The Dissenting Academies Online Virtual Library System, and: What Middletown Read, and: The Reading Experience Database (review)

One of the most exciting opportunities offered by the digital developments of the past decade has been the ability to create and make freely-available large bodies of primary data.^* The increasing emphasis placed by academics and funding bodies on making primary data electronically available has stimulated the same explosion in digital resources in the fields of book history and bibliography as elsewhere in the arts and humanities, with some memorable successes, and equally memorable failures. Three recent additions to the growing corpus of bibliographical databases cover broadly similar ground, each taking evidence of reading and the use of books as their focus and each utilizing a variety of primary and secondary sources to elucidate the inter action between text and reader. The utility and impact of the resulting databases varies widely.

Unveiled on 11 June 2011 and funded by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme, the Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System (VLS) is the most recent and is one facet of an innovative digital resource supporting research into the history of dissenting academies. The Virtual Library System is a union catalogue representing the holdings and loans of selected dissenting academies in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a dissenting COPAC. As a consultant on the next stage of this project this reviewer must be cautious not to be accused of a conflict of interest, but what follows differs little from my comments on the VLS made at the Dissenting Academy Libraries Workshop at Harris Manchester College on 8 March 2011, when there was no formal connection.

The VLS has been compiled from a range of sources, principally historic catalogues, shelf lists and loan registers. Each record in the system describes a single bibliographical entity and consists of three parts: bibliographic data harvested from modern library catalogues, information about the copies held in different academy libraries and, where available, evidence of borrowing. The VLS sits alongside a parallel database and encyclopaedia which, when complete, will contain historical accounts of individual academies, biographical articles about leading tutors, and biographical data for thousands of students educated at the academies over two centuries.

In recent years a number of proposals have been mooted to reconstruct dispersed libraries in digital form, few of which demonstrated imagination or innovation in their selection of primary data or in their approach to unlocking the research potential offered by the virtual recreation of lost collections. The VLS, however, makes clear what can be achieved with an ambitious project remit, judicious selection and a clever interface. The decision to include multiple catalogues and multiple borrowing records has resulted in a powerful research tool. The source material here all shares a common feature, providing essential background context — these collections were drawn together with the express purpose of educating Nonconformist students. The catalogue data alone is of limited utility in this regard — the presence of a copy of the editio princeps of Aristophanes in an academy library does not mean it was ever read. With the borrower records, however, it is possible to take this one step further and demonstrate educational use of the book. Placed alongside surviving archival evidence from tutor's notes, committee minutes, lists of desiderata, and lists of examined texts, the research potential becomes apparent.

The decision to mount the VLS through an interface familiar from library catalogues is prudent. The data is immediately accessible and recognizable. The ease with which one can switch between bibliographic records and borrower records, from the single instance of a book borrowed by a reader to that reader's entire borrow ing record, is admirable. The ability to view the primary evidence is equally helpful and allows one to verify the transcription or interpretation — within seconds of calling up a borrower's record the user can view a good quality digital image of the relevant page within the loan register...