Bodleian card catalogue (The ‘Index of Literary Correspondence’)

Primary Contributors:

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and Cultures of Knowledge


Drawers containing the Bodleian card catalogue, in situ at the Selden end of Duke Humfrey’s Library. (Photograph: Miranda Lewis, 2012)

This catalogue, compiled by just three individuals over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, captures on one typed card per manuscript letter the basic metadata (for example, the names of the author and the recipient, the date the letter was written, the location it was sent from, the language it was written in, and the shelfmark required for retrieval, together with an abstract summary) for a large portion of the Bodleian Library’s holdings of early modern correspondence. Although in 1927, when work on the catalogue began, it was intended to be no more than an index to the correspondence of Thomas Hearne, subsequently it was expanded into what became known in the Library as the ‘Index of Literary Correspondence’.

 


Partners and Additional Contributors

Digitized in 2010 during the course of first phase of the Cultures of Knowledge project and made available initially in the beta version of the union catalogue, this collection of library finding-aid cards is now accessible within EMLO to researchers worldwide. The scanning and keying of the 48,817 cards represented in EMLO was supervised by Alexander Huber and Michael Popham from the Oxford Digital Library, while editorial work on the metadata was performed by the Phase I Cultures of Knowledge editors, Miranda Lewis and Kim McLean-Fiander. EMLO would like to thank Professor Richard Sharpe for his constant and invaluable advice at every stage during this undertaking.

A great deal has been learned from this process of digitization of the Bodleian card catalogue, lessons EMLO would be more than happy to share; for further information and advise about scanning, keying, and digitizing similar catalogues, please contact us.


Key Bibliographic Source(s)

Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 11 vols (Oxford Historical Society, 1885–1921).


Contents

Compiled between 1927 and 1964, the letters described in this catalogue range from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries and span 321 years. Although significant numbers of the itemized letters are scholarly in nature and were written in Latin or English and sent within the British Isles, as one might expect at the height of the early modern era vast quantities of the letters listed on the cards were dispatched to and from Europe in a myriad of languages that range from Dutch to Hebrew, German to Greek, French and Italian to Spanish.

One Bodleian staff member—Kate Pogson (1888–1968)—and two indefatigable volunteers—James Henry Hall MInn (1870–1961) and Colin Bertram Hunt (1881–1967), the former a retired member of Library staff—worked through more than 487 guardbooks in total and captured the basic metadata for a staggering 48,667 manuscript letters, together with an informative, at times expansive, and often entertaining abstract summary of each letter in English. Whilst EMLO is not able to provide images of the manuscripts, it was decided during the first phase of the Cultures of Knowledge project to mount the scans of the cards themselves within the catalogue so that these might be rendered accessible—along with their digitized and fully searchable summaries—to scholars and library users worldwide. Whilst editorial ‘tidying’ work on such a massive collection continues to this day, digitizing the cards has brought a finding aid that was previously accessible only to those with a certain type of Bodleian reader’s card to the attention of the public at large and has highlighted a number of hitherto little-known letters. It has enabled, in addition, significant keyword and content searches to be conducted.

 

Geographic Range of the letters in the catalogue

 


Geographic range of the letters sent and received in the Bodleian card catalogue.
(Visualization by Yann Ryan, Networking Archives Project, 2021)

 

Chronological Overview of the major collections described in the catalogue

 

Distribution by date of letters itemized from the larger collections within the Bodleian card catalogue.
(Visualization by Yann Ryan, Networking Archives Project, 2021)

 


Provenance

The Bodleian Library contains correspondence from a large number of epistolary collections, many compiled shortly after the date the letters themselves were written. The Library’s holdings of the Rawlinson, Tanner, Smith, Ballard, and D’Orville manuscripts are particularly well described in the cards. A forthcoming article to be published in the Bodleian Library Record will set out and explore for the first time an overview and analysis of the Library’s holdings contained in the catalogue.


Scope of Catalogue

It must be borne in mind that none of the three compilers was a trained librarian or archivist and whilst each made every attempt to create accurate records, the cards contain a number of errors and inconsistencies. A number of known issues have arisen as a result of the initial ingest process and we, at EMLO, work hard on an ongoing basis to resolve these. One such issue involves the mis-capture of the Roman calendar dates. Another is with language of the manuscript letter: with the majority of the cards, the language is English unless otherwise stated; there is, however, a small number of cards that do not have a language specified and are not in English — these need to be identified and the correct language recorded. The manifestation type is recorded in the cards is not reliable, and there is also a problem with the some of Tanner collection records: the date of the year has not been captured on the original card and this needs to be added. EMLO will be holding a number of workshops and ‘correct-a-thons’ to address these problems; should you be interested in getting involved in any way and at any stage, please be in touch to find out more.

Work to proofread and tidy the metadata is ongoing and at this point the help of scholars who consult the catalogue in the course of their own research would be appreciated greatly. Please send us your comments as they arise—each correction and addition received plays an invaluable part in this editorial process and it is with the help of the early modern community that we will hone and refine this invaluable resource and every contribution will be credited. EMLO is beginning in addition to tag increasing numbers of people mentioned within these letters and if you have contributions to make, we will accept these with gratitude.

 


Further resources

Miranda Lewis, ‘The Origin of the “Index of Literary Correspondence”‘, in ‘A Commonwealth of Letters: From the Index of Literary Correspondence to Early Modern Letters Online’, ed. Howard Hotson and Miranda Lewis, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 33, nos 1–2 (April/October 2020), pp. 28–54.

Yann Ryan, Miranda Lewis, and Howard Hotson, ‘An Anatomy of the “Index of Literary Correspondence”‘, in ‘A Commonwealth of Letters: From the Index of Literary Correspondence to Early Modern Letters Online’, ed. Howard Hotson and Miranda Lewis, Bodleian Library Record, vol. 33, nos 1–2 (April/October 2020),, pp. 68–111.

Miranda Lewis, ‘Ghosts in the Machine: (Re)Constructing the Bodleian’s Index of Literary Correspondence, 1927–1963’, published online 26 April 2013 [http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?p=295].

 

Launch the digitized version of the Bodleian card catalogue

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