The dataset comprises original compound index (CDX) files that have been re-assembled into 18 separate CDX files for each year of crawling activity represented (1996 - 2013). Please note that the individual CDX files are not sorted. In order to enable access to web archives, UKWA uses CDX files to act as indexes so that it is possible to look up which ARC or WARC files contain which URLs and responses. In partnership with the...

We present DUKweb, a set of large-scale resources useful for the diachronic analysis of contemporary English. The dataset is derived from JISC UK Web Domain Dataset (1996-2013), which collects resources from the Internet Archive that were hosted on domains ending in ‘.uk’. The dataset includes co-occurrences matrices for each year and two types of word vectors by year, Temporal Random Indexing vectors and word2vec embeddings.

The UK’s longitudinal studies (including cohort and household panel studies) have been making their data available to researchers beyond their immediate staff for decades. Over this time, they have developed various models of data sharing and citation that have increased the value of the data collected. DataCite was created in 2009 to encourage data sharing by allowing better practice in data citation using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The British Library is a founding member of...

The ‘Off the Map’ competition is an unusual collaboration between the British Library and GameCity; a videogame culture festival, which takes place annually in the UK city of Nottingham. The competition challenges higher education students based in the UK to create videogames, explorable virtual environments and interactive fiction inspired by the British Library’s digital collections. The Off the Map competition is one of the library’s experimental projects investigating how the institution can collaborate with digital...

BETWEEN 1609 and 1619, during his confinement in the Fleet Prison, in London, Francis Tregian the younger, a Cornish Roman Catholic recusant, has hitherto been thought to have compiled an important group of music anthologies. These comprise the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Mus. MS. 168; British Library, Egerton MS. 3665; New York Public Library, Drexel MS. 4302; and the second part of Oxford, Christ Church, Mus. MSS. 510-514. This attribution was derived from...

Learn about how institutions and projects in the UK and internationally are using DataCite DOIs to enhance discovery and citation of content, along with recent and upcoming changes for DataCite users in the UK, with the recording of our 2020 Summer Meeting. This year’s speakers were: • Rachael Kotarski, British Library: British Library Research Services update • Jez Cope, British Library: British Library DataCite member update • Helena Cousijn & Robin Dasler, DataCite International: Providing...

NOTHING seems to be recorded about the life of Paolo Angelo, except for the meagre scraps of information which his own books reveal. He was a humble priest of Venice, apparently a member of the Dominican Order, and he had a fanatical hatred of Luther and his doctrines, which he more than once described as being like the croaking of frogs. He is represented in the British Library by three small printed books, which have...

AN inscribed portrait of John Gower, literary champion of Lancastrian kingship, provides the key to the reading of the unique illustrative programme of the Duke of Bedford's Psalter-Hours, Add. MS. 42131, the only manuscript he is known to have commissioned in England. Two hundred and ninety of the 300 minor text divisions are illustrated with portrait heads; a national portrait gallery of Lancastrian friends and foes is concealed in the initials of carefully selected texts....

THE great collectors of manuscripts in Britain during the century following the dissolution of the monasteries, men such as Parker, Dee, Cotton, and Lumley, were figures, by and large, of some standing in church or state, with the means and opportunity to amass large numbers of manuscript books and other documents from the medieval collections. Humbler persons could however establish collections of some importance, and they were often formed in the provinces, away from the...

THE Benedictional of St Aethelwold (Add. MS. 49598) is one of the great treasures of the British Library. Produced between 971 and 973 expressly at the request of Aethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, by his chaplain Godeman, as the dedicatory poem near the beginning of the book makes clear, the manuscript not only is significant for understanding the art of tenth-century England, but also contributes to our understanding of the history of handwriting during the period,...

SIR Charles William Pasley (1780-1861) is remembered today as a general in the British Army who earned distinction as a military engineer, writing manuals about field fortification, telegraphy, sapping, mining, pontooning, and how best to explode gunpowder under water for the salvage of wrecks. Pasley's distinction was recognized beyond the army by his election in 1816 as a Fellow of the Royal Society, by his appointment in 1841 as Inspector General of Railways and by...

IN my recent study of Samaritan typefaces I was able to trace the history and development of some of the more important of these on the basis of the evidence then available to me. That study stimulated some interest among both historians of typography and librarians. Through the kindness of Brad Sabin Hill of the British Library, who has drawn my attention to specimens which I would not otherwise have seen, including examples from both...

ONE of the treasures of the British Library's Turkish collections is the magnificent set of fifty-one ornately bound albums, containing in all over 1,8oo photographs (albumen prints), which the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II presented to the British Museum in 1893 and were received in 1894. (An almost identical set was given to the United States Library of Congress in the same years.) The contents represent a carefully picked selection from the vast photographic collection amassed...

DEEP in the papers of the Duke of Newcastle, the Whig 'ecclesiastical minister', lie the thirty or so letters written by the Rev. Dr Lucius Henry Hibbins to the Duke from 1741 onwards. It is a remarkable collection, spanning eighteen years, and one overlooked by historians who have considered Newcastle's exercise of Church patronage. Mary Bateson ignores the correspondence, even though her aim was to exemplify the Duke of Newcastle's dealing with place-seeking clergy. More...

THE British Library recently acquired a fine and complete copy of an important Handel collection: "Forty Eight Overtures, Composed by Handel, as Performed at the Concerts of Antient Music, Newly Arranged for the Organ or Piano Forte, with a Figured Bass for the use of the Organ, By John Watts."

Remembering David Goldstein (1933-1987).

In a footnote to the long and scholarly biography with which in 1800 Edmond Malone prefaced his edition of Dryden's prose he drew attention to a couplet preserved in a manuscript verse-miscellany in the British Museum Library.

ANTONIO PANIZZI arrived in England in May 1823 'with not quite a sovereign in his pocket, knowing no one, nor a word of the language' as he was later to write. The liberal attitudes of the English especially regarding political, intellectual and religious tolerance and freedom, so much appreciated by Voltaire in his Lettres philosophiques in the eighteenth century, had effectively transformed the English capital into a virtual Mecca for exiles, especially for political exiles,...

PHILIPPINE fiction in English is one of the many consequences of Spain's cession of the islands to the United States after the war of 1898. The coming of the Americans introduced a new language and a new culture to the people. During the early part of the twentieth century Spanish continued to dominate as the literary idiom, but works were also written in the vernacular languages such as Tagalog (Pilipino), Ilokano and Cebuano. Writers of...

Early in 1770 a Swedish journal published a brief account by a visitor of the public galleries of the British Museum. Describing the Harley rooms, he remarked that copies of the Harleian manuscript catalogue published by the Museum in 1759 had been sent to Uppsala University Library and to the Royal Library in Stockholm. He admired the nine rooms of printed books and praised the reference service: 'One sits very comfortably in a so-called Reading...

BORN of an ancient noble family of Verona, Count Lodovico Nogarola died in 1554: the year of his birth seems to be unrecorded. Of his many writings a large number remained unpublished. The short book with which the present article deals was evidently his first venture into print.

Edward Clark (1888-1962), who was a programme planner with the BBC from 1927 to 1936, had been introduced to Arnold Schoenberg after a performance of the latter's symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande in Berlin in 1910. He was thereafter an ardent champion of the music of Schoenberg (whose pupil he became in 1911) and also of that of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern.

During the period from 1790 to the early 1830s, quite a number of organizations came into being in London to provide public musical entertainment of various kinds. The only one of them still active today is the Philharmonic Society, which was established in 1813 and received the title 'Royal' exactly one hundred years later. It owed much of its endurance and success to the fact that its founders were shrewd professional musicians wholly dedicated to...

The name 'Beudeker Collection' or 'Beudeker Atlas' commemorates the eighteenth century Dutchman who compiled these twenty-four large folio volumes, bound ingold-tooled white vellum, placed at Maps C.9.d.1-11, e.1-13. Each volume contains an average of a hundred to a hundred and fifty leaves, on to and between which large single or several smaller prints have been mounted, and into which some complete books and extracts from others have been inserted in a carefully designed sequence. The...

A curious motif appears at the foot of the frontispiece of the celebrated copy of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, written and probably illuminated by Bartolommeo Sanvito, in the British Library (Department of Manuscripts, MS. Royal 14.C.III, fol. 2). This consists of a group of three putti, the central one wearing a grotesque Silenus mask, from whom his two colleagues flee in terror, the one on the left tumbling as he runs. It...