A New Look at Old London

We've begun work on the Electronic Bolles Collection, a joint project between Perseus and the Tufts University Archives. The Reverend Edwin C. Bolles (1836-1920), Chaplain at Tufts University, spent his life collecting over three hundred books, and four hundred maps, tourist guidebooks, and pamphlets about 18th and 19th century London. The university purchased Bolles' entire collection after his death, but this amazing set of resources has been largely unknown outside of the Tufts Archives and Special Collections. Until now.

With the support of a grant from the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, we are beginning to digitize Bolles' collection. At the core of the project is a six volume, 3,000 page history of the city, Walter Thornbury's Old and New London, published between 1872-1878. To supplement the illustrations contained in the book, Bolles collected approximately 10,000 images, newspaper clippings, and other material about London, mounted them on cardboard, and keyed them to underlined references in Old and New London. What Bolles saw as "extra-illustrating" the book, modern readers may recognize as a paper version of hypertext links. Bolles' edition of Old and New London thus constitutes the blueprint for an electronic hypertext, for Bolles spent years laboring to add explicit links to supplementary information and placing it in a form that we can map directly into an electronic environment.

Throughout this year, we will digitize the text of Old and New London and the various images and texts now on cardboard and transform Bolles' blue pencil underlines into links. In addition to our focus on Old and New London, we will also digitize a small subset of the three hundred books about London that Bolles collected. All of the digitized material will be automatically tagged for features such as places and personal names, and will be described in the database by standard keywords.

Another major feature of our joint Perseus-Archives project will be digitizing the forty large-size maps, as well as several dozen smaller maps, in the Bolles collection, and keying these to place names mentioned in the on-line texts. Finally, we plan to expand this collection by establishing links with digitized literary works set in London, such as Dickens's novels, or Sherlock Holmes stories. Our overall vision is to generate automatic links which will tie all of this material together, so that a user can jump between various types of information about any given topic in the database. For example, clicking on "Whitechapel" will present a menu of options such as "display Whitechapel on a map," "read descriptions of Whitechapel," and "see images illustrating Whitechapel." This is the first year of a multi-year focus on the Bolles collection. We're currently doing an initial cataloging of the pamphlets in the collection, which can be accessed through the Archives home page.

We're planning on having some of the digitized material up on its own website in the fall, with regular updates and upgrades as this first phase winds down at the end of this year.

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document placed on-line 6/21/99, LMC