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Journal article
Collecting Revolution: George Thomason and the ‘Thomason Tracts’
The approximately 24,000 pamphlets, manuscripts and newspapers collected by the London bookseller George Thomason are an invaluable source for the study of the political events of 1640 to 1663. This introduction surveys the articles, based on a conference held at the British Library, which are brought together in eBLJ 2023.Peacey, Jason
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Journal article
Working at scale: what do computational methods mean for research using cases, models and collections?
Open access, peer-reviewed article published in Science Museum Group Journal, as part of a double-length special issue for the AHRC TaNC discovery project, 'Congruence Engine'. The article gives a critical overview of how 'scale' operates as a keyword within computational humanities as well as reviewing a number of cognate fields,...Wilson, Daniel C S
machine learning, AI for GLAM, STS, scale, computational humanities, history, and congruence engine
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Journal article
Data Analysis and Network Visualisation as Tools for Curating Hybrid Correspondence Archives
This pilot project uses data analytics in Python and network analysis in Gephi to interrogate the ways in which digital and analogue correspondence files (letters and e-mails) function within the Archive of Harold Pinter; reflecting upon what these patterns might mean for archivists, curators and researchers working with hybrid correspondence...Mckean, Callum
visualisations, data science, hybrid archives, and Harold Pinter
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Journal article
Challenging legacies at the British Library
The British Library established a corporate Anti-Racism Project (2020) designed to encourage participation via six subgroups, with staff recommendations incorporated into “Enacting Change”, the Library's Race Equality Action Plan (2022). The research and recommendations of the Cataloguing and Metadata subgroup fed into a pilot project proposed as a proof of...Danskin, Alan
Caribbean, anti-racism, South Asia, Cataloguing, and Metadata
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Journal article
Kaitiakitanga: Utilising Māori Holistic Conservation in Heritage Institutions
It is imperative that heritage institutions deal with the legacies of colonialism within their collections, the way this material is retained, preserved, displayed and interpreted, and the impact that this will have on local and global audiences. Failing to do so risks such organisations being perceived as the beneficiaries of...Nolan, Scott Ratima
empowerment, Māori, collections, custodianship, inclusion, and Kaitiakitanga
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Journal article
Current Issues with Cataloging Printed Music: Challenges Facing Staff and Systems
This paper explores the challenges currently faced by music cataloguers, with particular regard to their training and the systems they work with. It asks whether music catalogers feel they have enough support and training to do their work; it investigates the skills they require, and how they might be taught....Fisher, Meg ; Rafferty, Pauline
cataloging printed music, cataloging training, and Cataloging research
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Journal article
Deconstruction and ‘Re-Volumization’: The Thomason Collection in the Past, Present, and Future
The Thomason Tracts that arrived at the British Museum as the gift of George III were in a rigorous chronological order, which was mirrored by Thomason’s own twelve-volume manuscript catalogue. Though Thomason boasted that by means of the catalogue even a single sheet could be found ‘instantly’, even more important...Mendle, Michael
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Journal article
From The Queen’s College to Montagu House: The History of the Thomason Tracts after the Restoration
Although the Thomason collection is rightly regarded as one of the treasures of the British Library, its survival was by no means inevitable. This chapter revisits the convoluted history of its fortunes after Thomason ceased collecting in 1661, shedding new light upon his own hopes and expectations regarding its fate,...Stoker, David
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Journal article
Scattered about the Streets: George Thomason’s Annotations and Ephemeral Print during the English Revolution
Thomason is rightly famous for his tendency to annotate individual pamphlets, and his notes have long been exploited by scholars in order to trace his connections with various authors, to contextualise individual items, and to enhance our appreciation of writers and the debates in which they participated. This chapter subjects...Peacey, Jason
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Journal article
Milton’s Sonnet XIV and the poetry of George Thomason
It has long been recognised that Thomason was well connected, and that his friends included men like John Milton. This essay uses the sonnet that Milton wrote in honour of Thomason’s wife as the springboard for a discussion of a neglected aspect of the Thomason tracts: its poetry. It thus...Nevitt, Marcus
Thomason Tracts, George Thomason, Catharine Thomason, and John Milton
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Journal article
The Politics and Meaning of Thomason’s Tracts
This article takes as its starting point the reputation of Thomason's collection as royalist in orientation. It examines whether Thomason’s collection reflects 1640s and 1650s press output more broadly - offering a quantitative account of this - and whether the items he chose to purchase, and those he did not,...Raymond, Joad
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Journal article
The Thomason Tracts and Presbyterian Mobilization
This chapter uses the Thomason Tracts as a collection, as well as the partisan attitudes of Thomason himself, to assess the use of print in the bitter conflicts that divided parliamentarians in the 1640s. It compares the stress on division revealed in printed accounts of two particularly fraught episodes in...Hughes, Anne
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Journal article
Search and Seize: Partisan Publishers and Press Controls in Thomason’s London
The Thomason collection is recognised as being vital for exploring the dramatic developments in print culture that accompanied the English Revolution, not least those that were made possible by the collapse of press censorship in 1641. Less widely appreciated is that it also sheds valuable light upon the attempts that...Como, David R.
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Journal article
John Hammond and the Explosion of Print in 1641: Commercial and Political Opportunities
One of the great values of Thomason’s collection of civil war tracts and newsbooks is the opportunity that it affords for analysing the nature of the print trade during a key phase of the so-called ‘print revolution’. Given the so-called ‘explosion’ of cheap print that accompanied the descent into civil...Braddick, Michael J.
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Journal article
George Thomason and London in the 1650s
Thomason’s involvement in public politics, which had been extensive during the 1640s, brought him considerable personal trouble following the execution of Charles I, an event that he clearly opposed. Like many others who had been active Presbyterians before 1649, he became an opponent of the republican regime, and this chapter...Vernon, Elliot
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Journal article
‘Honest George’: George Thomason and London during the Civil War and Revolution
Part of the fascination with Thomason is that he was more than merely a prominent bookseller who collected a vast collection of civil war pamphlets and newspapers. He was also an active participant in public life, in terms of the workings of the Stationers’ Company and in terms of political...Lindley, Keith ; Peacey, Jason
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Journal article
Cretaceous gnetalean yields first preserved plant gum
Some liquid plant exudates (e.g. resin) can be found preserved in the fossil record. However, due to their high solubility, gums have been assumed to dissolve before fossilisation. The visual appearance of gums (water-soluble polysaccharides) is so similar to other plant exudates, particularly resin, that chemical testing is essential to...Roberts, Emily A. ; Seyfullah, Leyla J. ; Loveridge, Robert F. ; Garside, Paul ; Martill, David M.
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Journal article
An investigation of weighted and degraded silk by complementary microscopy techniques
A number of silk samples, comprising historic materials and modern surrogates, were examined by light, electron and atomic force microscopy, to determine the extent to which such assessments would allow the nature and condition of the materials to be determined. The integrity of these materials had previously been investigated using...Garside, Paul ; Mills, Graham A. ; Smith, James R. ; Wyeth, Paul
silk, textiles, microscopy, atomic force microscopy, conservation, and scanning electron microscopy
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Journal article
Use of near IR spectroscopy and chemo‑metrics to assess the tensile strength of historic silk
Silk is a culturally important textile, found in many artefacts of historic significance including clothing, upholstery, banners and decorations. However, it is a fragile material and is prone to deterioration via a variety of mechanisms, particularly after certain historically common processing methods such as bleaching and weighting. Therefore it is...Garside, Paul ; Wyeth, Paul ; Zhang, Xiaomei
silk, spectroscopy, and conservation
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Journal article
Looking beneath Dalí's paint: non-destructive canvas analysis
A new analytical method was developed to non-destructively determine pH and degree of polymerisation (DP) of cellulose in fibres in 19th–20th century painting canvases, and to identify the fibre type: cotton, linen, hemp, ramie or jute. The method is based on NIR spectroscopy and multivariate data analysis, while for calibration...Oriola, Marta ; Možir, Alenka ; Garside, Paul ; Campo, Gema ; Nualart-Torroja, Anna …
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Journal article
A Gold Girdle Book and its Connection with Anne Boleyn
The miniature prayer book with the shelfmark Stowe MS. 956 has long attracted attention because of a story associating it with Anne Boleyn. According to an oft-repeated account, this tiny girdle book with a gold metalwork binding was handed by Anne to one of her maids of honour on the...Jackson, Eleanor
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Journal article
AI training resources for GLAM: a snapshot
We take a snapshot of current resources available for teaching and learning AI with a focus on the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) community. The review was carried out in 2021 and 2022. The review provides an overview of material we identified as being relevant, offers a description of... -
Journal article
Italian Futurist Books (1909-1944) at the British Library
The Futurist book was instrumental in the circulation of Futurist ideas and represents a very experimental phase in book production, paving the way for the book object, the artist’s book, advertising and design. The purpose of this article is to produce a survey of the Italian Futurist collections held at...Mirabella, Valentina
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Journal article
The London Stage 1660-1800: A Short History, Retrospective Anatomy, and Projected Future
The London Stage, 1660-1800, a day-by-day performance calendar spanning 140 years, was for its time a magnificent achievement published in eleven volumes (1960-1968 [recte 1970]) running to 1058 pages of introductory matter and 7182 pages of text, plus 672 pages of volume indexes. A one-volume cumulative index compiled from scratch...Hume, Robert D.
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Journal article
Discovering the local in national cultural heritage collections. How web maps can help the UK public engage with their ‘own places’
Identity is a critical influence on the public’s engagement with cultural heritage. This article emphasises the role of geographical scale in this relationship examining how the presentation of local heritage can foster meaningful engagement with collections. The geographical information embedded in digital collections – such as where objects were made... -
Journal article
The New Media Writing Prize Special Collection
This article introduces the New Media Writing Prize (NMWP) special collection (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/en/ukwa/collection/2912) created on behalf of the six UK Legal Deposit Libraries and hosted by the UK Web Archive. It is divided into two sections, presenting the perspectives of the archivists and the organizers of the prize respectively. The first...Rossi, Giulia Carla ; Pyke, Tegan ; Pope, James ; Skains, R. Lyle ; Wisdom, Stella
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Journal article
Facts, Fictions, and Fascism: A Life of Actor Mary Taviner (1909-1972)
Despite an acting career spanning both silent film and talkies, as well as London and regional theatre, Mary Taviner was not a household name. In fact she attracted more press coverage for her political views, being an active fascist from the 1930s to the 1960s. She fell in with, and...St John-McAlister, Michael
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Journal article
Sir Hans Sloane’s Books: Seventy Years of Research
The library of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), became one of the foundations of the British Museum, but was dispersed among other collections within the Museum, and for over 250 years it has not been possible to view it as a whole. The Sloane Printed Books Project aims to provide a...Walker, Alison
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Journal article
A Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers
We present a new dataset for the task of toponym resolution in digitized historical newspapers in English. It consists of 343 annotated articles from newspapers based in four different locations in England (Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Poole and Dorchester), published between 1780 and 1870. The articles have been manually annotated with mentions... -
Journal article
Beethoven Exhibition at the British Library
Ridgewell, Rupert
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Journal article
The International Standard Name Identifier: extending identity management across the global metadata supply chain
This article describes how ISNI is being adopted as a common identifier across disparate sectors of publishing. Whether publishing and distributing recorded music, film or text ISNI is making good identity management a staple element in the global metadata supply chain. As the content creation industries become more engaged with...MacEwan, Andrew
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Journal article
Orwell’s Political Pamphlet ‘Solar System’: A Network Interpretation of a British Library Collection
This article examines the network of publishers, authors and topics included in George Orwell’s Collection of Political Pamphlets at the British Library (shelfmark 1899.ss.1-49.), some of which were catalogued as part of a Ph.D. placement in 2019. It explores how the pamphlets came to be held at the British Library,...Treacher, Claudia
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Journal article
American Political Pamphlets 1917-1945 at the British Library
The twentieth century was a golden age of pamphleteering in America, especially during the period between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the conclusion of the Second World War in 1945. Pamphlets were vital tools for radical organizations in educating and communicating with their own members and persuading the public...Collins, Jodie
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Journal article
Selected English Masonic Bookbindings
Books as artefacts, as well as the texts that they contain, play a fundamental role in English freemasonry. The esteem in which they were held is shown in paintings. This detail comes from a portrait of freemason Dr Robert Crucefix (1797-1850) who is shown with significant items of regalia as...Marks, P. J. M.
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Journal article
Author of his own fate? The eighteenth-century writings of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo
The life of Ayuba Sulayman Diallo (also known as Job ben Solomon) receives a fresh examination in this article, based primarily on his own writings. The son of an Imam from Bundu in Senegambia, Diallo was enslaved in 1731 and transported to America. He survived to gain his freedom, make...Naylor, Paul ; Wallace, Marion
Atlantic World, biography, Islam , scholarship, Senegal , Senegambia , slave narratives, West Africa , emancipation, slavery, archives, and Gambia
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Journal article
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 as a Source for Florentine/Pisan University History
British Library Additional Manuscript 8537 contains a selection of statutes related to the university of Florence and Pisa from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The manuscript was originally produced to specifically document rulings between the institution and Florentine government, suggesting it may have been a personal vademecum of...Rossi, Elena
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Journal article
A Sense of Place: The ‘London’ Cityscapes of BL, Royal MS. 13 A. III
The British Library, Royal MS. 13 A. III, containing a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, was likely produced in southeast England in or around London between the late thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The only manuscript with an extended series of illustrations,...Chunko-Dominguez, Betsy
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Journal article
‘The Great Bowyer Bible’: Robert Bowyer and the Macklin Bible
This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758‐1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of...Billingsley, Naomi
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Journal article
Covid-19 and the Future of the Digital Shift amongst Research Libraries: An RLUK Perspective in Context
Research Libraries UK is a consortium of 37 of the UK and Ireland’s largest research libraries with the purpose of convening its members around the key issues that affect them, to represent their collective voice, to support them as they face shared challenges, and to be an effective advocate on...Baxter, Guy ; Beard, Lorraine ; Beattie, Gavin ; Blake, Michelle ; Greenhall, Matthew …
library services, library space, academic libraries, Covid-19 pandemic, and digital shift
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Journal article
MapReader: A Computer Vision Pipeline for the Semantic Exploration of Maps at Scale
We present MapReader, a free, open-source software library written in Python for analyzing large map collections (scanned or born-digital). This library transforms the way historians can use maps by turning extensive, homogeneous map sets into searchable primary sources. MapReader allows users with little or no computer vision expertise to i)...Hosseini, Kasra ; Wilson, Daniel C.S. ; Beelen, Kaspar ; McDonough, Katherine
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Journal article
Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English
We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance...Hosseini, Kasra ; Beelen, Kaspar ; Colavizza, Giovanni ; Coll Ardanuy, Mariona
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Journal article
Babbage among the insurers: Big 19th-century data and the public interest
This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of...Wilson, Daniel C.S.
big data, Thomas Rowe Edmonds, Charles Babbage, public interest, and insurance
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Journal article
The Spiral-Locked Letters of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
This article presents evidence about the use of the ‘spiral lock’, a highly secure letterlocking mechanism used by Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and other letter-writers in early modern Europe, to secure their correspondence shut. After explaining the concept of letterlocking, a centuries-old communication security technique, we demonstrate how...Dambrogio, Jana ; Smith, Daniel Starza ; Pellecchia, Jennifer ; Wiggins, Alison ; Clarke, Andrea …
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Journal article
A Transcription and Translation of Sloane MS. 2131, Robert Ashley’s (1561-1641) Vita: with Additional Biographical Details
British Library Sloane MS. 2131, Vita, is an autobiography written in Latin by Robert Ashley (1565-1641), bibliophile, lawyer, and translator. Ashley bequeathed his collection of approximately 5000 books to establish a library at Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court. This is the first full transcription and translation...Kelser, Astrid ; Nelson, Jennifer K. ; Satterley, Renae
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Journal article
The Alice N. Hays Notebook: A Tour of Early Twentieth-Century Library Methods in the UK and Europe
In the summer of 1909, Stanford librarian Alice Newman Hays embarked on a journey to visit libraries across England and Europe, compiling a record of cataloguing practices to share with her colleagues back in California. Among the stops on Alice's journey were prestigious institutions like the Bodleian Library and British...Jordan, Jessica Camille
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Journal article
Hans Sloane, Samuel Pepys, and the Evidence of a Lost Pepys Library Catalogue
This article examines the relationship between Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), two celebrated book collectors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pepys's and Sloane's connection is traced back to the mid 1680s and to their attendance at the Royal Society. A mysterious leaf in Sloane's papers...Loveman, Kate
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Journal article
The Formation, development and curation of the Tapling Collection at the British Museum Library in the Nineteenth Century
In 1891 Thomas Keay Tapling bequeathed his near complete, worldwide collection of stamps and postal stationery to the British Museum Library. To celebrate the 130th anniversary of this event which created the British Library's Philatelic Collections, this article provides an overview of the Tapling Collection's formation, development and early curation...Morel, Richard Scott
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Journal article
From popular to rare: Acquisition and preservation policies at the British Museum Library in Panizzi’s time
Large quantities of Italian early modern books were dispersed on a vast scale mainly from the 1760s onwards as a consequence of the decline of the local aristocracy, the French Revolution and the suppressions of religious libraries. Increasing interest in the Italian Renaissance and its historical importance strongly influenced the...Carnelos, Laura
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Journal article
The Papers of Edward Scott, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum 1888-1904
Edward Scott (1840-1918) was a member of the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum for just over forty years, 1863-1904. From 1888 until his retirement he was Keeper of Manuscripts and yet he is not as well remembered as his predecessors or successors. In 2014 the British Library acquired a small...Wright, C.J.