The University of California’s English Broadside Ballad Archive is a fantastic project, with a dedicated team making broadsides available to everyone.

The project provides high-quality ballad sheet facsimiles of the ballads as well as facsimile transcriptions (which preserve the ballad’s original ornament while transcribing its unfamiliar typeface into easily readable modern print). In addition, they supply recordings of the ballads whenever a tune is extant, extensive cataloguing of the ballads, including cataloguing of their illustrations or woodcut impressions, TEI/XML and MARC records, and both basic and advanced search functions that allow readers easily to find collections or individual ballads as well as their constituent parts or makers by a variety of means. They also offer background essays on the various ballad collections included in EBBA and on ballad culture generally as well as other helpful ballad resources.

For more information, visit the English Broadside Ballad Archive website: http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu.

The Making of Charlemagne’s Europe project is a database of prosopographical and socio-economic data found in the more than four thousand legal documents surviving from Charlemagne’s reign. It covers material from all areas that were ever part of Charlemagne’s empire, dating from 25 September 768 to 28 January 814 AD. The emphasis is on the extraction and systematic classification of data for maximum comparability between regions. This will make the valuable information on institutions, people, places and objects contained in charters and other legal documents more easily accessible to researchers via faceted browsing, search queries and a mapping tool.

The project, which runs from 2012-2014, is being carried out at King’s College London by the Department of History and the Department of Digital Humanities and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

For more information, please visit: http://www.charlemagneseurope.ac.uk

Thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library, tens of thousands of high resolution images from their Digital Image Collection, including books, theater memorabilia, manuscripts, and art, are now available online. And they’re free to use under a CC BY-SA Creative Commons license.

For more information, please visit: http://collation.folger.edu/2014/08/free-cultural-works-come-get-your-free-cultural-works.

The Database of Women’s Travel Writing (DWTW) provides full and accurate bibliographical records for nearly 200 titles, all the known books of travel published in Britain and Ireland by women between 1780 and 1840.

The database is part of a larger database project, based in the University of Wolverhampton’s Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research, which will include all travel books published in this period.

You can search the database by combinations of author, title, date of publication, publisher, genre, and regional content.

For more information and to visit the database: http://www4.wlv.ac.uk/btw

The Visualizing Chaucer Project seeks to capture post-medieval illustrated versions of Chaucer’s work. The project provides annotations for books containing illustrated versions of Chaucer’s writings and organises these images by character/work for easy accessibility. The intention is to make these images readily accessible, where copyright allows, for teachers, students, and scholars interested in the afterlife of Chaucer’s works.

Visualizing Chaucer was developed by Kara L. McShane and supported by the Rossell Hope Robbins Library Fellowship in the Digital Humanities.

Visualizing Chaucer is prepared and published in the Rossell Hope Robbins Library, a special medieval collection in the University of Rochester’s Rush Rhees Library

To access the Visualizing Chaucer Project please follow this link: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/chaucer

The Catholicon Anglicum, a fifteenth-century English-Latin dictionary acquired by the British Library earlier this year, is now fully online on Digitised Manuscripts.

Read more about the MS at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2014/05/a-world-of-words.html

View the MS at: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_89074

ROLLCO, is a site providing records of Apprentices and Freemen in the City of London Livery Companies between 1400 and 1900.

Currently the database includes information about apprenticeship bindings and freedom admissions for seven of London’s Livery Companies, with the records of further Companies to follow.

ROLLCO is a not-for-profit project, and access is free to all.

http://www.londonroll.org

The Digital Library of Spain is the digital library of the Biblioteca Nacional de España. It aims to give free access to thousands of digitized documents: books from the 15th to the 19th century, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, pamphlets, posters, photographs, maps, atlases, music scores, historic newspapers and magazines and audio recordings.

Today it comprises more than 134,000 works on all topics in all documentary forms, freely accessible from anywhere in the world.

http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/AdvancedSearch.do?showAdvanced=true

“The world’s largest collection of original Shakespearean books and manuscripts is expanding its online offerings.

Next month, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will release a series of apps that will broaden access to thousands of original books and manuscripts from Shakespearean England.”

More about this: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24589338

“More than 600 years ago poet Geoffrey Chaucer died without completing his greatest masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales.

A collection of more than 20 stories written in Middle English in the 14th Century, they show the best and worst of human nature with a humorous touch.

And the earliest manuscript containing his work has been kept at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

Now the priceless collection has been published online for the first time.”

More about this: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-27155607

On March 4, 1714, Bernard Lintot published Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock in five cantos. Associate Professor Allison Muri (Department of English, University of Saskatchewan) is the editor of this new online edition in honour of this anniversary: http://grubstreetproject.net/works/T5728.

Dr. Muri will be adding notes over the next few months, and hopes her online edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock may be of use to some in teaching the poem and studying its plates in the near future. The images (provided by McMaster’s William Ready Division of Archives & Research Collections) are slow to load because they’re very high resolution.