The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a

digital library A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital ...

of 17th-century English

Broadside Ballads A broadside (also known as a broadsheet) is a single sheet of inexpensive paper printed on one side, often with a ballad, rhyme, news and sometimes with woodcut illustrations. They were one of the most common forms of printed material between th ...

, a project of the English Department of the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

. The project archives ballads in multiple accessible digital formats.

History

The English Broadside Ballad Archive was created in 2003 by Patricia Fumerton, Professor of English at

UCSB The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

to digitize broadside ballads of the heyday of the 17th century. Many of these ballads are currently held in difficult to access libraries in both North America and the United Kingdom, often in fragile condition, and EBBA's aim is to make them accessible to users in a variety of digital formats. Since then, EBBA has received six Collections and Resources grants from the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

(NEH), an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, and Faculty Research Grants and Instructional Improvement Grants from the University of California, Santa Barbara. As of August 2015, the project has archived over 7000 of the estimated 11,000 extant broadside ballads.

Scope

As of August 2015, EBBA has archived 7,124 broadside ballads, from 20 different collections held at six different libraries worldwide. The collections range from the very well-known and recognized by name - such as those housed at the Pepys Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge - to the relatively unknown. The project has currently archived ballads from the following libraries, with partnerships in place to begin archiving ballads from several other libraries in the next two years.

Holding Libraries and Named Collections

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

Roxburghe Ballads In 1847 John Payne Collier (1789–1883) printed ''A Book of Roxburghe Ballads''. It consisted of 1,341 broadside ballads from the seventeenth century, mostly English, originally collected by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Mortimer (16 ...

* Glasgow University Library ** Euing Collection *

Houghton Library Houghton Library, on the south side of Harvard Yard adjacent to Widener Library, is Harvard University's primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. It is part of the Harvard College Library, the library system of Harvard's Faculty of ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

** Huth Collection *

Huntington Library The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, known as The Huntington, is a collections-based educational and research institution established by Henry E. Huntington (1850–1927) and Arabella Huntington (c.1851–1924) in San Ma ...

** Bindley Collection ** Bridgewater Collection ** Britwell Collection * Magdalene College, Cambridge ** Pepys Ballads * National Library of Scotland ** Crawford Collection ** Rosebery Collection

Archival Formats

In addition to cataloging all of its holdings exhaustively, EBBA archives ballads in up to five different formats, all designed to make the ballads more accessible to modern scholars and members of the public.

Ballad Facsimile

All ballads are archived on the website as a high quality, 600 dpi image of the ballad sheet, trimmed with a 2mm margin.

Album Facsimile

Those ballads that were pasted into albums or archived in any format other than loose-leaf are also archived on the website in another high quality photograph of the ballad sheet on its surrounding album page.

Transcriptions

All ballads, often originally rendered in difficult to read black letter, or Gothic font, and other early modern typefaces, are transcribed into Times New Roman using a diplomatic double-keyed transcription process, and those transcriptions are included in the archive.

Facsimile Transcriptions

All ballads are archived in Facsimile Transcriptions, in which the original blocks of text from the Ballad Facsimile have been replaced with blocks of text from the modern transcription, resulting in an image that preserves the visual experience of the original ballad, including woodcut impression illustrations, yet is easily readable by a modern audience.

Ballad Recording

Many broadside ballads include a tune imprint, indicating to which well-known tune they were meant to be sung. For those ballads for which EBBA has been able to identify the tune, recordings of the sung ballad are available on the archive.

Examples of Notable Holdings

* Barbara Allen *

Chevy Chase Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase (; born October 8, 1943) is an American comedian, actor and writer. He became a key cast member in the first season of ''Saturday Night Live'', where his recurring ''Weekend Update'' segment became a staple of the ...

* Unexpected Perspectives such as Lady Isabel's Tragedy * Many Robin Hood Ballads including Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham * Examples of the

Titus Andronicus ''Titus Andronicus'' is a tragedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written between 1588 and 1593, probably in collaboration with George Peele. It is thought to be Shakespeare's first tragedy and is often seen as his attempt to emul ...

tradition

Bibliography

* Patricia Fumerton and Anitta Guerrini, eds. ''Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800.'' Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010. * Patricia Fumerton, ed. ''Broadside Ballads from the Pepys Collection: A Selection of Texts, Approaches, and Recordings.'' Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2012.

External links

English Broadside Ballad Archive

English Department, UC Santa Barbara
{{authority control Discipline-oriented digital libraries University of California, Santa Barbara Digital humanities projects Early modern printing databases Online databases American digital libraries English folk songs