Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads

The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads is a digitization project undertaken by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, which has a collection of 30,000 broadsides with printed ballads from the 16th-20th c. If I'm reading the website correctly, they have actually scanned all 30,000 broadsides in addition to putting the catalog of broadside ballads online. The Bodleian owns the copyright to these images and sets out some very specific rules governing their use. Only one printed copy per person can be made without special permission and a fee, even for non-commercial use. Hypertext links to an image are OK, but the image itself may not be incorporated within any online document. This is "to protect the integrity of the image"- each image is also labeled at the bottom with a copyright mark and reference number, which makes it easier to detect unauthorized use.

The scanned image of each broadside is initially displayed as a small picture next to a catalog number, a brief description of the broadside and the first few lines of the ballad. It's necessary to use the zoom function to actually see the page itself. These scans are pretty raw-looking, with all of the wrinkles and blotches of the original object, but they're definitely readable and the woodcut illustrations that accompany a lot of the broadsides are easy to see. I'm not sure whether they scanned the actual broadsides or scanned microfilmed facsimiles of them- the wording in the project description is kind of unclear. Most images are bitonal, were scanned at 400 dpi, and are displayed at 180 dpi. A few of the ballads are printed with musical notation. These are accompanied by MIDI files that play the ballad's tune (on solo piano).

The cataloging metadata compiled for this project is amazing. It's possible to search for items by title, first line, subject, author, publisher, date, reference number (shelfmark) and more. The individual woodcut illustrations have been classified by subject using the ICONCLASS image classification system. ICONCLASS is a visual art thesaurus/classfication system that describes content only. For example, individual woodcuts might be described according to the themes, settings and/or people depicted. It's also possible to browse trees and hierarchies in ICONCLASS. The Broadside Ballads digitization and cataloging project started in 1995, and it took about four years- it looks like the website was created in 1999. The scope of this project is really incredible. I guess it goes to show what a really elite cultural institution with lots of money can do.