Folger/Bodleian Quartos Online in a Year

It was announced last week that a joint project between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford will bring 70% of the quartos of Shakespeare's works published before 1641 to the Internet, free and publicly available.  For those who have not yet heard the details, read the following press release from the Folger:

Shakespeare Quartos Archive One of Five Projects to Receive the First JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants

Washington, DC – The Shakespeare Quartos Archive , a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the 75 pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays—a joint project of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Oxford, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland—is one of five transatlantic collaborations awarded the first JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants . The announcement was made by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole during an event at the Folger on Tuesday afternoon.

"There will be countless new ways for scholars, teachers, and students to examine the quarto texts, particularly of Hamlet, thanks to this landmark grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joint Information Systems Committee,” says Folger Director Gail Kern Paster. “The Shakespeare Quartos Archive heralds the future of textual studies, bringing these rare early texts out of their separate archives and onto the screens of individual scholars."

In the absence of surviving manuscripts, the quartos—Shakespeare’s earliest printed editions—offer the closest known evidence of what Shakespeare might actually have written, and what appeared on the early modern English stage. They are of immense interest to scholars, teachers, editors, and theater directors, yet due to their rarity and fragility, the earliest quartos are not readily available for most to study. The Shakespeare Quartos Archive will make these earliest quartos freely accessible for in-depth study to Shakespeare students across the globe.

In addition to making available digital surrogates of the seventy-five quarto editions of William Shakespeare's plays, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive will also develop an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all 32 copies of Hamlet , held at participating institutions, including the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland. Users will be able to overlay text images, compare text side-by-side, search full-text, and annotate and tag images. The prototype will be tested by the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. The hope is to eventually apply this full-level functionality to all the plays in quarto editions.

"The JISC/NEH initiative gave us the opportunity and the incentive to attempt a truly international, collaborative, digital project,” explains Richard Kuhta, Eric Weinmann Librarian at the Folger . “The guidelines challenged us to think collectively about what was possible, and to realize a shared ambition.  It was exactly the prompt we needed to launch a conversation that transformed geographically distant collections into partner institutions."

“The JISC/NEH grant program encourages international collaboration on humanities projects of value to scholars worldwide,” said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.  “Award recipients in the U.S. and U.K. are working together to create digital archives, centralize holdings, and develop tools to improve humanities research online. These projects embody the best of the digital humanities and advance the mission of the Endowment.”

A similar press release from the Bodleian is available also.

The pioneering institution was, of course, the British Library. The BL has made its 93 Shakespeare quartos fully available online for a number of years now in an exhibit titled Shakespeare in Quarto.  Many of the quartos held by the Bodleian, and several other libraries including the BL, can already be accessed through Octavo's Rare Book Room.  Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet indexes the available quartos by play.  More access means more scholarship which means a deeper and richer experience of Shakespeare.