JISC

Summary

Broadside ballads, printed cheaply on one side of a sheet of paper from the earliest days of printing, contain song-lyrics, tunes and woodcut illustrations and bear news, prophecies, histories, moral advice, religious warnings, political arguments, satire, comedy and bawdy tales. Sold in large numbers on street-corners, in town-squares and at fairs by travelling ballad-singers and pinned on the walls of alehouses and other public places, they were sung, read and viewed with pleasure by a wide audience, but have been handed-down to us in only small numbers.

The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford holds nearly 30,000 songs, many of them unique survivals, printed from the 16th to the 20th Centuries, accessible online since 1999 through an existing Bodleian Broadside Ballads database (www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads). Whilst still the largest digital collection of broadside ballads, it has joined by other initiatives which this project now aims to connect. The English Broadside Ballad Archive based in the Early-Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara specialises in ballads of the 17th century and provides full-text transcriptions, as well as images and catalogue records, of over 4,000 ballads. The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, based at the English Folk Song and Dance Society Society headquartered at Cecil Sharp House in London, maintains the Roud Broadside Index of references to songs which appeared on broadsides, chapbooks, songsters, and other cheap print publications, up to about 1920.

Objectives

Integrating Broadside Ballads Archives aims to improve public access to and understanding of the rich musical, literary, visual and cultural traditions embodied by the broadside ballad. It aims to further cooperation in the description and understanding of broadside ballads among institutions holding ballads and between scholars and students of traditional music and the history of the print trade. It will raise the profile of the broadside ballad form within teaching and research and among practitioners of printing and traditional music. It will innovate in methods of displaying ballads online to these user-groups and enhance their interpretation.

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes

The project will connect the two largest digital archives of broadside ballads (Bodleian and UCSB) and allow cross-searching via an open semantic cataloguing standard, which will be published. The project will develop the Roud Database of references to the broadside and song traditions as an interoperable resource and link it to the Bodleian ballads catalogue. Records for Bodleian ballads will become discoverable and reusable through persistent URLs and enhanced metadata. The project will develop state-of-the art digital image recognition technology developed at the University of Oxford’s Department of Engineering to provide a new way of browsing broadside ballads’ illustrative traditions.