The British Library Board was asked to support the ESTC project which emerged from the conference held at the British Library in June, 1976 on the basis that it would satisfy a number of conditions.
(i) It would serve as a focus for Anglo-American cooperation in bringing about a natural, and urgently needed sequel to fifty years of such cooperation in the revision of STC and Wing, projects which owed much to nineteenth-century initiatives undertaken in the British Museum Library by Bullen [English books to 1640] and Fortescue [the Thomason Collection].
(ii) It would, as a union catalogue based upon the resources of libraries throughout the world, signal the importance which the newly-formed British Library attached to scholarly endeavour, and the unique role which it occupies as the principal resource for the history of English civilization.
(iii) By adopting computer technology to transform traditional methods of compiling catalogues and encourage other national libraries to recognize the needs of researchers for flexible access to historical sources.
(iv) It would serve as a nursery for training young staff in a sound and varied knowledge of the collections, and the way those collections are revealed in the General Catalogue, as well as in the possibilities provided by machine-readable records for advancing scholarship.
(v) The project would bring to light many thousands of items never previously catalogued, both in the Department of Printed Books and the Department of Manuscripts.
(vi) It would identify, in a clear and persuasive manner, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the collections and play a significant part in the Library's preservation policy for the future.
(vii) It would provide a substantial source of revenue for many years to come.
The Board's decision to support the project has been vindicated, and has led to firm support by research libraries in Britain, North America, Europe, South Africa, Australasia and Japan. ESTC enjoys the support and cooperation of more institutions (more than 950) than any previous bibliographical project ever undertaken; the undertakings made to the Board in 1977 have been fulfilled. In particular it should be noted that the revenue earned by ESTC from the sale of the COM catalogue of the British Library's collection (1983), on-line and batch services from use of the file on BLAISE-LINE and RLIN, and royalties from the Research Publications microfilm project has been to date in excess of £500,000. (Future revenue is guaranteed by continuing royalties from Research Publications for at least a further six years, and the sale of the first edition of ESTC, in whatever form that might take.)
In addition, the example of ESTC has led to the establishment of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and the South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB) using similar cataloguing and bibliographical formats. Both projects are international in scope and are acknowledged as major contributions to bibliographical scholarship.
The Board approved the project in 1977 on the basis of a limited Anglo-American initiative to produce, within five years, a minimum-level short title catalogue, based on the Library's unrivalled collections, supplemented by an undetermined number of research libraries in Britain and the United States. The development of this limited project has been regularly reported to the Board, and the public at large in the Library's Annual Report. In 1981, under pressure from the Library of Congress, the level of cataloguing was adjusted to incorporate several features required by AACR2, including the burden of establishing AACR2 headings for personal and corporate authorship, both main and added entries. This commitment alone has added the equivalent of five person-years to the project's timescale: but conceding to the demand for fuller records has made it easier for Professor Henry Snyder to raise substantial funding in the U.S. from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and private foundations.
In addition, there have been delays arising from difficulties in recruiting staff replacements; logistical problems presented by "success"; financial constraints; and a considerable interruption to normal working during the nine months needed to install and test the link with RLN.
Nevertheless, what was promised has been delivered: ESTC is widely regarded as a model for retrospective national projects in Holland, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan; staff have been transferred to other parts of the Library and have brought to their new responsibilities skills they would otherwise have lacked; the project has been the subject of articles in learned journals as well as library-school dissertations, and has been the focus of meetings of national library associations (Britain, America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Japan) and bibliographical societies (Britain, America, Canada). The Editor has been invited to lecture at universities throughout the world.
The academic community has begun to appreciate the importance of ESTC as a resource which radically alters the way in which research is conducted, and during the past four years a number of important research projects have depended on ESTC for information not otherwise available. These have included the history of the publishing firm of Longmans; a history of printing in Yorkshire; the spread of provincial printing in the British Isles in the eighteenth century; a history of the West Indian slave trade, &c. The Enquiry Desk in the Reading Room routinely undertakes searches for readers on a limited scale. Use of the RLN file by American scholars is regular, though researchers requiring off-line listings still send their requests to London because RLIN does not supply off-line services.
The Board has now approved support for the project until 1989 when publication (in an appropriate form) is planned for the material accumulated in the database. However, material continues to be reported to the Editors in both continents, and much material will not be incorporated in the file if publication is undertaken in 1989. (It is estimated that all material reported up to 1986 will be incorporated).
If the American side of the project was slower to develop, Professor Henry Snyder has consistently achieved a level of funding from public and private sources which has enabled the project to harvest and process an impressive number of records from virtually every significant research library in North America. His success makes it possible for work to continue at the University of California well into the 1990s. (It is worth noting that no other research project has ever received National Endowment for the Humanities funding for three consecutive triennial periods).
ESTC has been directly responsible for assisting the Early Imprints Project in Australia and New Zealand [EIPANZ], and the catalogue of English books at Göttingen University (two volumes will be published in May this year). However, the most obvious international feature of the project's development was the establishment of the transatlantic link with Washington and Stanford, enabling the two editorial teams to work simultaneously on the file maintained on RLIN. It is now accepted that ESTC is the logical place for information about eighteenth century books to be deposited, because only on such a live and adaptable research tool can information be easily added and retrieved.
In the course of examining the Library's collections it has been regular practice by project staff to report to the Preservation Service books urgently in need of repair, and this has been done with the bibliographical evidence to substantiate rarity and textual importance. Given the overwhelming task of trying to preserve the library's collections, selective principles, based upon bibliographical criteria, are increasingly being seen as the only hope in the unequal struggle between limited resources for preservation and the inexorable processes of deterioration. Since 1983, when Research Publications began publishing The Eighteenth Century, the large-scale publication of microfilms of the Library's holdings has been a significant contribution to the over-all policy of preservation filming, and the records for these films will in due course be incorporated in the National Register of Microform Masters.
ESTC is a modern solution to what has been historically an intractable difficulty: how to reconcile, with the intellectual and technical resources available, the extremities of elaborate bibliographical description of a small subset of the large general bibliographical universe and the synoptic summary of a larger subset exemplified in previous short title catalogues published for French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish books.
The fundamental difference between printed catalogues and those in machine-readable form is that while the former can be "closed" and supplemented later, the latter demand a continuing existence. This is one reason why a machine-readable environment is so particularly suitable for union catalogues which are, because of the vastness of bibliographical scale, indefinitely capable of enrichment and adaptation. ESTC is probably concerned with 300,000 individual items surviving in over two million copies. Ensuring its continued existence is of paramount importance for future eighteenth century scholarship.
H&SS has 'guaranteed' the current levels of staffing and financial support for ESTC until 1989, as agreed by the Board. However it is now clear that 1989 will not see the end of the project: many locations and additional information (300,000 it is now estimated) will have been reported and require incorporation in the data base. The ESTC (North America) project has now raised more than $400,000 to fund the survey and listing of material in the Public Record Office and to begin work on items in the Oxford and Cambridge college libraries, a task that will take at least five years.
The United Kingdom Committee for ESTC at its last meeting on February 13, 1987 considered the following possible course of action :-
The Committee unanimously took the view that the incorporation of the additional materials from the Public Record Office and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges would add significantly to the scholarly value of the file, and that the continuing maintenance of the on-line union bibliography beyond 1989 was essential if the ESTC was to fulfill its true potential. It also considered that ESTC contributed strongly to the British Library's reputation for sound bibliographical scholarship, and that a publication programme, with revisions and extensions after 1989 would produce continuing revenue, particularly if the potential of CD-ROM technology was applied to the file. The Committee for these and other reasons was unanimous in its decision to recommend to the Board that the course of action outlined in 5.2(v) should be followed: to continue the ESTC within the BL on a reduced scale after 1989. The Committee asked the Chairman to consult with the Director General of H&SS with a view to a more precise formulation for the needs and the timescale, taking into account the need to find supplementary external funding and projected revenues.
The Board is now invited to consider this paper and agree in principle to continue ESTC for a further five year period subject to the proviso that some outside funding can be obtained in addition to the projected revenue to be earned; this level of staffing and funding would be reduced after 1989 but the level would be determined largely by the Library's success in raising external funding for the project and by the revenue from publishing and other activities arising from the use of this file.