The British Library Announces Crowdsourcing Project to Make Late 18th – Late 19th Century Digitised Playbills More Findable Online

From The British Library’s Digital Scholarship Blog:

Playbills were sheets of paper handed out or posted up (as in the picture of a Portsmouth theatre, below) to advertise entertainments at theatres, fairs, pleasure gardens and other such venues. The British Library has a fantastic collection of playbills dating back to the 1730s. Looking through them is a lovely way to get a glimpse at how Britons entertained themselves over the past 300 years.
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The playbills list performances of plays we know and love now alongside less well-known, even forgotten plays and songs. But individual playbills are hard to find in the British Library’s catalogues, because they are only listed as a group (in the past they were bound into volumes of frequently miscellaneous sheets) with a brief summary of dates and location/theatre names. The rich details captured on each historical page – from personal names to popular songs and plays to lost moments in theatrical history – aren’t yet available to search online.

We’re launching a project called In the Spotlight soon to make these late 18th – late 19th century digitised playbills more findable online, and to give people a chance to see past entertainments as represented in this collection. In this new crowdsourcing project, members of the public can help transcribe titles, names and locations to make the playbills easier to find.

Read the Complete Blog Post for More Information
Directo to Project Website

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