The British Book Trade Index

The BBTI, hosted at the University of Birmingham is a superb tool for dating booktrade and other ephemera. Covering a multiplicity of book-related trades, such as ink maker, gold beater, engraver, lithographer, auctioneer, librarian/owner of circulating library, stationer, and publisher, the resource goes far beyond dating booktrade ephemera and is helpful in dating any ephemera with an imprint. Its scope is England and Wales to 1851. Aseparate Scottish booktrade index is hosted by the National Library of Scotland.

Information given about each tradesman includes (where known) dates of birth and death, addresses with associated dates, apprenticeships, successors, and trades. Sources of information are given and contributions can be made to the database.

As an example, this is the BBTI information for Abel Sweetland of Exeter, enabling us to date the trade card in the John Johnson Collection to 1783-85 and that of his widow Margaret to 1787-96.

(C) BBTI

JJ Coll Provincial Booktrade 2 (13)

Music Resources

An additional blog for St Cecilia's day!  Concert programmes abound in collections, including the John Johnson Collection and the Bodleian Music Room. There have been three major iniatives to document holdings of concert programmes. Cecilia (Mapping the music resources of the UK and Ireland) was followed by  the Concert Programmes database which focuses on describing concert programmes and enables searching by time, people, place, subject, tradition and institution.

(c) University of Cardiff, RCM London, MLA

Additionally, there is the Concert Life in 19th century London database and Research project.

The Royal College of Music, which has very important holdings of concert programmes, is also currently collaborating with the Wigmore Hall to catalogue concert programmes.   The Wigmore Hall has two podcasts of a study afternoon in May 2011 which discussed the archives of the Wigmore Hall, led by Prof Paul Banks, from the Royal College of Music's Centre for Performance History, and Paula Best, Head of Publications & Archive at Wgmore Hall.

The Royal Opera House is cataloguing every performance at the ROH from 1732 to the present.

(c) Royal Opera House

In 2011, the BBC launched the online Prom Archive in which all 7,168 performances at the Proms since 1895 are indexed. This is a search for Benjamin Britten (whose birthday is on St Cecilia's Day)

(C) BBC 2011