Resilience
What happens to traditional fishermen’s multi-generational knowledge when the young people do not follow the tradition? CEC member Andrea Déri presents a case study on how young people revitalised and re-contextualised intergenerational learning for biodiversity conservation in the Lakshadweep archipelago, India.Déri, Andrea
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Journal article
Archaeological Inventories and Cultural Heritage Management in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
This paper's topic is a database of all archaeological sites excavated and surveyed by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967. This database project, conducted by the author with Rafi Greenberg in Tel Aviv University (Greenberg and Keinan 2007, 2009; Keinan, forthcoming), was created by collating administrative...Keinan, Adi
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Magazine article
MicroPasts: An Innovative Place for Progressing Research
Archaeology has always attracted enthusiastic volunteers, who have participated in excavations, surveys, site recording or artefact handling, as well as museum-related tasks such as engaging with visitors or helping with curatorial duties. However, most data have been produced by specialists. More often than not the knowledge remains in the academic...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Bevan, Andrew ; Pett, Daniel ; Bonacchi, Chiara ; Wilkin, Neil …
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Journal article
Using Archaeological Information to Promote Peaceful Co-existence in Israel/Palestine
The issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and role of archaeology in helping sustain it has been thoroughly discussed, especially in the last decade. The social, ideological, religious and cultural dissonances present in today’s Israel/Palestine are important contributing factors behind this intractable conflict. Some of these disparities are closely linked with...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi
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Journal article
Citizen archaeologists. Online collaborative research about the human past
Archaeology has a long tradition of volunteer involvement but also faces considerable challenges in protecting and understanding a geographically widespread, rapidly dwindling and ever threatened cultural resource. This paper considers a newly launched, multi-application crowdsourcing project called MicroPasts that enables both community-led and massive online contributions to high quality research...Bevan, Andrew ; Pett, Daniel ; Bonacchi, Chiara ; Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Lombraña González, Daniel …
heritage, MicroPasts, archaeology, crowd-sourcing, and citizen science
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Journal article
Crowd-sourced Archaeological Research: The MicroPasts Project
This paper offers a brief introduction to MicroPasts, a web-enabled crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding project whose overall goal is to promote the collection and use of high quality research data via institutional and community collaborations, both on- and off-line. In addition to introducing this initiative, the discussion below is a reflection... -
Editorial
Editorial: Documenting Archaeology in the Southern Levant
This spring witnessed another excavation season at Khirbet el-Maqatir, an archaeological site identified by its excavators as the biblical ‘Ai and located about 15 km north of Jerusalem. Khirbet el-Maqatir has a long history of excavations with participation of enthusiastic evangelical volunteers, led and sponsored in recent years by the...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi
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Journal article
Crowd-sourcing the British Bronze Age: Initial Experiences and Results from the MicroPasts Project
Neal Ascherson (2002) has argued that some nations are ‘tidy with their past’, while others leave theirs ‘unsorted’ for ‘scavengers [to] wander, pulling up interesting fragments’ (Ibid., vii). Ascherson reassures us that the latter attitude is nothing to be ashamed of, given that the lack of a ‘commanding ‘story’ which...Wilkin, Neil ; Bevan, Andrew ; Bonacchi, Chiara ; Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Pett, Daniel …
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Journal article
Collective Re-Excavation and Lost Media from the Last Century of British Prehistoric Studies
There are thousands of forgotten archaeological archives hidden away in repositories all over the world, lost worlds where many scholars have toiled away for years, trying to record every detail and bit of information available about rare and precious archaeological objects in an attempt to bring order and understanding to...Wexler, Jennifer ; Bevan, Andrew ; Bonacchi, Chiara ; Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Pett, Daniel …
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Journal article
Experiments in Crowd-funding Community Archaeology
This article reviews existing case studies in the ‘crowd-funding’ of community archaeology, as well as offering preliminary results from a small-scale experiment conducted alongside the wider crowd-sourcing efforts of the MicroPasts project (http://micropasts.org). In so-doing, it also considers the possible role of a hybrid reward- and donation-based model for micro-financing... -
Journal article
Digitising the British Library’s collection of Hebrew manuscripts: Challenges and insights
The British Library’s collection of Hebrew manuscripts is one of the most significant in the world. Funded by The Polonsky Foundation, the Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project has been digitising 1,250 manuscripts since 2013, in line with the Library’s commitment to digitisation and opening up access to its collections. The main...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Lewis, Miriam
British Library, the Polonsky Foundation, digitisation, project workflow, Hebrew manuscripts, and digital scholarship
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Journal article
Multiple inventories and divided archaeology in the West Bank: An assessment of databases in the Etzion Bloc
This paper presents and discusses an assessment of the scope, priorities, and coverage of existing archaeological datasets, via database comparison and on-the-ground re-survey of all accessible known sites in one region of the West Bank, the Etzion Bloc. The main goal of this survey was to assess the current inventories...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi
inventory, database, West Bank, assessment, and Israel/Palestine
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Journal article
Popular History in the Black British Press: Edward Scobie’s Tropic and Flamingo, 1960-64
This article uses Edward Scobie, the Dominican-born journalist and historian, as an entry point for recovering histories of the Black British press and popular history. Examining two commercial Black magazines from the early 1960s, Tropic and Flamingo, it identifies the political utility of Black British history. Reflecting on presentist and...Oppenheim, Naomi
reparative, magazines, post-war Britain, 1960s, temporalities, Black history, and Caribbean
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Journal article
From Print to Digital: First Steps in Collecting Digital Music Publications in UK Legal Deposit Libraries
As a result of the 2013 Non-Print Legal Deposit Regulations, the UK’s legal deposit libraries acquired two large collections of digital music publications in PDF format: 43,165 from Music Sales and 13,167 from Faber Music. These constitute their back catalogues for the period 2013 to 2018. This paper considers the...Roper, Amelie
legal deposit, Music Sales, digital music publications, and Faber Music
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Journal article
MPs on the Subject of STEMM: What Can Oral History Tell Us?
A growing collection of archived oral history interviews with former MPs offers historians new opportunities to study the influences that have directed MPs’ routes into elected office and their behaviour in the House of Commons. This article draws on evidence in the interviews to consider the extent to which an...Ledgerwood, Emmeline
science, maths, medicine, committee, occupation, technology, engineering, oral history, and MP
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Journal article
Understanding multispectral imaging of cultural heritage: Determining best practice in MSI analysis of historical artefacts
Although multispectral imaging (MSI) of cultural heritage, such as manuscripts, documents and artwork, is becoming more popular, a variety of approaches are taken and methods are often inconsistently documented. Furthermore, no overview of the process of MSI capture and analysis with current technology has previously been published. This research was...Jones, Cerys ; Duffy, Christina ; Gibson, Adam ; Terras, Melissa
workflow, best practice, digitization, cultural heritage imaging, advanced imaging analysis, and multispectral imaging
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Journal article
Knowledge management and information management: A tale of two siblings
Confusion has long existed between knowledge management (KM) and information management (IM). To the uninitiated, the difference between KM and IM is unclear – largely because there are no universally accepted definitions of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’. But the confusion is not limited to the uninitiated. KM and IM specialists argue...Payne, Judy ; Fryer, Jonathan
knowledge and information management confusion, KM, IM, information management, and knowledge management
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Journal article
A Survey of the Art Works Connected to Adam Gumpelzhaimer with Revelations about his _Compendium musicae_
This study contains the first detailed survey of the art works connected to the influential Augsburg _Kantor_, composer, teacher and music theorist Adam Gumpelzhaimer (1559–1625) and demonstrates that they are much more plentiful and widespread than previously realized. For instance, this survey examines nineteen portraits of Gumpelzhaimer whereas only four...Charteris, Richard
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Journal article
Development and mining of a database of historic European paper properties
A database of historic paper properties was developed using 729 samples of European origin (1350–1990), analysed for acidity, degree or polymerisation (DP), molecular weight of cellulose, grammage, tensile strength, as well as contents of ash, aluminium, carbonyl groups, rosin, protein, lignin and fibre furnish. Using Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and...Strlič, Matija ; Liu, Yun ; Lichtblau, Dirk Andreas ; De Bruin, Gerrit ; Knight, Barry …
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Journal article
MARC transformed: MARC and XML – the perfect partnership?
I first met a very British version of MARC (Machine Readable Cataloguing) in 1983, straight out of university. I didn't know anything about cataloguing, indexing, classification, or data. MARC made sense of it all. AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition) was impenetrable without MARC as a framework. LCSH (Library of...Rosie, Heather
MarcEdit, LCSH, EThOS, Dublin Core, TDM, XML, MARC Report, metadata, MARC 21, MARC, OAI-PMH, and AACR2
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Journal article
UK theses and the British Library EThOS service: from supply on demand to repository linking
This paper aims to describe the transition of EThOS, the British Library’s E-Theses Online service, from its original role as a transactional document supply service to the service seen today where it forms part of the UK’s network of institutional repositories, open access and still-developing research funder mandates.Gould, Sara
Doctoral research, Theses, Open access, and PhD
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Journal article
A Season of Place: Teaching Digital Mapping at the British Library
One of the British Library Digital Scholarship team’s core purposes is to deliver training to Library staff. Running since 2012, the main aim of the Digital Scholarship Training Program (DSTP) is to create opportunities for staff to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to support emerging areas of scholarship. Recently,...Keinan-Schoonbaert, Adi ; Rees, Gethin
training, access, British Library, Digital Scholarship, and digital mapping
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Journal article
‘And since that time has never been heard of…’ The forgotten boys of the sea: Marine Society merchant sea apprentices, 1772–1873
The supply of child labour during Britain’s industrial revolution conjures mental imagery of destitute children toiling in mines and mills, but in recent years, historians have demonstrated that children worked in many nooks and crannies of the economy, not just the highly visible new industries. The shipping industry was a...Withall, Caroline
maritime apprenticeship, Marine Society, indentures, child labour, merchant shipping, apprenticeship, and merchant seamen
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Journal article
Feasibility Study Into the Reporting of Research Information at a National Level Within the UK Higher Education Sector
This article presents the key findings of feasibility and scoping study into the reporting of research information at a national level within the United Kingdom, based on Common European Research Information Format (CERIF). The study was carried out by the Jisc-funded UK Research Information Shared Service (UKRISS) project. The reporting...Waddington, Simon ; Sudlow, Allan ; Walshe, Karen ; Scoble, Rosa ; Mitchell, Lorna …
CRIS, UKRISS, CERIF, research information, feasibility study, and Jisc
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Journal article
Innovations in Learning and Teaching in Academic Libraries: Alignment, Collaboration, and the Social Turn
Academic libraries are central to the learning, teaching and research enterprise of their institutions. As emphasised by Brophy (2005, p. 216) “Academic libraries are here to enable and enhance learning in all its forms – whether it be the learning of a first year undergraduate coming to terms with what...Corrall, Sheila ; Jolly, Liz
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Journal article
Libraries and the REF: how do librarians contribute to research excellence?
Librarians support research in a wide variety of ways. However, librarians may not always receive recognition for the valuable contributions they make to the research life cycle or research environments. In higher education institutions (HEIs), librarians face competition from other professional support services in addition to external organizations and suppliers....Walker, Dominic
research impact, REF, library, leadership, open research, and research assessment
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Journal article
The 28th International Conference on the History of Cartography, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 14–19 July 2019
After 30 years the International Conference on the History of Cartography (ICHC) returned to Amsterdam for the 28th meeting entitled ‘Early Maps, Modern Perspectives. Understanding Early Maps in the Twenty-First Century’. In fact, there was no better time for the ICHC to come back to this city renowned for its...Peszko, Magdalena ; Doll, Andrew
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Journal article
Exploring Models for Shared Identity Management at a Global Scale: The Work of the PCC Task Group on Identity Management in NACO
The paper discusses the efforts of the PCC Task Group on Identity Management in NACO to explore and advance identity management activities. The Task Group’s work serves as a recent example of how the Program for Cooperative Cataloging has engaged the metadata community to incubate practical solutions to the perennial...Stalberg, Erin ; Riemer, John ; MacEwan, Andrew ; Liss, Jennifer A. ; Ilik, Violeta …
identity management, authority control, linked library data, and bibliographic maintenance
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Journal article
The European Documentation Centre at the British Library: An Appraisal of the Last Year
Since July 2007 the British Library (BL) has housed a European Documentation Centre (EDC). Now, on its second anniversary it is possible to take a moment and reflect on the successes of the last year for one of the newer EDCs in the Europe Direct network. The basic purpose of...Jenkins, Jeremy
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Journal article
E-journals at the British Library: from selection to access
The British Library is embracing e-technology across all aspects of its work and this article concentrates on e-journals. The Library is facing some real challenges in use of the medium from licensing issues to the question of legal deposit of electronic material, both of which are outlined in the article....Burden, Christine ; Reid, Andrea ; Sweeney, John ; Bennett, Richard ; Braid, Andrew …
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Journal article
Online Georeferencing for Libraries: The British Library Implementation of Georeferencer for Spatial Metadata Enhancement and Public Engagement
The British Library partnered with Klokan Technologies to customise the Georeferencer application for crowdsourcing of spatial metadata capture for two of its most important collections of historic mapping of Britain. This effort built upon previous work in online georeferencing and developments in metadata uses with geographical interfaces in libraries. The...Kowal, Kimberly C. ; Přidal, Petr
scanned maps, georeferencing, Georeferencer, spatial metadata, web tools, and crowdsourcing
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Journal article
Grey literature at The British Library: revealing a hidden resource
Purpose: To explore the changing nature of grey literature, the British Library collections of grey literature and the future challenges of collecting and supplying this type of material. Design/methodology/approach: This article provides an informal description of the British Library grey literature collection and views on challenges in acquiring and supplying...Tillett, Samantha ; Newbold, Elizabeth
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Journal article
Negotiating the ‘Ghanaian’ way of schooling: transnational mobility and the educational strategies of British-Ghanaian families
While scholars are increasingly interested in migrants in the Global North educating their children in their homelands, ethnographic studies of how ideas about being educated are shaped, and young people’s accounts of these transnational educational practices, remain under-researched. This paper attends to these gaps by drawing on the ethnographic cases...Abotsi, Emma
education, Ghana, children and youth, West Africa, and transnational migration
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Journal article
New Approaches to Subject Indexing at the British Library
The constantly changing metadata landscape means that libraries need to re-think their approach to standards and subject analysis, to enable the discovery of vast areas of both print and digital content. This article presents a case study from the British Library that assesses the feasibility of adopting FAST (Faceted Application...Ashton, Janet ; Kent, Caroline
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Journal article
The Anglo-American Authority File: A PCC Story
This article examines the motivations for the collaboration between the British Library and Library of Congress to develop a joint (Anglo-American) authority file. It describes the obstacles that had to be overcome for the British Library to become a Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) “copy holder”, or node. It considers the...Danskin, Alan
cataloging standards, interoperability, MARC 21 formats, cooperative cataloging, authority control, and cataloging administration/management
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Journal article
Automated Language Identification of Bibliographic Resources
This article describes experiments in the use of machine learning techniques at the British Library to assign language codes to catalog records, in order to provide information about the language of content of the resources described. In the first phase of the project, language codes were assigned to 1.15 million...Morris, Victoria
machine learning, automatic metadata generation, legacy record enhancement, metadata, and language identification
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Journal article
Henry of Blois's Gift Lists in Add. MS. 29436: Why the Discrepancies?
Folios 46v-48r of Add. MS. 29436 contain two lists of the gifts donated by Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester (1129 – 71) to his cathedral church. The shorter list post-dates Bishop Henry's death, the longer list probably belongs to the last decade of his life. This article examines the...Munns, John
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Journal article
Navigating Brave New Worlds: A Close Analysis of Anne McLaren's Laboratory Notebook
Dr Anne McLaren (1927–2007) was a leading developmental biologist with a decorated career that spanned more than fifty years. In particular, McLaren was interested in the ways in which an individual is always connected to, and a part of, its many environments. This interest led her to the study of...Moynihan, Bridget
in vitro fertilization, women in science, developmental biologist, laboratory notebook, and IVF
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Journal article
What oral historians and historians of science can learn from each other
This paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which...Merchant, Paul
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Journal article
Philip Harris: Accomplished Librarian and Acclaimed Historian of the British Museum Library
An appreciation of the life and work of the author of A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973 (London, 1998).Phillips, Andrew
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Journal article
The Reading Room in Literature
A survey of references to the Reading Rooms of the British Museum Library from its foundation in 1753 to the 1960s, with some personal memories.Harris, P. R.
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Journal article
An Overlooked Connection of Anne Boleyn's Maid of Honour, Elizabeth Holland, with BL, King's MS. 9
BL, King's MS. 9 is one of only three Books of Hours with a connection to Henry VIII's second wife, the controversial Anne Boleyn. This prayer book provides an intimate insight into Henry VIII's courtship of Anne, but its historical significance does not end here. It has been hitherto overlooked...Zupanec, Sylwia Sobczak
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Journal article
Scribes, Kings, and a Roll Chronicle: Dating and Provenance of British Library, Add. MS. 30029
Created in a period of political transition, as England moved from the end of Henry III’s reign towards that of Edward I, British Library Add. MS. 30079 is an important witness to the historical events of the late thirteenth century. This manuscript was one of the first chronicle rolls written...Bellato, Giulia
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Journal article
A Fragmentary Draft as the Groundwork for Bloodthirsty 'Sir Cauline' in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: British Library, Add. MS. 39547, f. 157v
This article takes a novel approach to Thomas Percy's draft on 'Sir Cauline' in his ballad collection Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which is stored in the British Library (Add. MS. 39547, f. 157v). Very little attention has heretofore been paid to the conflation of the draft with the romance...Mihara, Minoru
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Journal article
'I am sending herewith' – First World War Ephemera at the British Library
This article explores two guard books containing First World War ephemera (shelfmark Tab.11748.aa.4) held at the British Library that were catalogued as part of a PhD placement during the summer of 2016. It examines the acquisition of ephemera during the war, what the collection held at the British Library comprises...Foster, Ann-Marie
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Journal article
A New Witness to Henry of Avranches's Vita Sancti Oswaldi in London, British Library, Cotton MS. Faustina B. VII
Cotton MS. Faustina B. VII. contains a previously unexamined piece of parchment inscribed with several verses taken from Henry of Avranches’ Vita Sancti Oswaldi, composed c. 1230. The article highlights the value of this textual witness in relation to the transmission of the Vita and discusses the function of the...Ispir, Cristian N.
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Journal article
The Bibliographical History of The Spectator
The bibliographical history of The Spectator 1712-2016 is a list of all complete editions and extracts in English (published in England, Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies – later the United States of America) and French. It is intended to be comprehensive, but it may be that some extracts have...Bernard, Stephen
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Journal article
The Catholicon Anglicum (British Library, Add. MS. 89074): An Analysis of the Physical Evidence of its Production and Binding
On 27 February 2014, the British Library acquired the only known complete surviving copy of the Catholicon Anglicum, one of the earliest Middle English-Latin dictionaries, and thereby secured for the nation a key source for the study of English language and lexicography. The manuscript had been in the possession of...Freeman, James
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Journal article
A Collection of Georg Rhau's Music Editions and Some Previously Unnoticed Works
Georg Rhau (1488–1548) was an important figure in the Reformation, the beginning of which is celebrated in this quincentenary year. Rhau published for the famous German theologian, author and teacher Martin Luther (1483–1546) and his circle a substantial body of works, many of which enjoyed considerable popularity. A close friend...Charteris, Richard
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Journal article
The Theodore Psalter and the Rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
The Byzantine decorated psalters form a particularly rich source of knowledge about cultural life. One such manuscript is the Theodore Psalter (London, BL Add. MS 19352), which was made in Constantinople in 1066. It is one of a group of psalters that have been studied in various contexts, including that...Hennessy, Cecily
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Journal article
The Watermarks on the Northumberland Manuscript and Hand D: Research Findings and Reflections on the Shakespeare Authorship Question
Key manuscript documents relevant to the Shakespeare Authorship Question are examined for the watermarks on the paper. Manuscripts of ten contemporaries are examined, revealing that variations of a generic watermark of a pot were used by the paper manufacturers. Elements of this watermark are analysed and examples compared. This process...Casson, John
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Journal article
'The Most Bogus Ideas': Science, Religion and Creationism in the John Maynard Smith Archive
The science and religion question is one of continued interest in academia and in the non-academic public. In terms of biology, discussions almost inevitably revolve around evolution and (human) origins, contrasting Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection to the Biblical account of creation and origins in...Piel, Helen
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Journal article
Tambimuttu: Re-Inventing the Art of Poetry Illustration
M. J. T. Tambimuttu, the much maligned Ceylonese editor of Poetry London and Editions Poetry London, was in fact consistently admired at home and abroad during the Second World War. Both his periodical and books were held in high esteem by his peers for their aesthetic innovations: his judicious commissions...Boselli, Sandra
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Journal article
Disembodied: Additional MS. 8785 and the Tradition of Human Organ Depictions in Medieval Art and Medicine
While Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum – a popular medieval encyclopaedia describing the properties of ‘things’ – has attracted the attention of scholars for centuries, far less well known is the British Library’s unique copy in the Mantuan dialect. This manuscript, Additional MS. 8785, was translated by Vivaldo Belcalzer, an...McCall, Taylor
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Journal article
From West Country Farmers to W. H. Ireland, the Shakespeare Forger: The Previous Owners of Thomas Tusser's Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1599), BL, C.122.bb.40
This article examines the provenance of a rare sixteenth-century copy of Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie (Edinburgh, 1599), an agricultural manual that, unlike previous guides, was aimed at tenant farmers at the lower end of the social order. These rural farmers had relatively modest levels of literacy...Smith, Maddy
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Journal article
Nautical Charts, Texts, and Transmission: The Case of Conte di Ottomano Freducci and Fra Mauro
The article addresses an unstudied nautical chart made by Conte di Ottomano Freducci in 1529 (British Library Add. MS. 11548) which is unusual for its long and non-traditional legends (descriptive texts). Following a discussion of what we know about Freducci and a survey of all his surviving works, I supply...Duzer, Chet Van
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Journal article
The Annotated Amleth: Belleforest in the British Library
The account of Amleth in François de Belleforest’s Le Cinquiesme Livre des Histoires Tragiques is a recognized source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The British Library copy of the Lyon 1576 edition (C.8.a.5) bears various manuscript annotations which reveal an early reader’s approach to Belleforest’s text: one possible author of these annotations...Casson, John
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Journal article
J. G. Ballard's 'Elaborately Signalled Landscape': The Drafting of Concrete Island
The archive of J. G. Ballard at the British Library contains two very different draft texts for 'Concrete Island': an undated typescript substantially revised by hand, and a 'first draft screenplay' dated 20 September 1972. The screenplay is, in the author’s words on the title page, 'from the novel of...Beckett, Chris
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Journal article
The Shorthand of Robert Willis, Physician-in-Extraordinary to King George III
The shorthand used by Robert Willis in documents within the Library’s Willis Papers collection is identified as a system similar to William Fordyce Mavor’s late eighteenth-century Universal Stenography but departing from it in some key respects. Transcriptions are provided of BL, Add. MS. 41734 – Willis’s memorandum of events between...Underhill, Timothy ; Peters, Timothy
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Journal article
Provenance Confirmed for the Dismembered Breviary of the Cathedral of Agen (1297-1313): Add. MS. 42132
The Breviary of the cathedral of Agen, one of the most monumental witnesses of illumination in the South-West of France around 1300, has been dismembered and is currently preserved in four different places. The Southern French origin of these fragments is beyond doubt, but the recent history of the manuscript...Nadal, Émilie
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Journal article
The Riverside Mansions and Tombs of Agra: New Evidence from a Panoramic Scroll Recently Acquired by The British Library
The riverfront at Agra once formed one of the great sights of Mughal India. As well as the fort and the Taj Mahal, both banks of the River Yamuna were lined with great mansions, palatial garden houses and imperial gardens. When the Mughal capital was moved the Delhi in 1648,...Koch, Ebba ; Losty, J. P.
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Journal article
The British Library, Europeana 1914-1918 and the Memorialization of the Great War
Europeana 1914-1918 digitised a wealth of material in various formats (stories, films and historical material, manuscripts and printed items), all of which are directly related to World War I. A feature of the collection is that it brings together the holdings of cultural institutions (among them the British Library) and...Jenkins, Jeremy
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Journal article
The First Manuals of English History: Two Late Thirteenth-Century Genealogical Rolls of the Kings of England in the Royal Collection
The reign of Edward I (1272-1307) witnessed the creation of numerous genealogical rolls of the kings of England from Egbert to the reigning king, initially in Latin (for instance BL, Add. MS. 30079), but then more often in Anglo-Norman. As Thomas Wright first intuited in 1872, these much innovative aide-mémoire...Laborderie, Olivier de
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Journal article
Sloane's Portuguese Books
This article aims to systematize and briefly analyse the collection of books printed at Portuguese presses which once belonged to Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753). Portuguese books (or Portuguese printing) are here defined as early books and other materials printed in Portugal (including overseas territories during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth...Costa, Júlio
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Journal article
'Handsomely bound in cloth': UK Book Cover Designs 1840-1880
A review of the many varied cover designs made for cloth trade bindings, with reference to signed cover designs, together with a review of online resources for the further study of these.King, Edmund M. B.
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Journal article
Henry VIII and British Library, Royal MS. 2 A. XVI: Marginalia in King Henry's Psalter
The book which Henry VIII most heavily annotated is the manuscript Psalter Royal MS 2 A XVI held in the British Library. This note records and comments on one previously overlooked feature - the omission of numerous verses from Psalm 77. It also records the findings of a more detailed...Christie-Miller, Ian
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Journal article
The Only Early English Translation of Giovanni Botero's Della ragion di stato: Richard Etherington and Sloane MS. 1065
Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) was an extremely popular Italian author of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. His works were translated into a number of languages and saw many editions. One of his most famous works, the Della Ragion di Stato (1589), was particularly popular in Europe. This response to...Trace, Jamie
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Journal article
'I Have Neither Interest nor Eloquence Sufficient to Prevaile': The Duke of Shrewsbury and the Politics of Succession during the Reign of Anne
On 13 April 1710 Queen Anne deprived the marquess of Kent of the office of lord chamberlain and appointed in his stead Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury. Many have seen in this event the opening salvo in Robert Harley's assault on the ministry of the duumvirs, Godolphin and Marlborough, which...Eagles, Robin