The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.
The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.
These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.
The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.
New Content
Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.
Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.
Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution
Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.
The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.
The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.
The resources that the project will link to are:
- Old Bailey Proceddings Online
- Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
- Newgate calendar
- Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.
More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.