JISC

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This project represents an innovative public-private partnership between the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and ProQuest a leading publisher of electronic educational resources. The project aimed to deliver online approximately 65,000 complete items (equivalent to about 170,000 images) drawn from the Bodleian's John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, thereby broadening access to a vast range of original source material which documents various aspects of everyday life in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Executive Summary

John de Monins Johnson, initially a papyrologist and then Printer to the University of Oxford, assembled his collection from about 1923 until his death in 1956. He was visionary in his preservation of our vulnerable paper heritage, believing that printed ephemera – items which were purposely created to be short-lived and disposable – would have historical value as documentary evidence. Housed in the Bodleian Library since 1968, the Collection is recognised as one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world and certainly the most significant single collection of its kind in the UK. It comprises about 1.5 million items, sub-divided into different subject sections, from which material selected for inclusion in the project includes a wide array of different types of printed document; posters and handbills for theatrical and non-theatrical entertainments, broadsides relating to murders and executions, book and journal prospectuses, popular topographical prints, and a wealth of different kinds of advertising material. Until recently, however, it had only been possible to make these materials available to a relatively small number of scholars owing to both geographical and physical constraints and the fragility of many of the items themselves.

Over a two-year period from spring 2007, project staff at the Bodleian and ProQuest created detailed and extensive catalogue records for this material, applied modern conservation techniques as necessary, digitised the complete items to the highest standard, and developed a sophisticated online resource through which to deliver both the digital surrogates and their associated metadata with a range of advanced functionalities. The John Johnson Collection: an Archive of Printed Ephemera launched in March 2008 with iterative content releases scheduled until autumn 2009, now provides invaluable access to this rare and often unique primary source material for researchers interested in printing, typography and the histories of consumption, leisure, gender, commerce, technology, crime and other areas of social and popular culture. It is freely available to all UK Higher and Further Education institutions, schools and public libraries, and available by institutional purchase or subscription overseas. Additional learning support materials such as essays and a project blog have been developed, while consideration has also been given to the implementation of Web 2.0 functionality post-project.

The digitisation of a significant cross-section of the John Johnson Collection has proved to be an effective means of providing direct access to this rare and largely under-used source material, and has served to confirm that the full richness and value of such material – its ability to provide a unique insight into aspects of daily life in the past – only becomes truly apparent when researchers are able to explore it online.

Report available electronically only