British printed images to 1700, a digital library

Project start date: 2006-04

Project end date: 2009-03

‘BRITISH PRINTED IMAGES TO 1700’ (bpi1700) is a project funded by the AHRC under their Resource Enhancement scheme. It represents a collaboration between Birkbeck, University of London, and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (King’s College London). The other partners are the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. It currently makes over 5,000 printed images from early modern Britain available online in fully searchable form. The bulk of these have come from the holdings of pre-1700 British prints in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, the largest extant collection of such material, but items from the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection have also been included. Images are searchable by artist, person, place or date. In addition, browsing by subject, place and theme has also been made possible through a systematically organised thesaurus based on ICONCLASS. The project website can also be used to locate engravers and printsellers of the images included in the project. In addition to the innovation of the subject index, BPI1700 also has developed a structure enabling the many duplicate impressions held by the museums as separate objects to be grouped together as 'works' created by the original makers. The project has organised two conferences to promote innovative research on the visual culture of the period with particular reference to printed images, including book illustrations. The first of these was held at Birkbeck on 13-14 July 2007; the second at the Victoria and Albert on 12-13 September 2008. The papers delivered at them have now been published as Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Ashgate, 2010). Production of compressed JPEG files from uncompressed TIFF files for web dissemination, Production of Zoomify files from TIFF for web dissemination, transformation of Merlin image meta-data into a relational database.