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2024
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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2023
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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2023
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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2023
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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2022
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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2023
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2024
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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2020
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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2014
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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2011
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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2014
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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2023
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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2022
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... -
2023
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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2023
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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2022
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... -
2022
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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2022
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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2022
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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2022
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... -
2022
Journal article
Beethoven Exhibition at the British Library
Ridgewell, Rupert
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2022
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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2022
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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2022
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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2022
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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2019
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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2022
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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2022
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2018
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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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2021
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.
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2021
Journal article
Trusting in God: Religious Inscriptions on Malay Seals
Malay seals – which can be defined as seals from Southeast Asia with inscriptions in Arabic script – date from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and originate from all parts of Nusantara. The inscriptions on Malay seals serve to identify the seal owner through his (or her) name or...Gallop, Annabel Teh
Malay seals, sigillography, Islamic seals, and religious inscriptions
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2020
Journal article
Information School academics and the value of their personal digital archives
Introduction: This paper explores the value that academics in an information school assign to their digital files and how this relates to their personal information management and personal digital archiving practices. Method: An interpretivist qualitative approach was adopted with data from in-depth interviews and participant-led tours of their digital storage...Drosopoulou, Loukia ; Cox, Andrew M.
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2020
Journal article
In Consideration of Our Mutual Relationship with Cats
Felis catus, the only domesticated species of cat in the family Felidae, flourishes on every continent except Antarctica. Able to thrive in almost any climate and habitat, it is among the world's most invasive species. Current estimates of the global cat population, including pet, stray, and feral cats, range from...Breedlove, Byron ; Igunma, Jana
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2021
Journal article
Archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data: Challenges and opportunities with curating the UK web archive
In this contribution, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges arising from memory institutions' need to redefine their archival strategies for contemporary collecting in a world of big data. We will reflect on this topic by critically examining the case study of the UK Web Archive, which is made up...Bingham, Nicola Jayne ; Byrne, Helena
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2021
Journal article
Can I believe what I see? Data visualisation and trust in the humanities
Questions of trust are increasingly important in relation to data and its use. The authors focus on humanities data and its visualisation, through analysis of their own recent projects with museums, archives and libraries internationally. Their account connects the specifics of hands-on digital humanities work to larger epistemological questions. They...Boyd Davis, Stephen ; Vane, Olivia ; Kräutli, Florian
scepticism, critical design, interdisciplinarity, ethics, digital humanities, interrogability, data visualisation, and GLAM
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2020
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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2018
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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2018
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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2020
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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2021
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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2020
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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2021
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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2021
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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2014
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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2014
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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2014
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... -
2015
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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2015
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... -
2016
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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2020
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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2020
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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2020
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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2020
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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2020
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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2021
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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2020
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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2020
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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2016
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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2020
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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2013
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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2020
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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2020
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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2019
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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2019
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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2009
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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2001
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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2012
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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2006
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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2019
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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2017
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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2019
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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2019
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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2019
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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2019
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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2019
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2019
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2019
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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2019
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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2019
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.