THE HISTORY OF ESTC

 

As published in The Age of Johnson, Volume 15, 2004.

 

The English Short-Title Catalogue: Past, Present, Future edited by Henry L. Snyder and Michael S. Smith represents a collection of contributions to a celebration held at the New York Public Library on January 21, 1998. It was fitting that the NYPL acted as host to this celebration since I had arranged in 1978 for the first presence of ESTC (then called The Eighteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue) in America of the project that had been in existence since January 1977 under my direction at the British Library. That presence had been planned by myself and Jim Henderson as a demonstration to sceptical American libraries that the project, however demanding it might prove to be to librarians, would nevertheless yield benefits of incalculable importance to the academic community. 1978 was a crucial year in the project’s history: progress in America had been disappointingly slow and beleaguered by political interference from members of the North American Committee chaired by Douglas Bryant of Harvard University. The National Endowment for the Humanities – the body which assisted in funding the June Conference in 1976 and has since played a crucial role in the funding of the project in America – was getting nervous; my Director General in the British Library, Don Richnell, was getting extremely nervous, since he had led the British Library Board to believe that the British financial contribution would be matched by funding from America. But I am straying into history …

 

The title of Snyder’s book suggests that it is a history: why else “Past, Present, Future”? In fact the book is pretty thin as a history of the project since the chapters ostensibly devoted to chronicling the record of the project’s development are by Snyder [Project Director of ESTC], Marcus McCorison [Project Director of NAIP], G. Thomas Tanselle [no formal connection with the project until he became a member of the Board of Directors of ESTC/NA incorporated in the State of Louisiana in 1984], and Michael Crump [my successor in the British Library].  It is a pity that that history had to give way to rhetoric: the result being that this book reads more like a grant proposal than an honest attempt at chronicling the progress of what will always be regarded as a remarkable project based on the collaborative effort of hundreds of scholars and librarians.

The genesis of the book was Snyder’s decision, taken I suppose early in 1997 to stage a celebratory conference ostensibly to assess “our progress to date” and to speculate “about the futures of the ESTC”. The use of the plural here is not, apparently, a slip: it is there to suggest that the project might well have a different future in Europe than in North America. Of the thirteen contributors to this volume, four were administrative (Henry Snyder, Marcus McCorison, John Haeger, and Michael Smethurst), four were not connected in any way with the project; leaving two: Paul Korshin, in more ways than one the project’s first-mover; and Michael Crump, the only contributor with day-to-day experience in the project’s development, and who was with the project from its inception in 1976. The Preface contains one terse sentence: “Robin Alston was invited to contribute but declined.”

 I was not, it should be stated for the record, invited to participate in the New York Conference. The invitation was to contribute some history to the printed volume; but knowing Snyder’s preference for jubilation I think I was wise to decline: whatever I might have contributed would have been airbrushed and sanitised. However, as it happened, about the same time that Snyder invited me to contribute to the volume I was asked to contribute a personal history of ESTC to a volume of essays celebrating the career of Ian Willison. Since it was entirely due to Ian that I became involved in ESTC I accepted this invitation with enthusiasm. The entire summer and winter of 1998 were spent in ordering my considerable archive for the project’s history, and writing my Personal History for Ian’s celebratory volume. By the summer of 1999 it became obvious to me that Ian’s volume was undergoing severe birth pangs, and I decided to put this personal history on my website. Significantly, it is not once mentioned in the Snyder volume. When Paul Korshin invited me to review the Snyder volume for The Age of Johnson I eagerly accepted: especially since he indicated that I could use as much of what I had already written in the Personal History as I wished. What follows is a blend of direct comment on The English Short-Title Catalogue with interpolations extracted from the personal history. All of the documents [several thousand pages] on which this history is based have been deposited in the Bodleian Library, together with papers relating to my involvement in the affairs of the British Library over a period of twenty years, and covering automation, preservation, and staff training.

 

The Beginnings 1976-1983

 

It is puzzling that the book’s first chapter – “A Brief History of the English Short-Title Catalogue in North America” – should have been written by someone who had nothing whatever to do with the project until he accepted a Directorship of ESTC/NA in 1984. Tanselle disarms criticism by stating that: ”A detailed account of what has been called (in various ESTC documents) ‘the largest multi-institutional cooperative bibliographic project ever undertaken’ must some day be written. What I offer here is a capsule history of the complex series of events that occurred on the American side.”[1] The account of how the New York Public Library Operational Test came into being, and the decision to fund the American Imprints Publication Project when it became operational at the American Antiquarian Society under the direction of Marcus McCorison can only be described as ablative. Ablative history is forgivable: inaccurate history is not.

 

Since Snyder’s book says virtually nothing about the events which led to the beginnings of a project in America during, or after, the June Conference, perhaps it is appropriate here to give readers my own view of developments. In many ways what happened to the project after 1989 when it was made clear that my overall direction of the project did not square with those who silently acceded to Snyder’s proposition that the recording of the output of the press between 1701 and 1800 was not ambitious enough and that everything from 1475 to 1700 should be incorporated. This I saw at the time as a disastrous decision, and said so. But, in retrospect, it is clear that this was the direction in which the project was inexorably bound, because it had long ceased to be a scholarly project and had become a venture in international librarianship. The seeds of ESTC’s new mission had been planted many years earlier, and I was well aware of that: but in the power play exercised by international librarians a lone voice could have little influence. I have, therefore, dwelt at some length on the early years because they can now be seen as crucial in determining ESTC’s subsequent history. It started, as so many ambitious projects do, with a dream. The dream had been coming for quite some time, as I have described it in the book I wrote in 1977 with the help of Mervyn Jannetta[2].

It is not altogether surprising that the initiative, which would finally transform the 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.[3] 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[4], 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.[5]

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.”[6]

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][7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

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.[10] It was at precisely this point that it occurred to Willison that I might be the right person to get involved.

In November 1975 nothing could have been further from my thoughts than planning a conference to explore ways and means of cataloguing all the English eighteenth century books in the world’s libraries. I was happily beginning to enjoy the first fruits of a project to do for art what I had, at Scolar Press, done for books. The Janus gallery was enjoying some success after a distinctly shaky start, and I had aroused the interest of the London market: David Shepherd did a splendid piece in the Telegraph entitled “A Courtyard in Ilkley”. I had artists from England, France, Austria, and Japan working with me in my printmaking workshop to create original lithographs which were being sold at very reasonable prices. I had enjoyed two exhibitions in London in which the pencil-like lithographs by Stuart Walton of London’s vanishing docklands were very successful – a set of these is in the Wapping River Police Station Museum, as that Station had generously afforded Stuart and myself transport on a Police launch around the docklands of Southwark.

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.[11] 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.[12] 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 British Library’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;[13] (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[14]. 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 British Library. 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)[15] 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 British Library 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:[16]

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%.[17]

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 British Library’s Steering Group and pledged support for the project. In spite of Shackleton’s support for the fingerprint as a matching device[18] doubts as to its efficacy were raised by Philip Gaskell, John Oates and David 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.[19] 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 Stephen Green I suspect] was cautious and to the point.[20] He urged Korshin to revise the paper and, after the proposed Charlottesville meeting, re-structure it as follows:

1. Statement of the STC project; 2. Options which require discussion and subsequent study; 3. 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 British Library’s Executive Offices on May 6.[21] Present were Hookway, Shackleton, Ceadel, Francis, Jolliffe, Denis Roberts (National Library of Scotland), David Rodger (British Library), Korshin, Willison, and myself.[22] 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.[23] 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 Reference Division. It was by now obvious that Willison saw Richnell as the key player in getting the support of the British Library, 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 weekly 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[24] 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 at 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 the Reference Division present was the Keeper of Printed Books R.J. Fulford, and he was understandably nervous about committing the Diviision 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, Bryant, Epstein, Jolliffe, Korshin, Ratcliffe, Shackleton, and Todd. My name, I later discovered, was at Hookway’s (never revealed) insistence, since I had not been nominated by anyone. On July 1 the British Library 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.[25]

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.

The June Conference has come to be seen as profoundly prophetic of the events which would overtake ESTC: all of the tensions between those who saw it as a bold and exciting academic project designed to open up a century for those engaged in research and those who saw it almost exclusively as a library automation project were there. None of this is addressed in Tanselle’s account, in spite of the fact that America was represented by more than half of those who came to London.

Apart from a welcome return to Ilkley, my gallery and studio, events at the British Library 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 in the British Library. There was the pilot test to see through, though the routine problems it involved were largely dealt with by Christophers. Much time was spent 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 the Library of Congress. 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, and he was making it very clear that he would announce at Washington my appointment to the British Library as a consultant, and that I was to be the project’s Editor-in-Chief with world-wide responsibility for ESTC.

A quiet, inconspicuous 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.[26]  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.[27] 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.[28]

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 begin the project. Until a graduate team could be recruited and absorbed into the staff structure of the British Library all cataloguing was done by myself and Laurence Wood, a recently retired Keeper in the Department of Printed Books. 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.

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[29] 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.[30] The British Library was anxious to have demonstrable support from the Library of Congress, and a meeting was accordingly arranged at LC on March 28.[31] 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. This was seen by those who had consistently tried to force ESTC into being a library project as a victory. How history will regard this victory is another matter, especially now that the project’s future seems particularly vulnerable.

In April Richnell took the project to the British Library Board for approval to recruit a team and support the cataloguing of the British Library’s holdings whether or not an American project was successful in getting funds.[32] 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 British Library 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.[33]

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.[34] 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.[35] 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.[36] 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 British Library’s Research and Development Department.[37] 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 British Library 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[38] 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 Project 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.[39] 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.[40] 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?[41]

Meanwhile, plans to form a North American Committee were active, and Adams sent a draft of his proposals to me.[42] 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, G. Thomas Tanselle, William Todd, and Edwin Wolf II.[43] 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 British Library) 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 …[44]

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.[45] If one considers the way all this is dealt with in Snyder’s book then it must have been plain sailing!

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.[46] 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. What I did not anticipate was Belanger’s real objective: to inaugurate a parallel project to catalogue the output of the printing press in North America up to the year 1800. As events unfolded it became clear that there were going to be two huge projects competing for funding for the next fifteen years. What evolved from AIPP was NAIP; and this project, based at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, was entirely independent of ESTC; raised its own funding; planned its procedures; and adopted a machine-readable structure for its records in line with Library of Congress procedures. The records created in this project are now part of the ESTC file, available on RLIN; they are remarkably full and accurate – as they should be, considering that they cost the American taxpayer about five times what an ESTC record cost!

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 Library 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[47] 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.[48]

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 the Library of Congress[49]. 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.[50] The drift towards LC practices proved unstoppable.

The British members of the Organising Committee met at the British Library on January 30 1978.[51] 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[52], 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 British Library Board work started in October[53], and within twelve months the library’s holdings were reported to the Editorial Office.[54]

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.[55] 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.[56] Richnell’s response was cautious.[57]

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.[58]

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.[59] 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.[60] 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.[61] 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.[62] 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[63] 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 British Library. Getting the library’s computer to perform this simple task was taking up hours of consultation between Jannetta, myself and the technical people in Bibliographical Services Division. I was also much absorbed in writing a paper for the meeting of the American Committee scheduled for September.[64] On July 25 Korshin wrote to me about his anxieties:[65]

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 British Library 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.[66] 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.[67] 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.[68] On August 17 Adams wrote to me inviting me to attend this meeting.[69] Early in September he sent me A Survey of the Holdings of North American Libraries for Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Material.[70]

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.

In Snyder’s book the decisive Grolier meeting is dealt with summarily by Tanselle:

This committee, along with several other members of the North American Committee (Belanger, A.H. Epstein of Information Transform Industries, Farr, McCorison, and William B. Todd of the University of Texas) and two British Library representatives (Alston and Richnell), met in New York on September 15, 1978, and formulated a general outline for the enrichment stage. The plan was to train and American team, using collections not likely to overlap British Library holdings, during the time when the basic British Library record was being completed so that a routine would be in place to produce as full an enrichment as possible from American holdings by the time of publication of Phase I (then expected to be 1984). The other crucial element in the committee’s plan was the establishment of a central clearinghouse and the appointment of a director of the operational activity of the ESTC in North America. Two days later, on September 17, 1978, Korshin offered the position to Snyder (whose scholarly, administrative, and business experience had caused him to be regarded for some time as the best choice; the next day, Snyder met with Alston, Belanger, and Richnell in New York and the day after he saw Adams and Bridenbaugh in Providence; and, despite his earlier intention to return to his research now that he had given up the post of dean of Research Administration at Kansas, he accepted the position. The Committee of Management then formally named him and went out of business, to be succeeded by an Advisory Committee, with Snyder in the chair.[71]

As history, this account needs correction. What transpired at the Grolier Club meeting was that Richnell made it clear that the present committee was performing no useful purpose and should be disbanded. It was a brief meeting, at which Richnell read a statement he had prepared. The text of his ‘Statement’ was circulated and read, in silence, by all present.[72] Bryant, I recall, was late for the meeting. 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