How We Catalogued The Full English archives
How We Catalogued The Full English archives
by Louise Bruton and Rowan Musser, The Full English archivists
This resource was produced several years ago and describes a cataloguing project which took place from 2012 to 2014. The online archives of the English Folk Dance and Song Society have since been developed further in various directions. We have chosen to keep this resource online, as it continues to provide useful information.
What We Started With
The Full English project has brought together 12 major manuscript collections to create the most comprehensive free searchable digital archive of English folk songs, tunes, dances and customs in the world.
In a marriage between tradition and new media, more than 58,400 items from some of the country’s most important folk music collections were conserved, catalogued and digitized, before being uploaded to a central digital archive. Two qualified archivists were employed to work on The Full English collections. They started with historical documents preserved for long-term storage in labelled boxes and arranged on shelves in the Archive Store at Cecil Sharp House.
Basic lists of the contents of each box had already been made, but more detailed descriptions of each item needed to be created in order for the documents to be searchable online. These lists indicated that there was a wide range of material from handwritten letters, diaries, music manuscripts and song texts, to typewritten reports, newspaper extracts and journal articles.
The documents are written on different types of paper including headed notepaper, carbon copy paper, music manuscripts, envelopes, an early kind of photocopy called a photostat and even more modern fax paper which, surprisingly, degrades at a much faster rate than the other types of paper.
These documents were mostly in very good condition and some had previously been re-packaged in acid-free folders to protect them during handling and conserve them for the future. The majority of the documents date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but include references to much earlier works.
What did we need to do
In order to make the old manuscript documents searchable and viewable online, it was necessary to have a clearly planned and integrated process of activities:
- Preservation and conservation
- Cataloguing
- Digitisation
These activities were the focus of the Archive team while other members of The Full English project worked on developing the learning programme and the website which would host the online portal for the archive database. a
