[This is a paper due to be published later this year]

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The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
A Personal History to 1989

 

It was a grey November afternoon in 1975 when Ian Willison rang me in Ilkley, where I was happily working on a lithograph of an Arabian stallion at my Janus printmaking studio. There were plans, he said, to hold a conference at the British Library in December 1975 to explore ways and means of producing an eighteenth century STC, but things had gone wrong and Paul Korshin’s proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities had been temporarily withdrawn. Could I help? I remember not being very clear exactly what Ian was trying to say, but I told him I would come to London and find out more. This I did, and met for the first time Don Richnell, the first Director General of what was known then as the Reference Division of the new British Library established in 1973. We instinctively liked each other, and I got from Don a lucid account of how matters stood. Though I had been a regular user of the British Museum Library between 1958 and 1972, I was too pre-occupied with starting Janus to spend much time in London in the first three years of the British Library’s existence. I left Scolar Press in 1973, and my energies were being almost totally devoted to pioneering new technologies for producing hand-printed lithographs: my life-long concern with books and teaching English literature was, for a while at least, in abeyance. I could not have guessed, that November, that I had taken the first step in what proved to be the most demanding challenge I have ever faced.[1]

 

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That the world of learning needed a methodical inventory of English printing to follow the catalogues produced for the periods to 1640 (originally published by the Bibliographical Society in 1926 and compiled by Pollard and Redgrave), and from 1641 to 1700 (compiled for the Index Society by Donald Wing) had been recognized as early as 1962 when the Bibliographical Society appointed a Sub-Committee of its Council to investigate the possibility of an eighteenth century STC. It had met ten times by May 1963 when a draft report was submitted to Council. The members of the Sub-Committee were: David Foxon (Assistant Keeper in the British Museum), Frank Francis (Director of the British Museum and President of the Bibliographical Society), Lars Hanson (Keeper in the Bodleian), and Graham Pollard. Frank Francis circulated the Society’s draft proposals to a number of distinguished scholars and librarians on January 16, 1964. Some of those who commented would, in due course, re-appear in June 1976: Douglas W. Bryant (Associate Director of Harvard College Library); Frederick R. Goff (Library of Congress); William A. Jackson (Harvard); George A. Schwegmann (Library of Congress); Fredson T. Bowers (University of Virginia); James T. Babb (Librarian of Yale University); Thomas R. Adams (John Carter Brown Library); Donald Wing (Yale)[2]; Edwin Wolf II (then at the Library Company of Philadelphia); Gordon Ray (President of the Guggenheim Foundation); Verner W. Clapp (President, Council on Library Resources); James M. Osborn (New Haven); George Winchester Stone (Modern Language Association); William B. Todd (University of Texas); Sir Mortimer Wheeler (British Academy); and William Beattie (National Library of Scotland).[3] I have elsewhere commented on the remarkable significance of the year 1964[4] for the development of computer technology, but I doubt that any of those listed above were aware that technological developments would, within their lifetime, make it possible to both plan and execute a project as large as ESTC turned out to be. Nor, I suspect, could they have imagined that the successor to Wing would be a computer-based file, far superior in every way to the traditional author catalogue, in which it would be possible to find books by searching on any aspect of their physical description (author, title, imprint, country of origin, language, bibliographical reference, location, shelfmark, &c.), thereby transforming the traditional printed catalogue into a tool of quite extraordinary power.

The responses to Francis are, in retrospect, interesting. Apart from those offering good-will (Stone, Babb, Wing, Adams, Osborn, Clapp, Schwegmann, Jackson, Beattie) two deserve particular mention here: a very detailed response from William B. Todd, and an ominously discouraging letter from Douglas Bryant. Bryant indicated bluntly that:

I can generate no enthusiasm for the project. I honestly have a feeling that to tackle so enormous a bibliographical job on so broad a front would be to create a kind of Frankenstein monster who, before he was through, might have devoured bibliographers everywhere. It seems to me that once one is as far as the 18th Century, one must probably rely on different and specialized forms of bibliographical control and not hope for any kind of single listing. … I am sorry to be so negative in my reaction, but I cannot think the values of such a massive bibliography would warrant the expenditure of human and mechanical effort to produce it – not so say the enormous sums of money that I can hardly imagine would be forthcoming.”[5]

I would have occasion to remember this letter when, in 1978, it was Bryant who was hostile to the plans for ESTC – in spite of his role in the proceedings of the 1976 June Conference – and had to be politically marginalised.

Todd’s response, on the other hand, was encouraging and practically useful.[6] He sent Francis a specimen of a short-title listing for the works of Addison. Noting this, as I prepared myself for the first meeting of the Steering Group established by Sir Harry Hookway, Chief Executive of the British Library, in December 1975, I resolved to attempt a STC-type listing for Addison based on data collected from about 200 libraries and available printed catalogues as a contribution to the Conference.[7] It would, I hoped, serve as a warning to those who believed that bibliography can be done from secondary sources, as indeed (for the most part) the Society’s STC of 1926 was compiled. As early as 1960 I had learned from Bill Jackson the enormous labour involved in revising STC according to the principle of examining every copy identified.[8] An important element in the planning of the ESTC after June 1976 concerns the planning for the automation of the British Museum General Catalogue, which had been entrusted to John Jolliffe and Alexander Cain, then Assistant Keepers in the Department of Printed Books. Working out in detail how such an immense task might be attempted absorbed most of their energies between 1964 and 1966, the year in which Cain left the Museum to join the State University of New York’s Biomedical Communication Network in Syracuse. In fact, Frank Francis’ enthusiasm for the Bibliographical Society’s proposal was not unconnected with his support for Jolliffe’s work on the conversion of the Museum’s catalogue: this is borne out by several internal communications in the BM archives. The ADP Report (as it quickly became known) was internally circulated “In Confidence” in April 1967 and bore the title Report on the Feasibility of using Automated Data Processing in the British Museum, principally in the Department of Printed Books.[9] The target date proposed for seeking, with Treasury approval, the introduction of computers in the British Museum was the financial year 1970/71. In the history of library automation it is crucially important: every bit as important as the discussions which took place at the Library of Congress in 1964 regarding the creation of a computer tagging system for producing computer-based catalogues, the practical result of which was the development of MARC[10], now the universally accepted tagging code for library catalogues.[11] As we shall see, John Jolliffe’s contributions to the June Conference, and the unfolding events up to December 1977, were both pertinent and crucial.

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1966 was to prove an important year for the future of automation in libraries: from 30 June to 3 July a distinguished group of librarians, automation experts, and academics met in Brasenose College, Oxford, to try and map the future of libraries in the United States and Britain. The Brasenose Conference was chaired by Sir Frank Francis, and was attended by sixty-six of the leading librarians in both countries, and several distinguished academics and computer experts.[12] The Conference did not specifically consider retrospective cataloguing, though there are hints of Project LOC.[13] One of the most interesting papers was that delivered by Henriette Avram on Project MARC, still only in draft format, which would eventually become the de facto standard for bibliographical description in machine-readable form. Much of the Conference discussion was speculative, but the intimations of the revolution that was to come are all to be found there. It is no coincidence that Project LOC arose almost directly ass a result of this gathering.[14]

The great masses of information which libraries are preserving is very urgently needed by the community, and one of the tragedies is that our somewhat old-fashioned methods have been rendered less efficient than they ought to be by the march of time. Our present methods of access to the information, particularly in the big libraries, are ridiculously inadequate. There is a vast amount of material which isn’t used, which should be used, which is vitally needed and which we’ve got to find some means of getting out to people. We cannot possibly do it on present methods but I am certain that if the appropriate kind of machine approach is adopted, the services that big libraries can give will be absolutely transformed.[15]

~ ~ ~

The first positive result of the ADP Report was the funding by the Old Dominion Foundation (Paul Mellon) in July 1968 of an initial grant of $55,000 to the British Museum (L), the Bodleian Library at Oxford (O), and Cambridge University Library (C) “to carry out together some experiments in the collection of cataloguing information and its handling by computer.” The experiments were to constitute “a pilot project for a union catalogue of early books (up to 1801) in all languages in the British Museum and in the college and university libraries at Oxford and Cambridge. The experiments, called collectively Project LOC, are expected to take a year.” The computer which would be used was the Titan at Cambridge, and the project was to be directed by Robert Shackleton (Bodley’s Librarian 1966-79) and Jolliffe, responsible for technical matters.[16] Soon after Cain’s departure for the U.S.A. Jolliffe left the Museum to become Keeper of Catalogues at the Bodleian, and Project LOC (LOC) became firmly established in Oxford. In parallel with LOC, Jolliffe began experimenting with the conversion of the Bodleian guard-book catalogue of the collections to 1920, a task which was eventually published on CD-ROM twenty-five years later.[17]

Work on LOC proceeded and by 1976 there was a printout of the books with headings for the letter ‘O’, bound in three volumes and labeled as a “Specimen”. My copy was given to me by Shackleton and, looking at it in the winter of 1975/76 I could hardly avoid feeling that, were an eighteenth century STC to be carried out, some very delicate negotiations with the Bodleian, Jolliffe, and Paul Mellon, who generously funded the project’s continuation, would be needed. One obvious consequence would be a shift in bibliographical initiative away from Oxford and back to London, in the institution that Jolliffe had served so notably between 1955 and 1970.

On the 10th April 1970 Julian Roberts, an Assistant Keeper in the British Museum (1958-74) gave a paper to the Rare Books Group of the Library Association at Keele entitled “Towards a Short-Title Catalogue of English Eighteenth Century Books.” It was reprinted, with a more international audience in mind, in the Journal of Librarianship in October that year.[18] Roberts provided a summary of events from the Bibliographical Society’s proposal in 1964 to 1970, concluding that once the revision of STC was complete the Society, of which he was then Secretary, would turn its attention to an ESTC, and “initiate a programme of research and publication which will make a definitive record of eighteenth century books possible.” As a member of the Society’s Council from 1968 and the Publications Sub-Committee from 1970, I was, naturally, aware of what had been going on, but my priorities in 1970 were with Scolar Press and Leeds University, and I took only a passing interest in the developing momentum of academic concern voiced on both sides of the Atlantic at the lack of adequate bibliographical control over the output of the press in the eighteenth century.

It is not altogether surprising that the initiative, which would finally transform a dream into reality, should have come from the United States of America. Paul Korshin was well known to me: he had visited Scolar Press in Yorkshire and was a devoted advocate of its objectives. He used Scolar texts in his teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and undertook a fascinating study of how facsimiles of texts in the English Literature canon positively contributed to appreciation by students of the finer points of textual criticism. His report was published by Scolar Press.[19] I kept in touch with Paul on his regular visits to London, but I was quite unaware of his initiative through the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies to form a Committee within that Society specifically to forward plans for producing the desired catalogue in 1971. As far as I am aware, the Committee published two Newsletters, of which No 2 (October 1971) is particularly interesting, since it records progress on the pilot project at Cornell University directed by Donald Eddy to explore the possibility of producing an STC based on cards submitted by the “Five Associated University Libraries” (SUNY at Binghampton, SUNY at Buffalo, Cornell, Rochester and Syracuse University Libraries). Some 20,000 titles were in progress of being edited by a small staff of three librarians at Cornell. Another project was the Hand Printed Book project at the University of Western Ontario, the brain-child of William J. Cameron, which aimed to produce nothing less than a union catalogue of all books in all languages printed before 1801 in Canadian libraries. This is not the place to list all the various STC-related projects in progress in the 1970s[20], but it is clear that interest in a union catalogue of eighteenth century books was widespread. Information on STC-related projects was requested to be sent to O M Brack at the Department of English, University of Iowa. It is also worth noting that all these projects assumed that what was needed was a traditional printed catalogue, in spite of the fact that, ever since the early 1950s scholars were investigating the use of computers in producing scholarly tools.[21]

So considerable was this interest throughout the period between 1964 and 1974 that John Jolliffe was invited to give a paper to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Pre-conference in San Francisco at the meeting of the American Library Association in June 1975. Jolliffe’s paper is entitled simply: “An Eighteenth Century STC”, and most of it is concerned with issues such as scope and publishing statistics; but he did venture an answer to the fundamental question – who would benefit most from such a catalogue? His answer: “source material for historians. But we cannot serve all historians equally …” In discussions at San Francisco it was accepted that there would have to be exclusions, as indeed it was accepted in June 1976; what proved intractable was which exclusions would diminish the project’s overall usefulness least. What Jolliffe suggested was that the best way forward was to start with printed catalogues: NUC; the British Museum’s General Catalogue; specialist catalogues (Foxon, Evans, Hanson, &c.); and a host of secondary sources. He concluded as follows:

Given that the sources will in most cases be records of books, not the books themselves, and given that the sources will range from catalogues with extremely brief records to specialized author bibliographies with a wealth of bibliographic detail and distinction, the cataloguing level of the first resulting compilation will be neither high nor consistent. The prime task seems to me to be to establish as full a list as possible of eighteenth century books; refinement of the list must wait until the list has been established. Here again, the existence of a computer file will facilitate such refinement.”[22]

It must be remembered that at the time these words were spoken it was tacitly assumed by most scholars working in eighteenth century studies that any project would have to be “quick and dirty” and full of compromises, as all previous attempts to produce a strategy for doing a catalogue which adhered to sound bibliographical principles had foundered where funding was concerned. The sheer magnitude of what was being envisaged ruled out conventional funding sources, such as had been available to Project LOC. Success, if it was to be achieved, would depend upon support from major national institutions.

Paul Korshin attended the San Francisco meeting, but instead of being intimidated by either the magnitude of the project for an eighteenth century STC or the necessity to raise staggering sums of money both in England and America, he submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities  [NEH][23] a Planning Grant to prepare a Proposal for an Eighteenth-Century English Short-Title Catalogue in his capacity as Executive Secretary of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies [ASECS]. It was dated November 17, 1975.[24] This application arose from an earlier grant, which the NEH had made to ASECS to determine from its membership what research tools were most needed to enable further research. The ASECS Research Committee met at New Haven on July 12 1975 and considered the responses to the 2,000 questionnaires it had circulated to members.

It became clear to the members of this panel at that time that an Eighteenth-Century STC was a project of such importance that it deserved to be pursued further, that it deserved to be investigated fully, and that it ought to be done properly if it were to be undertaken at all. The ASECS Research Committee then voted unanimously to give this project priority over all other research tool proposals it had received.

Korshin had sound reasons for believing that the time was right for pursuing such an ambitious project. In June of 1975 he visited London and discussed his ideas with Sir Harry Hookway, the British Library’s Chief Executive, Donovan Richnell, Director General of the Reference Division, and Ian Willison, then Deputy Keeper in charge of Rare Books. Unknown at the time to Korshin was the fact that Hookway had specifically asked Willison to keep an eye out for any project that might link rare books with computers. Korshin shrewdly judged that the new British Library, well funded by Parliament, would benefit by association with a substantial international project, especially if funding was forthcoming from NEH. An important element in Korshin’s optimism was the statement of purpose in the first Annual Report 1973-4, largely written by Richnell:

The object of the Board of the British Library is therefore to weld these hitherto separate institutions into a great modern library at the hub of the nation’s library system, setting the pace in meeting the multiple needs of today’s users and satisfying new needs by creating new services.[25]

Somewhat hastily it was proposed that an international planning meeting should be held at the British Library’s Store Street headquarters in January 1976. The window for planning such a conference was impossibly tight, and both NEH and the British Library agreed that an inadequately planned conference might well do more harm than good, and both parties withdrew to consider how best to proceed.[26] It was at precisely this point that it occurred to Willison that I might be the right person to get involved.

 

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The British Library came into being on April 1 1973, with David Viscount Eccles as its first Chairman, Dr Harry Hookway its Chief Executive, Donald Urquhart (Director General of the Lending Division at Boston Spa), with A.N.L. Munby as a member of the Board, representing the Trustees of the British Museum. Munby’s presence was to prove important in the first year of the new institution’s existence, and his untimely death in 1974 was a grievous loss.[27] In May 1974 Don Richnell was appointed Director General of the Reference Division [RD], and in July of that year Maurice Line succeeded Donald Urquhart at Boston Spa. Jack Wells, who had been Editor of the British  National Bibliography since 1949 [BNB], was succeeded in February 1975 by Richard Coward as Director General of the Bibliographic Services Division [BSD], which was to play a crucial role once ESTC officially became a British Library project in January 1977.

Understandably, the new British Library could claim very little distinctive identity by the summer of 1975 when Paul Korshin enthusiastically put to Hookway, Richnell and Willison his ideas for an Anglo-American project in which the British Library would play a key role.[28] Their principal worry was who would plan and supervise such a vast enterprise. There was no obvious candidate within the existing staff of the Reference Division, apart from Mervyn Jannetta (who subsequently played an important part in the first three years of ESTC), and BSD was far too occupied with BNB and introducing automated systems for dealing with contemporary publishing. Nevertheless, Korshin’s project must have seemed attractive as well as appropriate, and had the support of the Chairman, Lord Eccles. Encouraged by Willison, Korshin lost no time in summoning enthusiastic support for his project from a wide variety of scholars and librarians in America and still hoped for a Conference in January 1976. The Library grew nervous at the hectic pace he was setting, and Willison and I exchanged several telephone calls on the subject. I was called to London in early December to meet Hookway and Richnell. The first step in the process which eventually led to the June Conference was to establish a small Organizing Committee (of which Willison was a member), and my first task was to steady nerves and convince the Library that what was being proposed could be achieved without undue strain on a management already stretched by the obligations placed on it by the terms of the British Library Act (1972. c. 54).

A significant element in the BL’s decision to abandon the January Conference was the fact that there were two independent, commercial projects which confused the issue: (1) a proposal put forward by University Microfilms (owned by the Xerox Corporation) to undertake a Checklist of 18th Century English Books as the ‘Stepping Stone to an STC’. A copy of this proposal was sent to Ian Willison by D.J. Powell on December 12 1975;[29] (2) a proposal put forward by Dawsons to compile a checklist of eighteenth century books to be compiled by Peter Wallis at Newcastle-upon-Tyne[30]. Peter was a very difficult person to deal with and I was delegated by Hookway to try and persuade Brian Enright, the University of Newcastle’s Librarian, to intercede with Wallis and to point out that rival projects could seriously affect the likelihood of a successful Anglo-American project funded by the NEH and the BL. We both failed, with the result that the Organizing Committee had no choice but to invite representatives of both commercial projects to the June Conference. I succeeded in convincing Hookway that neither posed a serious threat, notwithstanding the formidable financial and political power which the Xerox Corporation could muster if it chose to do so. In an undated memorandum from Green to Willison (I conjecture a date close to December 15)[31] it is noted that:

PJW [Wallis] tried to sell his project to UMF [University Microfilms Inc] a year ago. It was turned down for ‘commercial reasons’. Now he is threatened by a rival project. His project appears to be ill-conceived and very optimistically costed. … John Jolliffe, with his UMF connections, has told PJW to go ahead. PJW was evasive about how much of his material was already on file. … UMF estimate the operational span of the project will be five years, from the issue of a first fascicule to the last. UMF reckons on an expenditure of $100,000 over this period, a much higher cost than PJW’s project envisages.

Throughout the planning period for the June Conference the nuisance value of the Wallis and UMF rival projects made progress complex and, at times, exasperating. It was clear from the start that Jolliffe would be a key player in the conference, but it was not always easy to interpret where he stood, given his close connection with UMF and his central role in Project LOC. By the end of January 1976 I was close to exhaustion, traveling between Leeds and London, Leeds and Newcastle, London and Oxford trying to tease my way through a cobweb of rival interests and keep the support of the BL and the British librarians who would have to be won over if ESTC was to succeed: of whom Robert Shackleton (Bodley), Eric Ceadel (Cambridge University Librarian), Robert Donaldson (National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh), and Fred Ratcliffe (University of Manchester) were vitally important. Francis was retired and, I rightly judged, impartial; but an Anglo-American enterprise would have to involve the support of the senior American librarians, amongst whom Bryant (Harvard) and Rogers (Yale) were certainly the most influential. The only way to get them on board was, I suspected, fully to engage Shackleton. In order to achieve this a meeting was held in Oxford on February 9-10 with Shackleton, Francis, Julian Roberts, David Foxon, David Fleeman, Don McKenzie, Jolliffe and John Feather present. I knew I could count on Roberts, Foxon, Fleeman and McKenzie for impartial and expert advice. At the conclusion of this two-day meeting I was able to circulate a memorandum outlining an agenda for the June Conference:[32]

June 14  A Bibliographer’s view on the general principles

Foxon agreed to lead on this

June 15   The views of potential users

Fleeman agreed to lead on this

June 16   The involvement of the Computer

Jolliffe agreed to lead on this

June 17   The part played by the Research Libraries

Julian Roberts agreed to lead on this

June 18   Management Structure

“Someone from the British Library”

It was agreed that the UMF and Dawsons projects “should be omitted from formal discussions … for different reasons: UMF because as yet no definite financial commitment by the Company is factive, Dawsons because Wallis’s ambitions are largely fictive.” The concluding paragraph of the memorandum took a long time to construct because I knew it would be the first thing that Hookway would read.

With support from Robert Shackleton the British Library must be persuaded to take the initiative by writing to Korshin and indicating what has taken place in Oxford. It would be helpful if the Chief Executive were to write direct to the NEH as well. Robert Shackleton’s report to the NEH should be received by April 1st. Korshin can report to the ASECS meeting on April 9th at Charlottesville that the June Conference (if sponsored) is well on the way. If a large number of very busy people are to be collected together for a week in June then NEH must be urged to decide finally before April 15th. American contributors must be contacted by the British Library as soon as possible, after telephone consultation with Korshin (Willison’s problem). All correspondence and memoranda should be copied to Sir Frank Francis and Robert Shackleton.

As I traveled back to Leeds on February 12 I pondered the logistics of what I had started, and the brevity of the timescale in which to complete it: just three months. Korshin’s energy and Willison’s support I knew I could rely on, but institutions react slowly and get very irritated by young men in a hurry. I placed on my desk a notice printed in red: Festina lente.

The need to continue my visits to London, Oxford and Cambridge, together with the responsibilities of running my art gallery and printmaking studio in Ilkley, meant that I allowed myself just three weeks in which to research the Addison Checklist. It was based on requests to 80 British libraries as well as checking entries in NUC. Somehow, it was ready and printed by myself on June 10, and contained 311 entries. A search made on June 6, 1999 of the ESTC file on RLIN listed 412 entries for works by Addison. Subtracting 72 entries for works which I did not cover that makes a total of 340, an improvement of 10%.[33]

In order to ascertain the attitude towards the proposed conference by Cambridge bibliographers a meeting was held in the University Library on March 8 1976. Present were Eric Ceadel, John Oates, Philip Gaskell, David McKitterick, Brian Jenkins, Warner Barnes (Visiting Fellow at Leeds University from the University of Texas), Ian Willison, Stephen Green, and myself. Ceadel agreed to join the BL’s Steering Group and pledged support for the project. In spite of Shackleton’s support for the fingerprint as a matching device[34] doubts as to its efficacy were raised by Gaskell, Oates and McKitterick. But getting the support of Cambridge, in my view, was crucial as it would make it difficult for Oxford not to follow, just as, somewhat later in 1977, I got Yale to agree to participate as a means of getting Harvard involved. Green reported on the meeting to Hookway.[35] Encouraged by developments Hookway wrote to Ronald S. Berman, Chairman of NEH, on March 22 urging him to look favourably on the proposed June Conference. What part Willison played in encouraging this crucially important development is unsupported by documentary evidence, but can hardly have been small.

Korshin progressed matters with commendable speed and by April 1 1976 had produced A Planning Grant to prepare a Proposal for an Eighteenth-Century English Short-Title Catalogue for submission to NEH. Korshin’s document carried (presumably) the support of the Members of the ASECS Short-Title Committee, most of whom attended and contributed to the proceedings of the June Conference: Robert R. Allen (University of Southern California), O M Brack (Arizona State University), William J. Cameron (University of Western Ontario), Robert J. Dilligan (University of Southern California), Gwyn J. Kolb (University of Chicago), Stephen Parks (Yale University Library), Donald Greene (University of Southern California), Hank Epstein (Director of the Stanford University computing team), Rutherford Rogers (Librarian of Yale), and Robert Vosper (Librarian of the Clark Library, Los Angeles).  In the post-conference period Rogers and Epstein proved of the greatest practical help in getting the project started: Rogers because he pledged the support of Yale, and Epstein because his prodigious computer skills were invaluable to me in planning ESTC’s tagging structure and eventually making it possible for the project to become associated with the Research Libraries Information Network [RLIN] in 1980.

Hookway’s response to the Planning Grant proposal [largely drafted by Green I suspect] was cautious and to the point.[36] He urged Korshin to re-structure the paper and, after the proposed Charlottesville meeting, re-structure it as follows:

Statement of the STC project;

Options which require discussion and subsequent study;

Time-scale and funds for the preliminary project;

I recognize that in discussing details of the administrative and editorial structure and computing methods you are aiming to show NEH that the project has the support of practical people and has been carefully thought out. However there are two dangers: first, excessive detail may distract NEH and their reviewers from the main point of the problems; and, second, the best technical and administrative solutions may not emerge in the planning period if thinking has been inhibited by prior fixed ideas on individual aspects. I can foresee criticism of the detailed suggestions [sic] for joint editors and for call-slips printed out in shelf order. …

Another difficulty, which I can appreciate, is that of keeping goodwill of colleagues who ardently support particular technical and managerial solutions, and I am concerned about its possible effect on the June conference. It seems improbable that this conference can both explore the desirable and also identify the feasible within the space of a week.

With dazzling speed Korshin re-wrote his proposal to NEH, now entitled A Feasibility Study for an Eighteenth-Century British Short-Title Catalogue and dated April 21 1976. It was delivered to NEH on April 22.

A meeting was scheduled by Hookway to take place in the BL’s Executive Offices on May 6.[37] Present were Hookway, Shackleton, Ceadel, Francis, Jolliffe, Denis Roberts (National Library of Scotland), David Rodger (BL), Korshin, Willison, and myself.[38] The agenda for the conference was revised, and some issues raised in Korshin’s paper were judged inappropriate. A Steering Committee (Francis, Bryant, Willison, Korshin) was suggested. This committee, which would play a vital role in the June proceedings) would be dissolved at the conclusion of the conference. An Organizing Committee should be established to provide a structure after the conference and would be active only until the point that the project actually commenced.[39] A third committee was the Drafting Committee, which would be responsible for producing an application to NEH for funding to start work on the project. On Friday May 7 a second meeting was called by Richnell at which Korshin, Willison and I were present. Richnell agreed that tests of different levels of cataloguing could probably be funded from within RD. It was by now obvious that Willison saw Richnell as the key player in getting the support of the BL, and this was more than vindicated by the events of the next three years. At lunch with Richnell after the meeting he probed me on the extent to which I was prepared to commit myself to ESTC. I suggested that he visit me in Ilkley, meet Joanna (my wife), and witness for himself the extent of my involvement with lithography and the management of a three-star restaurant (Kildwick Hall). That visit proved constructive, and he left knowing that if called I would respond, even if it meant leaving Yorkshire for the South East – a view not shared by my wife, necessitating me to travel between Yorkshire and London for three years.

If the weather was any augury for the future of ESTC the week of the June conference was fine and uncommonly hot. Meetings were held in the Board Room of the Executive Offices in Store Street, now the College of Law. The hot weather meant that opening the windows overlooking Store Street made it impossible to hear what anyone was saying because of the traffic; for most sessions the windows remained closed. Scheduling the agenda was still in progress three days before the conference began but at 10 am on June 14 Harry Hookway welcomed the 47 invited members, and Sir Frank Francis briefly set out the format the conference would take. The speakers on the first day were Julian Roberts, Bill Todd, Sheila Lambert, John Jolliffe, Hank Epstein, and myself. In the course of my paper on the Addison Checklist I ventured to suggest that the only certain way to achieve a consistent and accurate file was to examine each item and record the bibliographical data in a uniform and systematic manner. Many present thought this would make the project unacceptably long and expensive, and many times that week we would hear about how easy it is to clean a computer file and upgrade records. If there is one thing that I learned early on in the project’s history it was that updating and correcting a file using batch processing is anything but easy. Until the file was dynamically available online on RLIN in 1985 batch processing was a weekly nightmare in which correction-strings[40] frequently introduced even more errors. In the morning session on Tuesday, the alternatives of a full record versus an STC-type record were again debated, with the brief record winning general approval. It was then agreed that a pilot project to establish timings for different levels of record encoding. These tests were undertaken later that summer by Richard Christophers of the British Library. The afternoon session was devoted to presentations from UMF and Dawsons, after which discussion continued on the format in which data should be recorded. There was unanimous agreement that the MARC format was the only one worth considering. The official minutes reveal that “The British Library agreed that priority could probably be given to the conversion of its records of 18th century English language holdings, if sufficient reason were shown.” One difficulty, which made me anxious, was that the one person who could have spoken on most of the matters being discussed – Don Richnell – was in China leading a delegation of British librarians. The most senior member of RD present was the Keeper of Printed Books R.J. Fulford, and he was understandably nervous about committing the RD in Richnell’s absence. Only Hookway, Green and Willison were aware that Richnell had already decided that the ESTC was a project he wanted to see done, but also that he intended me to do it. I had to be very careful in urging Fulford to say as much as he did. Wednesday was devoted almost exclusively to scope, with much discussion concerning the advantages of limiting scope (cost and time) and the real advantages for scholarship in not limiting it. In the post-conference period I was able to persuade Richnell that exclusions would be engraved music, prints and maps, newspapers and periodicals.

Thursday was devoted to how the project might develop once the conference recommendations had been made to the British Library. Korshin, quite rightly, pressed for an Organizing Committee to take the project further. Nominations for such a committee were solicited. On Friday Francis announced the names of the members nominated: myself, Nicolas Barker (Conservation in the BL), Bryant, Epstein, Jolliffe, Korshin, Ratcliffe, Shackleton, and Todd. My name, it turned out, was at Hookway’s (never revealed) insistence, since I had not been nominated by anyone. On July 1 the BL issued a formal statement recapitulating the issues discussed during the conference, and made the entire proceedings, including the text of all the papers read, available on three microfiches.[41]

As with most conferences much of the matters of substance, and establishing alliances with those one can trust, are effected over lunches and dinners. One of the most interesting, as far as I was concerned, was a dinner at Graham Pollard’s Blackheath home to which Todd was invited. It was a cosy affair, marred only by the fact that Graham’s treat turned out to be a disaster. He had decided to launch my career with ESTC by opening a bottle of claret given to him by Stanley Morison: it turned out to be completely empty - due no doubt to a faulty cork. Esther Potter hastily retreated to a shop to get a far more modest bottle. Graham was, by then, widely regarded as the most authoritative voice on matters bibliographical, and I felt deeply honoured that he gave his blessing to my editorial role. How he knew at that early stage that I would be the one to guide the project on its long and arduous course I never discovered; but it did discomfort Todd, who had other ideas as to how ESTC should be managed. Nonetheless, it was a memorable evening, and it was reassuring that he supported my determination to try and bring about a catalogue worthy of the standards he had always advocated. I suspect that this encouragement was communicated to those Americans who had urged a ‘quick and dirty’ approach, since I began to get an uncomfortable feeling, as the next conference on the horizon scheduled for November at the Library of Congress loomed larger.

Apart from a welcome return to Ilkley, my gallery and studio, events at the BL necessitated frequent visits to London between July and October for which I could not be compensated, as I still had no official position either within the project or the BL. There was the pilot test to see through, though the routine problems it involved were largely dealt with by Christophers. Much time was spent in the BL exploring the uncatalogued collections of ephemeral material, what Graham had called the ‘ragged edge’ at the conference. Such material is inherently more difficult to catalogue than books or pamphlets, and I wanted to amass a collection of photocopies of this type of material before I had to face the cataloguing gurus at LC. The fact that Richnell was back was greatly encouraging and in the three months before the Washington conference we had several opportunities to exchange views. Whatever agenda was being suggested for Washington he was quite clear about what he intended to achieve. The most important of these intentions concerned my role, of course, but he was making it very clear that he would announce at Washington my appointment to the BL as a consultant, and that I was to be the project’s Editor-in-Chief with world-wide responsibility for ESTC.

A quiet, not conspicuous observer of events to date was Mervyn Jannetta who had recently joined the staff of Rare Books with particular responsibility for the library’s eighteenth century collections. We were to become good friends, but in 1976 Mervyn could not have foreseen the crucial role he was destined to play once the project eventually started in 1977: for three years he shared with me the awesome difficulties which had to be overcome in getting what was conceived as a bibliographical project into one which would alter completely the way in which research would be undertaken in the future. The transformation of bibliographical information from the rigidity of sequential order to the eventual online format now so familiar in libraries throughout the world was not one which could be achieved without vision, and I was fortunate to have as my helper in this process someone with an incisive mind and the perspicuity to see where we were headed. At that time there were very few librarians who saw the computer as anything more than an efficient typesetting machine for producing ordered catalogues, whether on cards or on paper.[42]  As the number of meetings began to multiply between the end of the June conference and the conference scheduled for November at the Library of Congress I realised that I would be well advised to keep my own counsel: the project was beginning to attract the interest of too many people.

The first pilot project demonstrated that the only sensible way to proceed was from an examination of the books with the General Catalogue [ GK3] entry to hand, and that the time allowed for creating a handwritten entry, properly coded, on an input form would be approximately 15 minutes.[43] Looking back at the statistics diaries that were kept from January 1977 to 1989, it seems that most cataloguers managed to achieve an average of 24 MARC records per day.[44]

The Washington conference considered the following principal topics:

The inclusiveness of an ESTC;

A quantification of the size and scatter of ESTC material;

The overlap of material in GK3 and NUC;

A comparison of the cataloguing standards of GK3, NUC, and other major catalogues;

The elements required in an ESTC entry;

Computing and technology standards;

The relationship of the project to organisations and other projects.

 

It is hardly surprising that, in retrospect, very little was decided that did not have to undergo revision once the project got under way in 1977. As far as I was concerned the most important single decision was that on January 1 1977 I would be appointed as a consultant to the Director General of the Reference Division of British Library and would be designated Editor-in-Chief of the project.

~ ~ ~

The second pilot project, which started in January 1977, was, Richnell made clear to me, to start the project. Until a graduate team could be recruited and absorbed into the staff structure of the BL all cataloguing was done by myself and Laurence Wood, a recently retired Keeper in the Department of Printed Books – one of the three Departments established at the founding of the British Museum, the other two being Manuscripts and Antiquities. A cataloguing team, some of whom were recruited from within the Library, was assembled and started work on the gallery of the North Library in June, one year (almost to the day) after the conclusion of the 1976 conference. I was invited to participate in a sort of debate at the annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America on January 28. It was titled “Prospects for an Eighteenth Century STC” and moderated by Adams. The speakers were Todd (‘A Visionary View’), myself (‘A Practical Approach’), with Terry Belanger as ‘Commentator’. Not much of what Todd said could be construed as ‘visionary’; Adams, as usual, was cautious; Belanger had his eye on grand plans for American involvement, but these did not emerge clearly until the end of 1977.[45]

The first version of the Draft of a Proposal for Securing financial Support for the Compilation of an Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue 1701-1800[46] prepared by myself was ready on January 8 1977. Although it subsequently was enlarged and improved by various people it did at least mark an important step in securing funding for an American parallel project. I sent it to 22 librarians, and received some comments from most of the recipients. Of these, the most important were from Mervyn Jannetta, Julian Roberts, and Richard Christophers. On February 17 a meeting was held to consider the steps needing to be carried out, the most important of which was the preparation of a short manual of cataloguing rules.[47] The BL was anxious to have demonstrable support from the Library of Congress, and a meeting was accordingly arranged at LC on March 28.[48] Getting LC fully on board was to prove a daunting task, as that institution’s bureaucracy had been carefully trained to exercise extreme caution in all things. In the end we succeeded, but not until the 1980s when it was agreed that the project would agree to full AACR2 cataloguing standards including name authority records.

In April Richnell took the project to the British Library Board for approval to recruit a team and support the cataloguing of the BL’s holdings whether or not an American project was successful in getting funds.[49] This was a shrewd strategy, as it guaranteed the completion of the base file upon which any hope of an eventual ESTC would have to be built. The strategy was approved. On April 25 an important meeting between representatives of the BL and Lucia Rather (LC) took place, and it was with huge relief that agreement was reached in principle that LC would be cooperative and not obstructive.[50]

The Drafting Committee produced a second draft of the Proposal for funding in May, the result of collaboration between Tom Adams, Julian Roberts, Korshin, and myself.[51] My concerns with getting the American operation under way had to give way, in June, as the result of a letter from Francis to Richnell on the unresolved status of Project LOC.[52] Norman Higham (Librarian of Bristol University Library) had been commissioned to prepare an evaluation of LOC, but there was little hope of its being completed in the near future. Richnell asked me to provide him with my own evaluation.[53] I argued that whatever merit the fingerprint might have had when it was developed, technology had overtaken it. In July, John Feather produced another report on the fingerprint for the BL’s Research and Development Department.[54] Feather was far more enthusiastic about its efficacy as a matching device. I discussed this with Richnell: his view was that, if I was right in estimating the cost of including fingerprints in BL records as in excess of £20,000, then they would not be included in the base file records.

August was taken up almost entirely with revision of the cataloguing rules with a view to their being printed: they now occupied 29 pages of typescript, and would continue to grow in complexity of detail over the next three years. Work had to be interrupted, however, as I received a letter from Shackleton[55] informing me that a meeting was to be held at Brasenose on September 1, at which Bryant would be present, to discuss the future of LOC. Richnell was going to be in Poland on that date and he warned me that this would be a very politically important meeting and that I should attempt, by whatever means, to ensure that LOC became part of bibliographical history and no longer a nuisance to the progress of ESTC. I prepared a report for this meeting: it was signed by Richnell, Fulford and myself.[56] In the end ESTC won its case, and Bryant agreed to communicate the news to Paul Mellon personally. Victory was only temporary, however, and Bryant began after that to make life very difficult for both Tom Adams and myself.[57] I had to be careful: as a member of the Organizing Committee he was placed to exercise considerable influence on events. And did so. On my return to London I circulated an account of what had been happening since the November meeting at LC for the benefit of the British Committee.

As in the case of the June Conference in London I left Washington with feelings of optimism and despair. The optimism derived, in part, from the impression that the majority of the Committee realised that the ESTC will have to be phased, with the first phase strictly limited in scope and fullness of data, and in part from the now obvious futility of involving computers until we have gone quite a long way down the road of recording data from books by the tried and true method. The despair derived largely from the insistence of certain parties that no strategy can be developed until accurate estimates for numbers and costings for methods are established, and from the realisation that Project LOC threatens the ESTC as a viable alternative, in spite of the self-evident fact that its objectives, scope and proposed methodology are quite different. … The main thrust of argument in any document designed to secure funds for the ESTC must, accordingly, seek to demonstrate that its objectives would have a wider appeal to librarians and scholars, that its execution within a stated period is more likely to prove practicable, and that it will, in the long run, cost less. …

I have always adhered to what I call the evolutionary school of bibliography: which holds it as a principle, that books have a habit of imposing themselves on any bibliographical project, and that no matter how methodical one’s intentions, in the end they tend to dictate the methodology. … Plan as one may, the books always seem to win. …

The Drafting Committee has some nice questions to answer: do we ask for a sum of money we think we are likely to get, and tailor achievement to that figure? Or do we decide what we think we can achieve in six years given adequate staff, funds for microfilming, allowances for extensive travel by senior editorial staff, and enthusiastic contributions by small or specialist libraries, and ask for the appropriate sum?[58]

Meanwhile, plans to form a North American Committee were active, and Adams sent a draft of his proposals to me.[59] What was being proposed was a North American Committee, a British Committee, and what eventually became the International Committee, still in being and meeting annually. Names proposed were: Carl Bridenbaugh (Chairman), Terry Belanger (Editor), Thomas  Adams, Douglas Bryant, James Clifford, Hank Epstein, James Hart, Brook Hindle, Mary Hyde, Gwyn Kolb, Paul Korshin, William Matheson, Marcus McCorison, Edmund Morgan, Thomas Tanselle, William Todd, and Edwin Wolf II.[60] The constitution of this committee worried me deeply. On November 29 1977 the Americans put forward A Proposal for an American Imprints Publication Project: Belanger was to be the Editor and Adams the Principal Investigator. The project would be located at Brown University. I gave Sears Jayne (then working in the North Library) a copy of the proposal, and asked for his views: he gave them in a decidedly unflattering manner. There was not the least likelihood that Brown would act as host to the project:

I don’t mean to discourage you, but I think that Brown is a disastrous place on which to pin your hopes of American cooperation in this huge and important project. Your system here is superb, and you should not waste your energies on the Americans if they aren’t willing to cooperate. … Let the whole American side of the thing die on the vine and concentrate on getting the U.K. (or even the BL) part of the job done to the superb standards you have set for the project. … In the end it will get done in America only if individual libraries are persuaded that they cannot afford to be left out … If I were in your position I would proceed on the assumption that the American part of it will never get done …[61]

It would not have been possible to proceed in any other way than had been agreed at the June Conference, but the warning notes were sounding clearly that getting America engaged was going to be much more difficult than either Hookway or Richnell had imagined.[62]

March 23 1977 saw me back in LC for meetings of the Drafting Committee that lasted until April 2. Much of the discussion seems to have been devoted either to technical matters or to how we could secure funds for yet more meetings.[63] On a visit to the New York Public Library I had persuaded Jim Henderson, the Director, that there was merit in having an operational test of working methodology carried out there: it was, he conceded, a library not dissimilar from the British Museum with wide-ranging collections of both British and American books. Richnell liked the idea and it seemed to me that Belanger was the logical person to conduct it.

Another trip to America was being planned for October 4-12 during which Richnell and I would visit Washington, New York, New Haven, and Cambridge. The purpose of the New York visit was to get Henderson and Richnell together, and hopefully forward the New York Public Library Operational Test [NYPL-OT]; the visit to New Haven to assess the prospects of getting Yale on board; the Cambridge visit to find out exactly where Bryant and Harvard stood. Yale proved to be an ordeal I had not expected, for instead of the usual meetings, I discovered on entering the Stirling at noon that I had been scheduled to deliver a Stirling Memorial Lecture. Richnell was beside himself with glee at this unexpected agenda. It went well, even though entirely impromptu, and at lunch afterwards Marjorie Wynne[64] told me that I had almost certainly succeeded in persuading Rudy Rogers to participate. This would, eventually, lead to the co-operation of Harvard.

In September Belanger had meetings at LC to discuss with Marion Schild, a former Principal Cataloger at LC, the cataloguing rules I had drawn up: as I could have predicted, there were numerous points of disagreement about different practices used in Britain and America. These differences would lead, as events unfolded, to the decision to adopt LC conventions, a process that delayed the first edition of ESTC by at least a year.

On September 16 Matheson sent me a copy of a letter he had written to Alan Fern (Head of Research at LC) regarding our visit to Washington. I had learned that the new Director of NEH (Duffy) was proposing to cut the Research Tools Program by $11M. What I needed to know was what effect this decision might have for the future of ESTC, and I hoped that LC might be able to use its influence to arrange a meeting with Duffy. This was communicated to Adams, who wrote to me on September 16th that seeing Duffy might be counter-productive and that a meeting with George Farr would prove more effective.[65]

On returning home there was a letter from Lucia Rather awaiting me: our differences could, it seemed, be reconciled, and she very soon afterwards sent a copy of the cataloguing rules as amended by LC[66]. The editorial team in London was unhappy at what they interpreted as unwanted deference to American cataloguing practice. As the years passed even more concessions were made, and now the file is, to all intents, an American-style one: even those useful epithets used in British Museum cataloguing to distinguish persons with the same name have gone, so that it is no longer possible to retrieve from the file ‘Schoolmaster’ or members of the clergy.[67]

The British members of the Organising Committee met at the British Library on January 30 1978.[68] I submitted an Interim Report which included the bad news concerning the LC version of the cataloguing rules, but also the good news that the holdings of Göttingen University would be catalogued and incorporated into ESTC, under the direction of Bernhard Fabian[69], and that a national committee had been formed by Wallace Kirsop to harvest records for ESTC in the libraries of Australia and New Zealand. Ceadel was impressed with progress, and wrote to Richnell on February 17 indicating that he was anxious to see Cambridge University Library’s holdings incorporated. As a result of a grant from the BL Board work started in October[70], and within twelve months the library’s holdings were reported to the Editorial Office.[71]

On February 22 1978 the application to NEH for funds to start the American Imprints Publication Project was ready. The project was to be based at Brown University, with Adams as Principal Investigator.[72] Both Richnell and I were alarmed at this, since neither of us believed that Adams could carry such a heavy burden, and Brown was decidedly not the place at which to base such an important part of the strategy for ESTC as an international project. The budget for AIPP for the period September 1 1978 to August 30 1980 was $731,952. In fact, the completion of NAIP at the American Antiquarian Society took many more years to complete and cost several millions of dollars. On the same day as the application to NEH was filed, Adams wrote Richnell suggesting that the Organising Committee should be disbanded and replaced with an Anglo-American Executive Committee: three members from the U.K., three from the U.S.A., a Secretary, and a Chairman. He further suggested that I be named as overall Editor of ESTC with Belanger as Associate Editor.[73] Richnell’s response was cautious.[74]

Now for Joint Anglo-American Steering Committee (or whatever name we agree upon). The proposal that I made in New York was that this should be small, and should consist of the Chairmen of the two ‘National’ Committees, the ‘editors’ on the British and American sides and perhaps one other nominee of each Committee. This was in the context of the New York meeting’s request to Doug Bryant to consider accepting the American Chairmanship. In the event the American Committee has appointed a different Chairman, and is proposing that there should be a Joint Committee of three members from each National Committee with Doug as Chairman making a seventh member.

This proposal is one that I should judge would not be acceptable to the British Committee, although it was not put to them at the meeting. My understanding was that they will expect equal representation of both National Committees on the Joint Committee, though they would accept Doug at the outset. …

I think much will depend on the terms of reference of this Joint Committee. My own feeling is these terms of reference must be carefully considered, since, in the longer term, if there is to be a genuine Anglo-American enterprise, and not just two enterprises seeking to work together, there will have to be an element of common funding.

On March 12 I wrote Adams a forceful letter, indicating my alarm that the LC revision of our cataloguing rules had been taken over and would be used in NYPL-OT which was officially funded as of March 1. As far as my overall editorship of both the British and American projects was concerned:

It is now, at the eleventh hour, being suggested in America that if an Editor is required, that I might be that person. Let me say, at once, that I have no intention whatever of accepting such a dreadful responsibility: … if things proceed further as they are proceeding now, to undertake responsibility for sorting out the chaos which two teams working with different cataloguing manuals will inevitably create would be to sign my own death warrant. … It does not seem to me unreasonable that I should decline from clearing up a mess created by others, especially since I am on record as having consistently warned of the dangers which would follow a failure to recognise the difference between a data base and a Short Title Catalogue. …

Jane [Douglas] leaves for New York this week, … As it now stands, with the New York team committed to a set of rules basically inhospitable to eighteenth-century material, and therefore of marginal use; with no encoding manual …; no worksheet or bibslip; and, as far as I can tell (from a distance) no established objectives; I have grave doubts about the wisdom of letting her go: …                            

I added a handwritten PS (‘in lighter vein’) that brought to his attention the fact that the membership of the American Committee was: Phi Beta Kappa 9; Guggenheim Fellows 10; Harvard graduates 7.[75]

NYPL-OT formally started on March 18, with Jane Douglas there until April 21. On her return she gave me a handwritten account of her month with Belanger’s team.[76] It concluded:

The difficulty in coping with such procedural problems in the day-to-day organisation of the file is simply that the NYPL project is looking forward to AIPP and seems to have no fixed objective beyond a vague preparation for that: this is a bit pointless in view of the fact that none of the present team except Terry Belanger is likely to continue on AIPP. I was told time and again that the importance of the NYPL-OT was to establish an ESTC presence in America, but I feel that unless this “presence” can show some concrete and lasting results it may well do more harm and cause more problems than an ESTC absence.

The commencement of NYPL-OT was publicly made known by the issue of a project newsletter called ESTC Facsimile, the first number of which appeared in April.[77] In addition to recapitulating progress to date and listing the members of the American Committee, it revealed that a small computer panel had been appointed to “map out the broad specifications for the computer services required by AIPP”, and that this panel had met in New York on March 20th.[78] Also announced was that “Alston and Belanger will speak on the British and American parts of ESTC at the annual conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in Chicago, Saturday the 22nd of April.”

On April 10 ESTC took its first (faltering) step into automation and acquired a Singer 1501 terminal for direct input to tape in MARC format. I hope the Science Museum has one of these primitive contraptions, as no one who has grown up with PCs could imagine what it was like.[79] On April 15  Jannetta and I left for New York to see for ourselves what had been happening at the New York Public Library.

What was clear from discussions with Belanger and his team on April 16 was that AIPP had become the goal and that what I had hoped that NYPL-OT would accomplish had ceased to be regarded as important. In a report for Richnell[80] I noted:

The first five weeks of NYPL-OT has generated: a document that tabulates, yet again, the differences between the British Library rules and AACR2; a number of bibslips catalogued twice, according to the two sets of rules; and about one hundred bibslips for English pamphlets, of which about half were produced by Jane Douglas. The resources of the Rare Book Division have been barely tapped – although there has been expressed goodwill from the staff – and no attempt has been made to engage the cooperation of the curators of the Berg and Arents collections. No American material has been examined or catalogued. …

We went to America in the optimistic belief that all this accumulated experience [in London], if adopted by the Americans, would go a long way towards diminishing their problems and making it easier for real progress to be made. It now seems that they [have] decided to proceed with strictly limited objectives and to be satisfied with limited achievement at this stage.

After our return to London there was substantial correspondence between Belanger and myself, mostly on technical matters to do with cataloguing rules and interpretation of AACR2. Burdensome though this was I understood the need to try and maintain a friendly rapport between London and New York. The summer was spent largely trying to get Bibliography Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC into final shape for printing. This was proving difficult, as one important element in that book was an ordered sequence of records for the works of Alexander Pope in the BL. Getting the BL’s computer to perform this simple task was taking up hours of consultation between Jannetta, myself and the technical people in BSD. I was also much absorbed in writing a paper for the meeting of the American Committee scheduled for September.[81] On July 25 Korshin wrote to me about his anxieties:[82]

As the result of my conversations last week with George Farr, I have learned that he and his division are uneasy about several aspects of ESTC in the U.S., especially the management side of it and the matter of matching funding. There are, he tells me, many doubts about the AIPP proposal, dealing not only with how and where it is to be done, but also whether  U.S. should be done at all. I have learned from George that, thanks in part to the delays Tom Adams has insisted upon in beginning U.S. enrichment and thanks, too, in part to the interest that the ESTC has aroused in the U.S., smaller libraries have started to file research centers proposals with NEH, seeking funds for doing ESTCs of their own books. The splintering of the U.S. enrichment is obviously beginning, and it will continue, he and I both think, unless there is a major thrust with one U.S. ESTC project. It must start soon – within a year or two – and be planned sooner. …

It would appear, then, that those planning ESTC in Britain and the States must choose (and the sooner, the better for us all) between the two alternatives set forth here: (1) the limited AIPP project, or (2) some form of enrichment, to start before your BL encoding and converting is complete.

So far as I can ascertain, none of our drafting colleagues has faced this choice; some of them have closed minds on the very existence of the choice.

He followed with a letter to Adams on July 28, in which he was clearly upset by what seemed to him arbitrary decisions.[83] He re-iterated the fact that both of us had opposed the concept of AIPP in a meeting in May 1977 in London. The dangers implicit in the ambiguities surrounding America’s involvement in ESTC would, I was increasingly aware, have serious consequences for the project’s funding, and these dangers became explicit in the comments made by many reviewers asked by NEH to comment on the AIPP proposal. Gerald Tyson communicated these to Adams and Belanger on August 2, sending a copy to me.[84] Tyson’s closing statement was unambiguous: “The panelists agreed that an eighteenth-century short-title catalogue was an extraordinarily important research undertaking, but they could not consent to funding it with so many radical issues undecided or unclear.”        

On August 8 Adams wrote a long letter to Richnell explaining what had been happening: the AIPP proposal would not now be submitted until October with a view to funding starting in June 1979; the site would be the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, and not Brown University, and McCorison was to be in charge of the project; the meeting of the North American Committee scheduled for September 23 would be postponed; instead, a meeting of American members of the Organizing Committee would be held, about September 15, with Belanger, Bridenbaugh and McCorison invited to attend.[85] On August 17 Adams wrote to me inviting me to attend this meeting.[86] Early in September he sent me A Survey of the Holdings of North American Libraries for Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Material.[87]

Richnell and I had several informal meetings at the flat I had acquired in 1977 close to the Museum about what we should do. I persuaded him that the Americans were in such a muddle that we would be better not attending the meeting on September 15. I telephoned Farr on the 10th and indicated that we were not coming. The next evening he phoned to say that if we did not come then NEH would reconsider any role that it might be asked to play in the Anglo-American enterprise. He furthermore said that if we came he would attend the meeting. It was decided that we would go; but clearly Richnell would have to play a forceful role at that meeting if we were to salvage the deteriorating situation. As a veteran of the war in the Pacific I knew I could rely on him to be tough. Together we drafted a statement that he would bring with him: it was to be the turning point when ESTC in America would cease to be interminable strategic meetings and start to be a contribution to bibliographical control that is now admired throughout the world, and daily used by hundreds of individuals and institutions.

The meeting was held at the Grolier Club. The text of his ‘Statement’ was circulated and read, in silence, by all present.[88] Bryant, I recall, was late. It is a document worth quoting at some length.

The British Library is currently staging a tri-centenary Exhibition on Andrew Marvell. In one of the rooms with a décor relating to a green thought in a green shade, there is writ large on the wall the words: “But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”.

And the message got through to us. Having thought at first that the time-table implied by the developments in the U.S. was such that there was no point in us coming, because the British and the American side as had got so badly out of phase, I was finally convinced by a number of last-minute communications that if we got together today and re-thought together one strategy, there was some hope that we could collectively keep one step ahead of time’s winged chariot. …

There is no need for me to retrace the development of ESTC. This – and much more – is contained in a book by Alston and Jannetta, tabled here today. We only regret that it could not be in your hands before, but time again was the enemy. …

If we cannot get, apart from AIPP, an enrichment phase started in 1980, at the latest, the 1984 dead-line will be missed. It may be said that I was wrong to set such a dead-line and wrong to jump the gun by a start in 1976/77, but I confess that I thought at the time that if nobody pulled the trigger, or jumped the gun, if you prefer, we might never actually get started at all. …

ESTC has five aims:

to locate all 18th century English material;

to record as many holdings of items as we can, for the convenience of scholars and librarians;

to record this material in a manner compatible with AACRII/MARC;

to ensure that the matching of records guarantees the holdings identified as identical are in fact identical;

to ensure that the record so created can be consulted, whether on-line or in some print-out form, in a sequence that serves the interest of the scholar and bibliographer.

I will repeat these last two points, because they are essential to the very concept of an ESTC – as opposed to a random recording of items contributed to a database.

The experience in the British Library has convinced us that these last two objectives can only be achieved under a single, unified control by highly experienced staff. …

There is an urgent need for an American Associate Editor, who will be responsible for organising the collection of data with a team throughout North America, and for matching and filtering the records to London. …

There must, therefore, be a Principal Investigator to apply now for NEH funds in 1979 and to secure matching funds to secure a credible, but not impossible, sum of about $1m.

The most important immediate task is to identify now such a Principal Investigator. The next most important is to secure an associate editor of the right calibre who is able to make himself (o herself) available over the whole period.

The meeting was stunned. I caught Farr’s eye, and knew at once that this was what NEH had been hoping for. With firmness, but with politeness also, Richnell proposed the dissolution of the present committee, since a Principal Investigator would certainly want to appoint his own. What only Richnell knew was that I already had one in mind.

~ ~ ~

We returned to our hotel[89] and I immediately telephoned Henry Snyder in Lawrence Kansas. I had met Henry in 1977 and knew of his work as a historian. He had shown considerable interest in ESTC and I knew that he would bring boundless energy and political skill to the ailing American side of the project. His wife said he was in the shower, but a minute later he was listening to my invitation to come to New York the next day. He came: and we knew, then, that ESTC in America would soon be a going concern. Thoroughly briefed as to the challenge he faced, Snyder set off on a whirlwind visit to Yale, Brown and Harvard. Within a week the waverers were in flight and one of the most remarkable episodes in bibliographical showmanship had begun.

We left New York and became tourists for five days, exploring the Hudson River country and visiting places neither of us knew. Our disappearance was a calculated move. When we got to Philadelphia, as previously arranged so that I could introduce Richnell to Edwin Wolf, I telephoned Korshin. Everyone, apparently, wanted to know where we were. I knew that Richnell and Wolf would get on well together, and in the course of three days mutual respect and trust had been established. Until his untimely death in 1991[90] Wolf was a staunch supporter of ESTC and, as a member of the American Committee, served the project with wisdom and enthusiasm.

On September 26 Korshin wrote me a long letter recapitulating what had been happening since our return.[91]

As I look back over the events since you were last here in April, which was when I started to try to change things, I must say that the key step was the visit of you and Don. As I said to you in a letter in June, it was necessary that the British leaders use their influence here, including their influence with NEH. It was fitting that you and Don should help us bring about this change, which I am persuaded will be for the best, since, after all, it was Don who named Tom Adams chairman of the drafting committee in 1976 – and it was that chairmanship which led to the state of the project’s stagnation here in the last six to nine months.

I very much appreciate all that you and Don have done to help us here; it was as momentous a week in ESTC summitry here as the week at Camp David seems to have been for the Middle East.

The problems in America had to give way to a subsidiary project of ESTC in London that I had been working on for some months: to get some idea of the printed materials buried in the thousands of files at the Public Record Office. At last I was given permission to have privileged access to browse the files in the following classes: Admiralty, Board of Trade, Colonial Office, Home Office, and War Office. With a team of three we examined 3009 boxes/files in eight days, and identified about 2,000 items.[92] I estimated that the total yield from a complete survey of the relevant files (200,000) would be of the order of 80,000 items. I estimated that of this total about 16,000 would turn out to be unique. Unfortunately no such total coverage proved feasible. Nevertheless, as of June 1999 the total number of ESTC records identified in PRO is 13,234, most of which are unique.[93]

On August 21 I produced for the BL, and all those associated with ESTC in Britain, a synopsis of developments to date.[94]

It is now clear that the British Library is willing to accept the major responsibility for the compilation of ESTC. Current investment in personnel, equipment, and facilities represents a commitment in excess of £400,000. Approved and projected investment in keyboarding and further equipment represents a further £350,000 up to the year 1981. And if resources are made available to accommodate ESTC records from other libraries as part of the Library’s commitment to a central union catalogue one can envisage a further substantial sum being added. To this massive financial burden must be added the self-evident fact that the British Library has, to date, undertaken responsibility for finding solutions to the innumerable cataloguing problems and the creation of a cataloguing code only marginally at variance with AACR; resolving the difficulties of computer filing so that the eventual output embodies intellectual and bibliographical structure; devising methods (and testing them) for enlarging the base-file from the resources of other libraries; encouraging other libraries to contribute records; harvesting printed ephemera from a wide variety of sources;[95] planning and supervising the operation at the Public Record Office; undertaking a primary editorial responsibility for projects under way (or planned) in other countries.[96]

The document was intended primarily as encouragement to British and Commonwealth countries, but it also served its purpose in challenging the Americans to follow suit. With Snyder in charge they soon did. Due note was taken of developments in the BL’s Annual Report for 1977-78.[97]

Perhaps the most immediately important and encouraging result has been the progress on the preparation of the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue. This is a major Anglo-American enterprise, reported last year,[98] which will involve many other countries as well. The British Committee, of which the Director General is Chairman, is in regular contact not only with the American Committee, but with centres in Ireland, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. The present task of the British Library is to provide a computerised base-file of all its English-language eighteenth century holdings, since the Library’s holdings are by far the largest in the world. The number of titles is estimated at over 300,000. In the first six months of a three-year project 60,000 items were examined and encoded. This holds out the prospect that a task at one time regarded as virtually impossible can be achieved on a reasonable time-scale. At the same time the Library is helping and advising other libraries in Britain and abroad on the best way to prepare their input.

One of pleasant activities involving the British team was the project’s newsletter Factotum. Edited for most of its existence by Lawrence Wood, this newsletter quickly gained an international readership and the status of a bibliographical journal.[99] One consequence of its regular appearance was a marked increase in the volume of correspondence that had to be dealt with. This was not unwelcome since many scholars wrote to us with detailed information regarding texts about which they had particular knowledge. After 1980 I supplied scholars with interim print-outs of the records on file, which they duly returned with corrections and supplementary information not otherwise available to the team. This continues today and the present teams spend a great deal of time correcting errors or lacunae.

In November 1978 Richnell called me to his office. He was dissatisfied with progress and intimated that unless productivity could be improved the Board might well reconsider its commitment to the first phase of the project. He had a point, of course: a great deal of project time was being spent on enrichment from other libraries, dealing with queries stimulated by Factotum, and making corrections to the growing file, not to mention the burdensome meetings which I had to attend and the amount of travel I could hardly avoid. I wrote to him on November 29th [100] assuring him that these distracting activities would be severely curtailed. To the immense credit of the team, cataloguing output remained high and many other activities were unobtrusively continued. What I could not get the Board to understand was the fact that ESTC was rapidly developing into an international database that would, in due course, completely change our way of using bibliographical data, and come to be regarded as the dawn of a new age in the history of library automation. I did not hesitate to record my disappointment.

During the past year much effort has been devoted to developing systems to enable a large retrospective union-cataloguing operation to be carried out effectively and in the shortest possible time. Every procedure has its place in the overall design of systems and is necessary for the production of a catalogue which combines bibliographical integrity with the minimal requirements of a national data base constructed according to AACR2/MARC.  It must be appreciated that expedients adopted now will only postpone (at considerable additional cost) procedures which, if standards are to be maintained, will have to be taken account of. Failure to do so will only result in a catalogue which conforms neither to the requirements of a data base nor a short title catalogue. We may, in the end, have a product which pleases no-one. …

The discontinuance of catalogue revision will have three effects:-

a proportion of inaccurately transcribed records;

a proportion of inaccurately coded records;

a reduction in the collective experience of the team.

One consequence of an inaccurately transcribed record will be the increased difficulty of determining (at an enrichment stage) with certainty that an apparently unmatched record is, or is not, identical. Inaccurately coded records will, of course, create problems in filing and cataloguing output, some of which may, for a long time, go undetected. Any reduction in the collective experience of eighteenth-century printed material increases the risk of erroneous cataloguing. …

No-one should be encouraged to believe that the editing of a large retrospective machine-readable file produced in a manner which permits the perpetuation of error and inconsistency in a straight-forward task. It is likely to prove a task as onerous and expensive as the original encoding. In the case of the British Life base-file for ESTC the following tasks will have to be accomplished before any attempt at sequential ordering, as exemplified in the Pope print-out, is undertaken:

Duplicates not examined will have to be retrieved and compared against the manual record – this will involve some 60,000 book-movements.

The authority file will have to be completed, otherwise an Anglo-American project will be seriously affected.

The entire file will have to be proof-read unless a file full of transcription, coding and keyboarding errors is deemed adequate.

The entire file will have to be scanned for inconsistencies in title-transcription and general notes; ironing out these inconsistencies may require further reference to the book.

All records in the manual file with data on the verso of the record card will have to have that data inserted into the machine-readable file.

The remaining collective headings will have to be catalogued, as will the uncatalogued items in the Department of Manuscripts. …

It seems certain that one important consequence of the decision to postpone any editorial activity until 1981 will be the relative inutility of the machine-readable file to an American editorial team until the above six stages have been completed. …

I can appreciate the Library’s disappointment at the lack of progress during the past year. I can also appreciate that the Library may well, in the light of this failure to adhere to the original schedules, reconsider its commitment to the ESTC. I have repeatedly, since 1976, warned of the consequences which would follow any substantial alterations to the basic requirements of a short title catalogue. The record of such alterations as have had to be made under apparently irresistable [sic] pressures are clearly recorded on [in] the book on the ESTC. The Library should, at this juncture, consider carefully its intentions and its expectations: the challenge, as always, will lie in defining a scholarly objective which balances creditable ambitions with responsible allocation of limited resources.[101]

I have quoted extensively from this letter because it serves to illustrate how easily strategic decisions based exclusively on cost usually lead to greater, not less, eventual costs. It also demonstrates the fundamental requirement of a consultant to tell the management of the institution (s)he serves the reality as (s)he sees it: it is well understood that members of staff usually tell their managers what they want to hear. As the years rolled by every prediction I made in this letter came true, and taking remedial action has proved vastly expensive.[102]

Early in 1979 I suggested to the BL that a consultant should be appointed to look at ESTC with a view to recommending how best the editing of the file could be accomplished in the period up 1986 when the first edition was scheduled for publication.[103] I did this as a means of self-protection, for it was becoming clear that my views needed the support of an outsider. The person finally selected to carry out the study, which lasted from April to June, was Ross Burgess from Data Logic. The report was submitted in July.