Digital resources at the Folger

This article lists selected digital resources available through the Folger Shakespeare Library.

♠ - Resources marked with this symbol can only be accessed while logged in to the Folger network, unless readers can access them through their own institutions.

Bibliographies

♠ Bibliography of British and Irish History provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present.

♠ Bibliography of English Women Writers 1500-1640 currently indexes the works of around 740 female writers and translators.

♠ Iter: Gateway to the Renaissance is a bibliography comprised of secondary source material pertaining to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700), including citations for books and journal material (articles, reviews, review articles, bibliographies, catalogues, abstracts and discographies), dissertation abstracts, and essays in books (including entries in conference proceedings, festschriften, encyclopedias and exhibition catalogues).

♠ John Milton: A Bibliography (MRTS Online Series) attempts to bring together all manuscripts and editions of John Milton's works and all studies and critical statements concerning his life and works, all allusions and quotations, and all significant imitations during the years 1624-1799.

♠ MLA International Bibliography provides citations to journal articles, books, dissertations, and scholarly websites, from 1921 to the present, in academic disciplines such as language, literature, folklore, linguistics, literary theory and criticism, and the dramatic arts.

♠ World Shakespeare Bibliography: indexes Shakespeare-related scholarship and theatrical productions published or produced worldwide since 1960.

Bindings

Bindings Image Database on LUNA features the many gorgeous bindings held in the Folger.

Biographical resources

♠ American National Biography is updated semi-annually with new articles and revisions of previously published entries; contains articles of notable Americans through the mid-twentieth century.

♠ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (DNB): biographical information on men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century; updated three time a year.

♠ Burke's Peerage and Gentry: genealogy and heraldry information for the Peerage of the United Kingdom, the historical families of Ireland and the Commonwealth of Nations, and royal and distinguished families worldwide.

Library catalogs

Hamnet, the Folger's online catalog, gives bibliographic information, copy-specific notes, and detailed information—often with links to images—of most of the items in the collection.

♠ FirstSearch: OCLC Databases: Default database: WorldCat. Select the "Search in database" dropdown to select one of the following databases: ArticleFirst, ClasePeriodica, OCLC Ebooks, OCLC ECO, ERIC, GPO, MEDLINE, OAIster, PapersFirst, Proceedings, WorldAlmanac, WorldCat, WorldCatDissertations.

Finding aids and indices

Folger Library microfilms database provides an easy way to search the Folger's microfilm collection so that readers may have some form of access to restricted or fragile materials.

Folger Shakespeare Library online finding aids guides users through the extensive manuscript collections with descriptions and lists of items.

The Union First Line Index of English Verse enables researchers to locate poems held in seven prestigious collections in the US and UK, including the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Index provides a database of over 224,000 first lines of manuscript and printed verse. firstlines@folger.edu

PLRE.Folger: private libraries in Renaissance England complements the printed volumes of Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE), an ongoing editorial project that has published eight volumes since 1992 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS) series.

The Glossary of digital humanities terms aims to help both novices and more advanced users of digital tools and approaches understand common terms employed in the digital humanities.

Sixteenth Century Collections in North American Research Libraries links to half a dozen library collections that are particularly strong in early modern materials.

E-Books

♠ American Council of Learned Societies Humanities E-Book (HEB): E-book records are searchable in Hamnet, with a link to ACLS full-text. All e-books are full-text searchable at ACLS site.

♠ Oxford Scholarly Editions Online provides an interlinked collection of authoritative Oxford editions of major works from the humanities.

Collections of papers

♠ British History Online: Includes Calendars of State Papers, Domestic and the Calendars of State Papers for Scotland and Ireland, along with the Calendar of Close Rolls.

♠ State Papers Online, 1509 - 1714 provides access to the Calendars, transcript and document images for the Domestic and Foreign State Papers, and Registers of the Privy Council for 1509-1714.

♠ Virginia Company Archives: Transcripts and images of the Ferrar Papers from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the papers of the Virginia Company. Documents date from approximately 1540-1770.

♠ Cecil Papers: archive consisting principally of the correspondence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598) and his son, Robert, the 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563-1612).

♠ The Newdigate newsletters, Numbers 1 through 2100 (13 January 1673/4 through 11 June 1692): thrice-weekly news releases issued by the Secretary of State's office, highlighting matters of interest to the Stewart court.

Digital texts

♠ Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700: Manuscripts written or compiled by women in the British Isles in the 16th and 17th centuries; also includes bibliographic sources.

♠ Women Writers Online: a full-text collection of early women’s writing in English which includes full transcriptions of texts published between 1526 and 1850, focusing on materials that are rare or inaccessible.

♠ American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) contains French-language texts from the 12th to 20th century, Diderot and d'Alembert's late 18th century Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres, digitized versions of many Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes (17th to mid-19th c.), a searchable version of Montaigne's Essais, and a different search interface for Tufts' Perseus Project (Greek & Latin texts).

♠ Early English Books Online - Chadwyck-Healey (EEBO): digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.

♠ Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO): Primarily focused on publications from the British Isles, but does include material from Western Europe and Russia. Access to page images and some full-text search.

♠ Literary Manuscripts Online: 17th and 18th Century Poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds: manuscripts of 17th and 18th century English language verse, including first lines, last lines, attribution, author, title, date, length, verse form, content and bibliographic references for over 6,600 poems within the collection.

♠ British Literary Manuscripts Online: facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials; early 12th century through 1900.

COPIA/CERES (Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service) provides access to manuscripts related to Spenser and resources for early modern English handwriting.

Folger Digital Texts provides a digital version of the Folger Shakespeare texts with easy and sophisticated search options.

Early Stuart Libels: early 17th century English political poetry from the accession of King James I to the outbreak of the English Civil War.

EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents from Western Europe is a repository of links to freely available primary source documents on the web; organized by both geographic area and time period.

John Foxe’s Book of Martrys Variorum Edition: browse and compare the unabridged texts of the four editions of this massive work published in John Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583).

Leonardo da Vinci and his Treatise on Painting: website examining all of the different variations of this text that appeared throughout the centuries; includes extensive bibliography.

Luminarium is an online anthology of English literature from the late Medieval period through the 18th century; texts from out-of-copyright editions.

Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online: A digital archive of manuscript miscellanies and commonplace books from c. 1450-1720.

17th Century Shakespearean Prompt Books from the University of Virginia, with introductions to each book and descriptions of each annotation within the plays.

Dictionaries and Calendars

♠ Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED)

Online Dictionary for Library and Information Sciences

Historical Calendar: Multi-country historical calendar for the years 1100 to 2100. Allows automatic conversion between Old Style and New Style dates.

Journals

♠ Shakespeare Quarterly (JSTOR): Back issues from 1950 through five years before the current issue.

♠ Shakespeare Quarterly (Project Muse): Back issues for the most recent four years.

Common-Place

Early English Studies

Early Modern Culture

Early Modern Literary Studies

Exemplaria

Image resources

Digital Image Database on LUNA contains high-quality, high-resolution images of a large number of Folger collection items. Users have the ability to store their preferred images in media groups, create presentations, and export images.

Impositor is an online tool to automatically arrange digital images from the collection into simulated impositions (the laying out of pages into the formes of printed sheets).

♠ CAMIO: OCLC's Catalog of Art Museum Images Online: OCLC's digital image collection, covering a wide range of geographic and temporal areas. Browse-able by contributing museum.

Other Online Resources

Blogs and Social Media

The Collation: a gathering of scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library is a blog about Folger collections and resources written by Folger staff and readers.

Resource Websites

♠ Archive Grid is a service provided by OCLC brings together information about archives, special collections and other collections of manuscripts and papers.

History On-Line provides information for historians with details of university lecturers in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, current and past historical research, digital history projects, new books and journals from a range of leading publishers and sources of funding available for researchers in the UK.