English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA at UCSB)

 digital archives, JISC  Comments Off
Feb 262013
 

This is the second of a two-part series on free digital archives featuring English ballads.  It follows Eleanor’s discussion of the JISC-funded Broadside Ballad Initiative at Oxford.

The University of California at Santa Barbara has created a free digital ballad collection called The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), which provides access to more than 8,000 seventeenth-century ballads.  The collection includes ballads from the Pepys Collection, the Roxburgh Collection, the Euing Collection, and the Huntington Library.  EBBA is directed by Patricia Fumerton at UCSB.  This project was supported by the N.E.H.

Individual entries provide links to  sheet facsimiles, facsimile transcriptions, and often recordings.  These features facilitate introducing students both to ballads’ visual details–ornaments, woodcuts, columned verse–and to their tunes.

Cataloging is full and includes the following:

EBBA ID: An internal identifier. Each individual ballad in the archive has a unique EBBA ID.

Title: A diplomatic transcription of the ballad title as it appears on the ballad sheet. The title consists of all ballad text before the first lines of the ballad, including verse headers but excluding text recorded elsewhere under other catalogue headings (such as the license or author, date, publisher and printer imprints).

Date Published: The year—or, in most cases, range of years—during which EBBA believes the ballad to have been published. See Dates.

Author: The recognized author of the ballad in cases where an indication of authorship has been printed on the ballad or, in the case of Pepys ballads, when Weinstein has identified an author from external sources (e.g., Wing, Rollins).

Standard Tune: The standardized name for the melody (according to Claude M. Simpson or other reliable sources). Clicking the standard tune name will return all ballads with the same melody, including alternate tune titles.

Imprint: A diplomatic transcription of the printing, publishing, and/or location information as it appears on the ballad sheet.

License: A diplomatic transcription of the licensing or permission information as printed on the ballad.

Collection: The name of the collection to which the ballad belongs. In cases where the ballad is not part of a named collection, the name of the holding library plus “miscellaneous” will appear. For example, Huntington Library ballads that are not part of a collection are grouped as “HEH Miscellaneous.”

Sheet/Page: For ballads that are collected as independent sheets, the citation page displays the word “Sheet” and lists the sheet number given to it by its holding institution (usually part of its shelfmark). For ballads bound in a book, the citation page displays the word “Page” and lists the page number within the bound volume.

Location: The name of the holding institution.

Shelfmark: The shelfmark assigned by the holding institution.

ESTC ID: The Citation Number for the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Use this number to find the full ESTC citation for any given ballad at http://estc.bl.uk/.

Keyword Categories: The keywords from EBBA’s standardized keyword list that relate to the ballad’s theme and content.

Notes: Clarify potential areas of confusion for users, such as ballads that have print on both sides of a sheet.

MARC Record: A link to our MARC-XML records

Additional Information: Information specific to each part of the ballad.

Title: Separate titles for multi-part ballads.

Tune Imprint: Tune title(s) as printed.

First Lines: A diplomatic transcription of the first two lines of the ballad text proper, below any heading information included in the title or elsewhere under other catalogue headings.

Refrain: Repeated lines at the end of or within ballad stanzas.

Condition: Description of ballad sheet damage and the current state of the sheet. (This information is from Weinstein and is currently for the Pepys collection only.)

Ornament: A list of decorations made of cast metal that appear on the ballad. Frequently used to fill empty spaces in the forme and/or to delimit parts of the ballad text, these ornaments include vertical rules, horizontal rules, and cast fleurons. (This information is from Weinstein and is currently for the Pepys collection only.)

Ballad scholars working with EEBO or ECCO will be familiar with the difficulty of finding ballads, making English Broadside Ballad Archive and Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads necessary.

Together with new printed resources, such as Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini’s Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 (Ashgate 2010) and Angela McShane’s Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (Pickering & Chatto 2011), these digital resources provide a robust and growing archive  for the systematic study of a format whose transiency may have discouraged such studies in the past.


British Newspaper Archives: Not Burney (yet), But Still Useful

 digital archives, JISC  Comments Off
Jul 072012
 

Launched this past November, the British Newspaper Archives is a joint project of the British Library and brightsolid online publishing. Over the next decade, this partnership is slated to digitize over 40 million pages of the BL’s newspaper collection. The site anticipates a wide audience that includes not only scholars but amateur historians, genealogists and more.

While the project often digitizes the original paper copies, it has also digitized from the BL’s microfilm copies because the process is faster and enables more pages to be made available in a shorter amount of time. The quality of the pages, however, does suffer as the website admits; unfortunately, this emphasis on speed means that the accuracy of the search results is forever sacrificed. That said, one can view the OCR text and correct it:

When viewing an image, the OCR text can be viewed via the left nav All Articles option. You can select an individual article and then select Show Article text and the text. This addictive option can be accessed by simply clicking the list of sections displayed and applying your own corrections. By correcting the text, you will be adding to the quality of the data that can be searched by others. Please note that during the launch period updates to corrections will take longer to appear. (“Getting Started”)

The site’s descriptive information suggests that the collection dates primarily from the nineteenth century on, but there are 24 eighteenth-century provincial newspaper titles available in the current collection (full list appears below). As of yet, there are no eighteenth-century London papers. Like Burney, the British Newspaper Archives is a subscription database. Unlike Burney, though, provisions for individual subscriptions exist. The rates also seem quite reasonable and offer an array of plans (credits refer to the number of views; each view “costs” 5 credits; the view option enables you to download or printing):

  • 12 Month Package (unlimited pages)
    Price: £79.95 GBP,       Valid For: 365 days       Credits: Unlimited*

  • 30 Day Package (up to 600 pages)
    Price: £29.95 GBP       Valid For: 30 days      Credits: 3000

  • 7 Day Package (up to 120 pages)
    Price: £9.95 GBP       Valid For: 7 days       Credits: 600

  • 2 Day Package (up to 100 pages)
    Price: £6.95 GBP       Valid For: 2 days      Credits: 500

    • Potential users are also able to register using an email address and receive 15 free credits—-a very limited trial of sorts.

    Searches can be conducted either as simple or advanced. The advanced search includes searching by “All of these words,” “Any of these words,” “Without these words,” and “Phrase.” You also have the option of applying filters such as dates, place of publication, publication title, or article type (advertisement, article, family notice, illustrated, miscellaneous). There is also the option of browsing by titles. Unfortunately, you cannot use the wildcard characters to help counteract the poor OCR, long “f,” or other typographical peculiarities that Burney provides. Nor does the BNA allow you to use Burney’s search aids such as the “w” or “n” joined by a number to find two terms within a certain proximity of one another.

    Search results can be ordered by relevance or by date (either by ascending or descending order), and a glimpse of the context in which the search term results occur are given. For example,

    Ipswich Journal
    Sat 10 Jan 1784 Suffolk, England
    5 U F F O L K. 1 0 be Ll’. TT, ant! enlered upon immediatrly, THAT olil*aeculbmed Public Honic,
    8343 Words
    “SfMON PATERNOSTER of Wickhairi-market, to be agent for the faitl company for the town of Wiek- ham.market, and parts adjacent. The company infure lioufeS, bufrdings, … ?

    As this example demonstrates, the context provides the OCR text with all its warts. Still, it helps the user decide if the article is worth viewing and assists in conserving the credits in one’s account.

    CAVEAT: During my two-day exploration of the BNA, I encountered several cases in which I clicked to view an article only to discover the article was not on that page. Five credits were still deducted from my account and continued to be deducted as I browsed other pages in the issue. Once or twice I was not able to find the result at all; other times it appeared on a different page within that issue.

    Here is a list of eighteenth-century titles currently available in BNA:

    • Aberdeen Journal (105)
    • Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (1989)
    • Birmingham Gazette (8)
    • Bristol Mercury (1)
    • Caledonian Mercury (7309)
    • Chelmsford Chronicle (329)
    • Derby Mercury (2595)
    • Hampshire Chronicle (1115)
    • Hampshire Telegraph (11)
    • Hereford Journal (982)
    • Ipswich Journal (1203)
    • Ipswich Journal, The (1296)
    • Kentish Gazette (374)
    • Leeds Intelligencer (2352)
    • Manchester Mercury (223)
    • Newcastle Courant (2561)
    • Norfolk Chronicle (1109)
    • Northampton Mercury (1625)
    • Oxford Journal (2434)
    • Reading Mercury (570)
    • Salisbury and Winchester Journal (17)
    • Scots Magazine, The (611)
    • Sherborne Mercury (256)
    • Sussex Advertiser (60)


    JISC’s Historic Books: Searching EEBO, ECCO for meaning

     EEBO, JISC, Proquest  Comments Off
    Mar 062012
     

    This past fall JISC announced a new venture, the JISC eCollections, “a new community-owned content service for UK HE and FE institutions.” What might interest EMOB readers most is its Historic Books. This digital collection contains over 300,000 books from before 1800 and also makes over 65,000 19th-century first editions from the British Library available for the first time online. The entire corpus is accessible through institutional subscription and, most welcome, searchable over a single platform.

    The pre-1800 material in the JISC Historic Books eCollection consists solely of ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) textbases, so some might wonder what this collection offers that is new for those working in the early modern period. One does not need to be in eCollections, for instance, to conduct searches simultaneously across both databases. Yet the Help page for the eCollections indicates that more than just the convenience of a single interface and platform is being offered:

    JISC Historic Books uses meaning-based searching rather than traditional keyword searching, which is why you will notice you get different results to searching EEBO and ECCO on the publishers sites. Meaning-based searching enables you to find conceptual and contexual [sic] links betweeen [sic] related documents which aren’t possible using traditional keyword searching.

    Besides returning traditional results, JISC Historic Books also delivers “meaning-based” concepts deemed relevant to the search in the form of a Concept Cloud:

    Concept Cloud

    The more prominent the word, the more relevant it is deemed to the search, and as the screenshot indicates, items in the cloud can be manipulated to narrow one’s search further.

    Over the past three or four years (and maybe longer) I have been consistently struck by the transformations that traditional searches of ECCO, Burney, EEBO, as well as Google Books have had on the ways I think about searching, construct searches, and view my results. More specifically, these keyword searches, described here as traditional, were already encouraging me to view results in a more networked, contextual way and, as a consequence, to devise additional searches aimed at teasing out new potential relationships. The meaning-based search enabled by JISC’s mimas platform, of course, is offering something quite different, but I wonder how its use might cause rethinking of what it means to search and research.

    It would be especially interesting to hear from EEBO and EECO users in the UK who have used JISC Historic Books, especially the differences between results obtained from searching using the JISC platform and those obtained by searching using the original publishers’ platform.

     


    JISC’s Historic Books: Searching EEBO, ECCO for meaning

     EEBO, JISC, Proquest  Comments Off
    Mar 062012
     

    This past fall JISC announced a new venture, the JISC eCollections, “a new community-owned content service for UK HE and FE institutions.” What might interest EMOB readers most is its Historic Books. This digital collection contains over 300,000 books from before 1800 and also makes over 65,000 19th-century first editions from the British Library available for the first time online. The entire corpus is accessible through institutional subscription and, most welcome, searchable over a single platform.

    The pre-1800 material in the JISC Historic Books eCollection consists solely of ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) textbases, so some might wonder what this collection offers that is new for those working in the early modern period. One does not need to be in eCollections, for instance, to conduct searches simultaneously across both databases. Yet the Help page for the eCollections indicates that more than just the convenience of a single interface and platform is being offered:

    JISC Historic Books uses meaning-based searching rather than traditional keyword searching, which is why you will notice you get different results to searching EEBO and ECCO on the publishers sites. Meaning-based searching enables you to find conceptual and contexual [sic] links betweeen [sic] related documents which aren’t possible using traditional keyword searching.

    Besides returning traditional results, JISC Historic Books also delivers “meaning-based” concepts deemed relevant to the search in the form of a Concept Cloud:

    Concept Cloud

    The more prominent the word, the more relevant it is deemed to the search, and as the screenshot indicates, items in the cloud can be manipulated to narrow one’s search further.

    Over the past three or four years (and maybe longer) I have been consistently struck by the transformations that traditional searches of ECCO, Burney, EEBO, as well as Google Books have had on the ways I think about searching, construct searches, and view my results. More specifically, these keyword searches, described here as traditional, were already encouraging me to view results in a more networked, contextual way and, as a consequence, to devise additional searches aimed at teasing out new potential relationships. The meaning-based search enabled by JISC’s mimas platform, of course, is offering something quite different, but I wonder how its use might cause rethinking of what it means to search and research.

    It would be especially interesting to hear from EEBO and EECO users in the UK who have used JISC Historic Books, especially the differences between results obtained from searching using the JISC platform and those obtained by searching using the original publishers’ platform.

     


    Early Music Online

     British Library, digitisation, JISC, music  Comments Off
    Oct 122011
     

    Early Music Online is a pilot project in which 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised and made freely available online. You can browse the digitised content in Royal Holloway’s digital repository.

    Excerpt from Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci, 1571

    Pages from Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci di Pietro Vinci, 1571

    You can also explore detailed descriptions of the content via the British Library Catalogue. Included are in the catalogue are full details of each digitised book, with an inventory of the contents of each, searchable by composer name, title of composition, date and subject, and with links to the digitised content. (Click ‘I want this’ in the Library catalogue to access the digitised content.)

    Full descriptions of each volume, with links to the digitised content, have also been included in the RISM UK database and COPAC, enabling researchers to locate and access this digitised content by several different means.

    You may use the digitised content on Early Music Online in any way and for any such purposes that are conducive to education, teaching, learning, private study and/or research as long as you are in compliance with the terms and conditions of our licence.

    Forthcoming Content Calls – Issues on the JISC radar

     Content, funding, JISC  Comments Off
    May 192011
     

    As noted in a previous blog post, JISC is currently writing the request for proposals for applications related to the next round of content funding.

    Over the next few days, we’ll jot down some of the issues related to each of the three strands that will go to making up the overall call.

    First off, Strand B) Large-Scale Digitisation

    Issues that applicants will need to address will include the following:

    Aggregation and Partnership

    How are applicants working with others to help create an aggregated mass of content? How are other partners helping reach audiences or deliver online experiences that univerisites working by themselves could not achieve

    Usage and Institutional Support

    How will the resource being created develop a user base that will help impact on research and teaching at a national level? Will the institution leading the project show support for the resource in the long term, embedding it in teaching and research practice.

    Access, IPR and Business Models

    What is the business model that will support the resource in the long term? Are there complex IPR issues that must be addressed early on?

    Metadata

    Will the metadata from the project be made openly available? Will metadata be easily harvestable, findable and re-usable by other sources? Will innovative methodologies like geo-tagging, natural language processing and APIs be used? Or other forms of innovative metadata creation?

    Impact and Evaluation

    Will the project have means of evaluating usage and impact embedded from the start of the project? Will they be able to react and respond to the results of such analysis once the initial project has ended?

    Update on JISC funding for digital content

     funding, JISC  No Responses »
    May 112011
     

    We’re still not in a position to give precise details on the forthcoming call for JISC digital content (and the hoped for early publication of details last month proved a little optimistic). However, we’ve been given permission to publicise the following.

    Subject to confirmation from the appropriate JISC subcommittee, there will be three strands within the JISC Digital Content call.

    A) Digitising for Open Educational Resources – digitising primary and other scholarly material for embedding in open access Open Educational Resources. Note there will also be a separate JISC OER Phase 3 programme.

    B) Large-Scale Digitisation – Creating or extending high-impact, sustainable digital resources for research and teaching, according to a variety of business models.

    C) Clustering Digital Content – Bringing together existing digital content from a variety of sources to create or extend high-impact resources for research and teaching.

    Strand B is likely to be open to any UK cultural or educational organisation who has content of note to higher and further education

    We are currently writing the Requests for Proposals.

    The call is likely to be issued in early June. It may well be joined up with calls from other areas JISC covers. Closing date is likely to be early August.

    Text Creation Partnership makes 18th century texts freely available to the public

     JISC  No Responses »
    Apr 262011
     

    This announcement is making the rounds of listservs and the like, and it should be of interest to emob readers:

    (Ann Arbor, MI—April 25, 2011) — The University of Michigan Library announced the opening to the public of 2,229 searchable keyed-text editions of books from Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). ECCO is an important research database that includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. ECCO contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. ECCO is published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.

    The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) produced the 2,229 keyed texts in collaboration with Gale, which provided page images for keying and is permitting the release of the keyed texts in support of the Library’s commitment to the creation of open access cultural heritage archives. Gale has been a generous partner, according to Maria Bonn, Associate University Librarian for Publishing. “Gale’s support for the TCP’s ECCO project will enhance the research experience for 18th century scholars and students around the world.”

    Laura Mandell, Professor of English and Digital Humanities at Miami University of Ohio, says, “The 2,229 ECCO texts that have been typed by the Text Creation Partnership, from Pope’s Essay on Man to a ‘Discourse addressed to an Infidel Mathematician,’ are gems.”

    Mandell, a key collaborator on 18thConnect, an online resource initiative in 18th century studies, says that the TCP is “a groundbreaking partnership that is creating the highest quality 18th century scholarship in digital form.”

    This announcement marks another milestone in the work of the TCP, a partnership between the University of Michigan and Oxford University, which since 1999 has collaborated with scholars, commercial publishers, and university libraries to produce scholar-ready (that is, TEI-compliant, SGML/XML enhanced) text editions of works from digital image collections, including ECCO, Early English Books Online (EEBO) from ProQuest, and Evans Early American Imprint from Readex.

    The TCP has also just published 4,180 texts from the second phase of its EEBO project, having already converted 25,355 books in its first phase, leaving 39,000 yet to be keyed and encoded. According to Ari Friedlander, TCP Outreach Coordinator, the EEBO-TCP project is much larger than ECCO-TCP because pre-1700 works are more difficult to capture with optical character recognition (OCR) than ECCO’s 18th-century texts, and therefore depend entirely on the TCP’s manual conversion for the creation of fully searchable editions.

    Friedlander explains that, for a limited period, the EEBO-TCP digital editions are available only to subscribers—ten years from their initial release—as per TCP’s agreement with the publisher. Eventually all TCP-created titles will be freely available to scholars, researchers, and readers everywhere under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark (PDM).

    Paul Courant, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, says that large projects such as those undertaken by the TCP are only possible when the full range of library, scholarly, and publishing resources are brought together. “The TCP illustrates the dynamic role played by today’s academic research library in encouraging library collaboration, forging public/private partnerships, and ensuring open access to our shared cultural and scholarly record.”

    More than 125 libraries participate in the TCP, as does the Joint Information Systems (JISC), which represents many British libraries and educational institutions.

    To learn more about the Text Creation Partnership, visit www.lib.umich.edu/tcp. To learn more about ECCO, visit http://gdc.gale.com/products/eighteenth-century-collections-online/


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