The following just arrived and may be of interest:

Thanks to funding from the Higher Education Funding Councils via the JISC Committee on Electronic Information, the 30,000 broadside ballads in the Bodleian Library are now available online. There is background information on the collections, a catalogue with indexes of the titles, first lines, authors, performers, subjects and printers and an iconographic index of the 17,000 illustrations; all linked to an image database of the ballad sheets themselves. Where a score is given on the sheet, a rendition is provided.
Visit the ballads website at
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/
For the next few weeks the database and interface will remain in the final stages of construction -- please be patient if you encounter problems in the meantime.


Mike Heaney
Bodleian Broadside Ballads Project