Take choice of all my library
(Titus Andronicus 4.1.34)
Susan Brock, Shakespeare Centre Library
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon
In this paper I propose to focus on a digitisation project which is both small and as yet unfunded but which has crystalised for me issues to be considered, and addressed by library, museum and archive collections in the provision of content for the Internet. What criteria should be applied to the selection of material? How can the needs of an audience with an unrestricted range of age, interest and background be satisfied? How far should the provider mediate between material and user? How far can these factors be reconciled with the wider needs of the institution?
The project, to provide a digital collection of books, documents and images associated with Shakespeare’s life and works from the holding of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s library, archive and museums departments, is a contribution to a larger enterprise entitled West Midlands: A Sense of Place submitted by a consortium of institutions1 located in central England for funding by the UK government’s New Opportunities Fund (NOF) ( which has £50 million of National Lottery money to be awarded to projects making information available in digital format. NOF’s published vision is ‘To offer new opportunities to improve the quality of life for all citizens through the imaginative and innovative use of Internet and digital technologies to create a coherent body of content that will unlock the rich resources of our knowledge organisations and support learning for life in its broadest sense’.
NOF-digitise ( is a content creation programme on a scale and scope which has not been attempted before in the UK. The programme recognises the importance of creating a ‘networked learning space’ which actively engages users in shaping not only their ideas, learning and lives, but which offers opportunity to make informed choices, to feed imagination and raise awareness, and which supports the development of communities of interest. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) finances the digitisation of material where the primary purpose of doing so is to preserve the nation’s heritage. NOF digitises content which is broadly educational in its nature and which pursues lifelong learning objectives and where the primary purpose is to widen access to resources in support of learning. Content will be accessed through the Peoples’s Network ( and the National Grid for Learning (NGfL) ( and must be made available free of charge at the point of access. The Peoples’ Network will connect all the UK’s 4000 public libraries to the Internet and will also offer access to specially created content designed to support life-long learning needs. The initiative targets adults who cannot, or are disinclined to, participate in learning. For them it will offer a resource to acquire information age skills for the 21st century. The NGfL will draw on national and local museums, galleries, broadcasters and other content providers to open up learning to the individual and offer the opportunity to all learners to explore the riches of the world’s intellectual, cultural and scientific heritage.
Exploiting its unique and extensive collection of archive, library and museum material relating to Shakespeare and, reflecting the fact that it administers, in and around Stratford-upon-Avon, five historic houses closely associated with Shakespeare and his family, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust proposed a module to demonstrate the source material which survives locally concerning the Midlands’ most famous poet and playwright, whose reputation, incidentally, is now world-wide. The project comprises three parts, Shakespeare’s Books, Shakespeare Documents and Images of Shakespeare. The Shakespeare Centre Library’s contribution, Shakespeare’s Books, will present full colour facsimiles of title pages and significant excerpts from a range of contemporary printed sources, each item accompanied by commentary explaining how it relates to Shakespeare’s life and works. The intention is to offer an opportunity to see the layout, typography, spelling and content of the original editions that informed the works in a way that will enrich and inform the experience of readers, theatre-goers and literature and history enthusiasts. Material will be drawn from four categories: published works current and influential in Shakespeare’s lifetime, 2 that Shakespeare might have read at school, 3 that inspired his plays and poems,4 and that disseminated his writings5. Shakespeare Documents, reproduces full-text facsimiles of thirty-one manuscript items in the care of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office written during Shakespeare’s lifetime and mentioning him by name.6 Only the Public Record Office in London, with thirty-five such items, has a greater responsibility for safeguarding the documentary record of Shakespeare’s life. Each image will be accompanied by text explaining its nature, context and importance. Images of Shakespeare comprises seventeen images of William Shakespeare, mainly drawn from the Trust’s picture collection , but also including medallic and sculptural portraits. Included are two of the only three paintings of Shakespeare that can be dated with any certainty to the mid seventeenth century.7
In formulating this project we had to address the questions I set out in the first paragraph of this paper. First of all, how do we identify and select material, indeed decide to submit a proposal at all? The answers were generated by another set of questions. What copyrights do we own unambiguously? What might have potential to generate revenue? What is not available elsewhere on the Internet? What materials are in a suitable condition for scanning? What thematic coherence can be found to unite these materials? Can this be made to fit the requirements of the funding body?
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is an educational charity. It receives no financial support from the government. Its library and archive facilities are open free of charge to the general public. Its income is derived from visitors to the historic Shakespeare houses that it cares for, to a much lesser extent to the revenue generated from reproduction rights for the use of materials in its collections, and increasingly to special project funding from external grant-awarding bodies. The priority of the collecting departments of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is to convert their catalogues, lists and indexes to machine-readable form and to make them available on the Internet. Catalogues, however, are not sexy. Digitisation is. So we must prepare the frosting before the cake is baked. We are duty-bound to grasp the opportunities presented to make some of our holdings more widely available even though the process raises expectations of access to information that we cannot yet fulfill. Furthermore we must exploit the funding available to raise our profile and to provide access to our collections while taking care not to give away our treasures without adequate compensation. Faced with a short deadline we identified three discrete areas of our collections which pre-selected themselves by format and number.
Reference to the principal Shakespeare metasite (Mr William Shakespeare on the Internet(daphne.palomar.edu/Shakespeare) indicated that no web site exists which offers the combination of images illustrating the physical properties of Shakespeare’s books and documents, relevant excerpts and contextual notes for the general reader, included in our proposal. Sites offer, variously, full colour facsimiles ( modernised texts with commentary ( unmediated transcripts ( or collections of links (shakespeare.about.com/arts/shakespeare/cs/sources/index.htm) most aimed at a university audience. A transcript of Shakespeare’s will and facsimiles of other documentary evidence for his life may be found on a Baconian site William Shakspere of Stratford by Paul Dupuy (fly.hiwaay.net/~paul/shakspere/evidence1.html). There are no authoritative web sites that offer a range of images of Shakespeare, the most coherent collection being in a newly developed section the Trust’s own site What Did Shakespeare Look Like?, which draws on its wide-ranging collection of images to offer a representative selection.
The Warwickshire strand of West Midlands: A Sense of Place, in which the Trust is a partner, brings together the county’s key information holders, leisure and cultural specialists for the first time in order to encourage and promote access to the county’s wealth of unique historical, recreational and educational experiences via the internet in order to offer web users the opportunity to sample Warwickshire’s past, present, and future. It aims to produce a series of modules on aspects of the county’s heritage and personalities together with the life and work of Warwickshire communities. Material for inclusion was to be chosen on the basis of historical significance and its potential for lifelong learning, with a particular emphasis was given to the digitisation of unique primary source material, not available elsewhere. The project is presented as a means of opening access to those who wish to enjoy all that Warwickshire has to offer from the comfort of their own home stimulating take-up of other services offered by the partners thereby boosting tourism and awareness of other lifelong learning opportunities within the region. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s role is national and international but the current political agenda promotes regionality and community above wider significance and influence and has provided generous financial aid in support.
Almost the last factor to be considered in selection is the need or demand from users. Apart from its focus on continuing education beyond formal schooling under the general rubric of cultural enrichment the New Opportunities fund has not asked those bidding for funds to respond to clearly identified areas of knowledge although bidders are asked to provide evidence of interest in the topic. This is hardly necessary with Shakespeare. The number and type of visits to the Trust’s web site, provides a good indication of the level of interest in Shakespeare’s life and works. It currently receives an average of 450,000 hits per month (reaching a record 777,000 in January 2001) with most interest centering on the definitive and reliable information which we aim to supply about Shakespeare: his life, education, Stratford in Shakespeare’s time, and, the most pages of all, ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Visitors to the Trust site frequently make requests for portraits of Shakespeare. Statistics from this area of the site indicate that it is most often accessed by young people under sixteen, not surprisingly as all fourteen to sixteen year-olds in the UK study Shakespeare for three years. The Library also serves some 2500 readers a year in its Reading Room and the Records Office a further 2200; in addition the Library answers over 10000 enquiries annually by phone, email and letter. The historic houses linked to Shakespeare and his family in and around Stratford-upon-Avon cared for by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust receive over a million visits a year.
In 1998 Ann Lancashire published a study called ‘What Do the Users Really Want’ surveying the requirements of potential academic users of the Internet Shakespeare Editions ( which usefully showed a demand for related texts such as sources and electronic representations of the original printed texts. In the case of a Sense of Place our users are clearly identified for us as lifelong learners and the general public. The requirements of NOF funding specifically steer us away from materials linked to educational programmes or national curricula. But the joy of the Internet is universal access. Just as university Shakespeare sites such as the McGill Shakespeare Resources Page ( or Lawrence Danson’s The Plays of Shakespeare ( or Michael Best’s Shakespeare by Individual Study (web.uvic.ca/Shakespeare) have information, ideas and links of interest to teachers, high school students and general readers, so we must take care that material from the Trust’s collections suitably presented for the non-specialist can also benefit academics, scholars and researchers.
This brings us to the final question and the most difficult to answer. How far should we mediate between the raw materials in the collections in our care and our audience? The first inclination of the information professional is to offer plain text just as we provide books or documents on a shelf from which the reader chooses and then uses according to his/her own requirements. The Schoenberg Ceneter for Eelctronic Text and Image at the University of Pennsylvania ( the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center (etext.lib.Virginia.edu) and the University of Toronto’ Renaissance Electronic Texts (utl2.library.utoronto.ca/utel/ret/ret.html) work on this basis. They are virtual libraries. An alternative is to provide a virtual exhibition of archives or images, for example the Public Records Office presents Shakespeare’s will as part of a collection relating to famous writers (learningcurve.pro.gov.uk/virtualmuseum/famous/shakespeare/default.htm) and on the National Portrait Gallery site there are five Shakespeare portraits ( Perhaps overt mediation is best avoided as we are not primarily teachers, but are we thereby abdicating responsibility for presenting materials in the most accessible way? The Trust, for example, is uniquely placed to provide an authoritative commentary on Shakespeare-related historical documents: our publication Shakespeare in the Stratford Records by the Trust’s Head of Archives and Local Studies,8 has been subsequently cited in the most recent biographies of Shakespeare. To help us to communicate effectively with our target audience, A Sense of Place will employ an educational writer to translate from our word-heavy over-detailed commentary to a style more accessible to a wide range of age groups, cultures and educational backgrounds. However the provision of facsimile text and transcripts will, we hope, satisfy the needs of other specialist constituencies of users. The NOF home page will serve as a single pint of access to the projects funded by the programme but links will be made from the partner’s web sites opening out their use.
We have made decisions on a pragmatic, some might say cynical, basis. What have we got? What will bring some benefit to our own institution? How can that be made to fit the funding criteria? But we hope that the end product might also achieve the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s first responsibility: ‘to promote in every part of the world the appreciation and the study of the plays and other works of William Shakespeare and the general advancement of Shakespearian knowledge’ and in the process to enthuse, to inform, and to provide access to useful and usable materials. Whether the bid is successful or not lessons have been learned.
1. Birmingham City Council (lead partner); Staffordshire Local Education Authority; Warwickshire County Council (including the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Warwick Castle, Compton Verney Trust); Potteries Museum and Art Gallery;
Shropshire County Council
2. The Bible [Geneva edition] 1576; Book of Common Prayer 1596; John Norden’s View of London Bridge from East to West 1597; Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg’s map of London Londinium Feracissimi Anglia Regni Metropolis 1572-c.1580; and Jodocus Hondius’ map of the Americas 1619
3. William Lily A Short Introduction to Grammar 1677; Plautus’ Comoediae XX 1530
4. Ovid’s Metamorphosis translated by William Golding 1603; Michel de Montaigne’s Essayes translated by John Florio 1603; Plutarch’s The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans translated by Sir Thomas North 1603; Holinshed’s Chronicles 1577; Cinthio’s Hecatommithi 1580
5. Venus and Adonis 1594; The Merchant of Venice 1600 [1619]; Comedies Histories and Tragedies 1623; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1600 [1619]; Loves Labour’s Lost 1631; King Lear 1608 [1619]
6. Including the entries in the Stratford parish registers of the baptisms of William Shakespeare, his children Susanna, Hamnet and Judith, the burial of Hamnet and of Shakespeare himself; the only surviving letter addressed to Shakespeare; conveyance to Shakespeare of 107 acres in the common fields of Old Stratford; exemplification of the final concord recording Shakespeare’s purchase of New Place in 1597.
7. The Chesterfield portrait attributed to Pieter Borseler (fl. 1160s); portrait by Gerard Soest (d. 1681)
8. Robert Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (Stroud: Alan Sutton for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 1994).