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 18^th 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 1^st. Korshin can report to the ASECS meeting on April 9^th 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 15^th. 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 18^th 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 16^th 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 20^th.[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 22^nd 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 10^th 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 18^th 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 (or 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 no one present knew was that I had already decided (with Richnell’s approval) to invite Henry Snyder to become American Editor. I had first met him at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association held in Chicago the previous January. I had given a talk to the Eighteenth Century Group on ESTC, and Snyder afterwards expressed his keen interest in the project. I subsequently checked his essays on the reign of Queen Anne, and discovered from several friends who knew him that he was a “mover and shaker”, with boundless reserves of energy and political skill. I phoned him that evening and asked him to come to New York the following day: which he did.

Within an hour in our somewhat shabby room in the Iroquis Richnell and I knew 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.[73]

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[74] Wolf was a staunch supporter of ESTC and, as a member of the American Committee, served the project with wisdom and enthusiasm. Though professionally a librarian Edwin stubbornly maintained throughout his long career as Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia that librarians exist to serve scholarship.

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.[75] 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.[76]

On September 26 Korshin wrote me a long letter recapitulating what had been happening since our return.[77]

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.[78]

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; and that of this total about 16,000 would turn out to be unique. Unfortunately no such total coverage proved feasible. Nevertheless, as of October 2003 the total number of ESTC records identified in PRO is 15,590, most of which are unique.[79] For researchers the significance of PRO entries is that they are almost always found associated with manuscript documents illustrating their relevance, so that even when undated it is generally possible to suggest a date with greater accuracy than is possible with an ephemeral item bound in a guard book.

On August 21 I produced for the British Library, and all those associated with ESTC in Britain, a synopsis of developments to date.[80]

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;[81] planning and supervising the operation at the Public Record Office; undertaking a primary editorial responsibility for projects under way (or planned) in other countries.[82]

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 British Library’s Annual Report for 1977-78.[83]

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,[84] 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.

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 29^th [85] 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.[86] 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.[87]

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 he/she serves the reality as he/she sees it: it is well understood that members of a permanent 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.[88]

Early in 1979 I suggested to the British Library 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.[89] 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.[90] Conferring with Burgess on countless matters of detail took up most of my time for the three months he was involved, but I was pleased with the outcome, as it broadly agreed with what I had been convinced was the only way forward. On January 29 I produced for the British Committee a paper on the subject.[91] It is, I believe, an appropriate exposition of the differences between modern and hand-press books.

The editing of a large retrospective machine-readable bibliographical file … is likely to prove an operation of great complexity. It is likely to prove, unless I am much mistaken, an operation without precedent, and there exists no model upon which it might be based. … The displacement on a data-base of an inadequate or inaccurate record for a current book is a relatively simple matter: … Furthermore, contemporary books (with a few notable exceptions) tend on the whole to be capable of isolative treatment: the substantive facts surrounding their publication are known (and increasingly through legislation declared), and they may never be reprinted. … By contrast, eighteenth-century items may exhibit ambiguities of every sort: author, place of publication, date, intended make-up, position in the textual sequence, illustration – all are, at times, the subject of considerable doubt, and the interpretation of the book in hand in order to arrive at an authoritative record frequently requires simultaneous examination of other copies, and other editions. There are, however, those who, in spite of the self-evident differences between ancient and modern books, maintain that the systems in use for contemporary data-bases provide the only practicable solution. … It has been clear for some time that the enrichment of ESTC from the holdings of other libraries presents very considerable problems. In Britain there exists a substantial consensus of agreement that a centralized editorial headquarters through which must pass all data to be incorporated (whether holdings or new records) is a precondition for the sort of publication envisaged in Bibliography, Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC. The two techniques for enrichment already devised and tested are (1) the volunteer record card, and (2) the marked-up photocopy of the title-page (with details of shelf-mark and pagination). … Discontent with these two techniques is manifestly negligible, and ESTC has already secured the willing cooperation of an impressive number of libraries in the United Kingdom. The marked-up photocopy is the basis, too, for data being submitted by Trinity College, Dublin, and Göttingen University. In America, on the other hand, there exists a formidable opposition to any method of enrichment which excludes a mechanical approach. Two methods are advocated: (1) the distribution of regularly updated and cumulated COM files to libraries wishing to cooperate; and (2) on-line access to the file (again regularly updated and cumulated) through one of the current data-bases (OCLC, BALLOTTS, etc.). …Realisation of the practical difficulties which their predisposition to a decentralized mechanical strategy will involve may well result in a decision to abandon for the first edition of ESTC a structured file modeled on that which the British Library is determined to produce.

One of the truly 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.[92] 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. Factotum is now no more, alas.

As 1979 wore on, I grew anxious about the future of ESTC after Richnell’s retirement on December 31. He had been, during the first three years of the project, both enthusiastic and wise, and we worked together so well that I found it hard to believe that his successor would be able to provide support within the British Library for the project’s well-being and have, as well, the political subtlety to circumvent trouble when it occurred in a project of such magnitude and complexity. Another cause for worry was Jannetta’s decision to return to his original post in 1980. No-one who has ever had to chart and manage a large project could ever have a lieutenant as loyal and dedicated, and he always supported my determination to try and make ESTC a scholarly, not just a library, project. My anxieties proved warranted for the next Director General, Alex Wilson, proved exceedingly difficult to deal with!

This is perhaps an appropriate point to interrupt the chronology of events and reflect on precisely why ESTC engaged so many minds, with sometimes contradictory views as to how it should be completed. It must by now be obvious that the two principal constituencies were academic (scholars who wanted a full and accurate inventory that would, like STC, enable historical research), and professional (librarians who, for the most part, were concerned with using information technology in the service of their users). In subtle ways the agendas of each community were quite different.

What interested me was the potential provided by both the technology and the methodology to radically change the way in which researchers use bibliographical information. It was clear from my discussions with other bibliographers in Britain that if ESTC did not succeed in pioneering a new kind of bibliographical resources it would be judged a failure. The key, I early realised, was to ensure that the base file being created at the British Library was as full and and as accurate as possible. The bibslip was created as the primary input form and elaborate rules evolved as to its proper use.[93] The original design was intended for use by contributing libraries as well as the British Library team, but it soon became clear that this was impractical. Recording data on a bibslip requires skill and arduous training: this, I realised, could never be achieved by most contributing libraries. So an alternative, and highly successful, technique was adopted: a photocopy of the titlepage with a template on which a relatively unskilled trainee could record the format, the pagination/foliation, and any other features judged to be relevant, such as illustrations, marginalia, provenance, &c. On the whole this procedure worked remarkably well, though there were inevitable discrepancies between 12mo and 18mo, often difficult to distinguish, and aberrant pagination sequences. In the matching phase both at the British Library and in America it was generally not difficult to make a match with reasonable accuracy. For this reason it was decided to record locations as either verified or unverified. The number of unverified locations now to be found on the file is considerable, but at least users are given a warning. For example, many thousands of British locations derive from the manual file assembled from a variety of sources at the National Central Library (the so-called ‘union catalogue’ administered by John Palmer for many years); similarly, there are American locations which derive from sources such as NUC. Whether, at some in the future, unverified locations will be upgraded to verified remains to be seen. If the current downsizing of ESTC staff on both sides of the Atlantic is any guide to the future, it seems to me more than likely that whatever shortcomings the present file of 468,209 records contains are likely to remain.

In America it was decided, wisely, to sort records submitted by title, thus ensuring that sometimes as many as fifteen titlepages for a given entry were looked at together before being incorporated as locations. In this way numerous variants and re-issues surfaced which almost certainly would have been missed if the the person matching was working from handwritten bibslips. It will be some time, of course, before the success of the methodology used can be assessed, but one must hope that the number of ‘not in ESTC’ items reported by scholars and booksellers will diminish as the file gets improved.[94]

In America Snyder moved rapidly to get a team together: not, as I had originally presumed at Lawrence, Kansas, but at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where, on the strength of being head of the American project, he had succeeded in becoming Dean. January 1 1979 was, therefore, a date of unusual significance for the project. His proposal to NEH had been submitted on 21 November 1978. Until funds were available he had succeeded in getting approval from NEH for $9,000 of unspent funds from the NYPL-OT to get things moving. I had studied his proposal carefully and sent him detailed comments on January 3.[95] Although Snyder’s abrupt departure for Baton Rouge did worry me somewhat, it also worried some of my American friends. I received a letter in January from Fred Mosher of the School of Library and Information Studies at Berkeley.[96]

As you know, Jim Hart of the Bancroft Library here is on the American committee and has been receiving at least some of the material on the American ESTC plans and proceedings, which have seemed confusing and tangled and devious, as viewed from here, at any rate. Hart did receive a copy of the proposal Henry Snyder made to the NEH, and we have been able to examine and react to it. Hart, Dean Buckland of the library school, and I all agree that the dependence on volunteer help is not realistic and that continuing use of bibslips as soon as a reasonably adequate database is available is inefficient. We think the American enrichment ought to start right away with the data base already established and that the results of the ESTC cataloguing ought to be made available immediately to scholars through some such organization as BALLOTTS.[97] Dean Buckland has discussed this idea with BALLOTTS, which professes to be very much interested in making ESTC cataloguing available through its channels during the compilation process. …We are also worried about Snyder’s having enough time and energy for the ESTC now that he has taken on a new and demanding job at a different university just as he is shouldering the responsibility for the American enrichment. There seems to us to be an apparent vacuum in leadership at the top of the American ESTC. We think it strange that there is a division between the cataloguing of North American imprints and the enrichment of the United Kingdom imprints. Surely the whole program ought to be under one administration.[98]

On January 12 Bridenbaugh wrote to the North American Committee informing them that, in view of recent developments, he was dissolving the committee.[99] Snyder moved quickly to persuade Robert Lumiansky, President of the American Council of Learned Societies, to act as Chairman of the new committee.[100]

Snyder visited London in April and communicated the fact that a decision on the NEH grant was experiencing difficulties. We were, erroneously as it turned out, given the impression that it had been rejected: it was, in fact, deferred, due to a variety of factors, one of which I felt sure was the large sum requested by NAIP. A revised proposal was submitted in June. One point was made forcefully in a letter Richnell sent Snyder in July.[101]

A point which both Robin and I made forcefully to Doug Bryant when he was here a few weeks ago was that opposition to the original proposal (in which the whole U.S. team would spend six months in London) has now resulted in a very large Achilles heel. It was never our intention to use the American team “to reinforce the British Library effort”. What I did say in New York was that the work they might produce I would regard as adequate compensation for our staff effort in training them. As things stand, Miss Singleton, whose credentials on paper certainly seem adequate, will have to absorb in three months the experience of ESTC over nearly three years.

NEH approved the proposal in August[102] and Snyder quickly hired Judith Singleton,[103] a cataloguer at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and plans were in place for her to visit London on October 25 for three months.[104]

Pre-occupation with cataloguing rules for older books had been going on apace at the LC,[105] the American Antiquarian Society [AAS] in Worcester, and the Independent Research Libraries Association [IRLA].[106] Reading successive drafts of these documents, and providing detailed criticisms of the manifold errors and inconsistencies they contained, was beginning to wear my patience, and distracted me from other far more important responsibilities. One such was preparing for the meeting in Washington on November 28.[107] This would, everyone devoutly hoped, see the three projects running in a complementary mode and not as separate enterprises. It was not to be. From that point on NAIP gradually asserted its absolute independence, a position maintained to the end.

Early in 1980 I began discussions with Fred Kilgour, the President of OCLC, when he visited London. He was anxious to have OCLC as the host for the enrichment phase of ESTC. At more or less the same time I had discussions with John Haeger from RLIN, the network for the Research Libraries Group [RLG]. Knowing that Epstein had been largely responsible for setting up the original Stanford BALOTTS, I telephoned him and asked his advice. In spite of serious funding problems at that time he was certain that RLIN would be the best choice. I both liked and admired Kilgour – a visionary if ever there was one – but followed Epstein’s advice: on matters like this I knew he had forgotten more than I would ever know. Since a new Director General was not yet in post, I wrote to the senior Keeper, R.J. Fulford.[108]

I have now had the opportunity of assessing the advantages which might be derived from ESTC in North America being involved with OCLC and RLIN. In the former case, by conversations with Fred Kilgour, in the latter in a recent meeting with John Haeger of RLIN. It seems to me that, all things being equal, while OCLC can undoubtedly involve a much larger number of cooperating libraries within their system, RLIN represents the greatest potential. … It has been suggested to me that on Haeger’s return to the U.S. this week he will explore with the Board of RLG the possibility of some inter-involvement with ESTC. … I know that Sir Harry Hookway is predisposed to look favourably on a RLIN link with ESTC, especially in view of the recently announced arrangements between RLIN and the Library of Congress.

I requested funding for a visit to Stanford by myself and Christine Ferdinand, a member of the ESTC team to whom I had allocated responsibility for liaison with ESTC/NA. The person in BSD now formally attached to ESTC and its automation was Christine Ashby, and it was agreed that she would participate in the discussions with RLIN staff. Haeger wrote me at the end of March and summarised the discussions at Palo Alto.[109]

Extensive discussion March 17-18 at Stanford … The parties agreed that the following general technical strategy is feasible and desirable: the ESTC master file (after testing) be established as a special data base in SPIRES with necessary file maintenance support, available to Henry on-line for record identification and the incorporation of holdings data. The file be made available for reference only to other RLIN users. … RLG and ESTC/British Library agree that RLIN has the capability to analyze, load, index, update and maintain the ESTC file. … Preference for this strategy is based on the conviction that alternative approaches are impractical. … If RLG were to undertake the involvement described above, it would recognize a programmatic commitment to the satisfactory completion of the project. …

It proved to be a historic document, and though I realised we were taking a gamble, ESTC has over the years progressed in a quite extraordinary way with RLIN. Approval by the RLG Board was secured on May 13, and this was communicated to Hookway on May 29.[110] The Web version of the current file, available through Eureka, is easy to search and displays information clearly and elegantly.[111]

In March the British Library officially proclaimed the international developments:[112]

The huge task of cataloguing the British Library’s eighteenth-century holdings has been making steady progress since the project began in 1977 and 100,000 records have now been put into machine-readable form. More than 100 libraries in the U.K. are now participating, and it has recently been announced that the American side of the project, under the direction of Professor Henry Snyder at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In charge of the editorial team being recruited at Baton Rouge is Judith Singleton (formerly rare book cataloguer at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library) who has just returned to America after a three-month period working with the British Library’s ESTC team. Already an impressive number of American libraries have agreed to participate, and records are coming in from major research libraries across the country. … If all goes as planned the first edition of ESTC will be published in microform in 1987. But scholars will not have to wait until 1987 to discover the data contained in the ESTC file: plans are well advanced to have ESTC available on BLAISE by the summer, albeit in unedited form, thus adding to the national computer-stored record a retrospective file of great importance for the world of scholarship. It should be noted that publicity put out by the British Library still emphasised the project’s academic and scholarly importance, and continued to do so for at least a few years. Now there is virtually no publicity for ESTC put out by the British Library and its staff has dwindled to a handful, most of whom have other responsibilities in the Early Collections.

My own problems at this critical juncture were aggravated by having to deal with two new Directors General: Alex Wilson (Reference Division) and Peter Lewis (Bibliographical Services Division). Neither of them participated in the early years of the project; both were bureaucratic, had other priorities; and neither understood the subtle complexities of ESTC. Snyder expected decisions to be taken in London rather more quickly than was realistic.

Snyder was causing me some difficulties because he seemed convinced that ESTC/NA could work online using the computer facilities at Louisiana State University. I had left for Washington and Baton Rouge on March 9 and learned of these plans while I was at the Library of Congress discussing the network future of ESTC with Henriette Avram. She was adamant that a local solution would be a mistake. Alex Wilson, the new Director General was only in post early in March, and I had to negotiate with Snyder virtually on my own. On March 1 Holly Phelps joined the U.S. team, and a third recruit, Martha Smith was due to start on July 1. I was very impressed with the way in which Judi Singleton had organised the project and by the time I left Baton Rouge my confidence in the future of ESTC had grown considerably. She was to prove an able and orderly leader and shared my conviction that the quality of ESTC records was of paramount importance. She also shared my worries about Snyder’s tendency to flirt with solutions to problems without thinking them through. By June, however, he wrote a long letter outlining progress and future problems to George Farr at NEH.[113] He was preparing another grant application and sought assurance from NEH that he would be able to assist certain libraries in identifying their eighteenth-century holdings and submit marked-up photocopies of titlepages for matching, as was being done in London.

At this time I was anxious to involve Canadian libraries, and Hookway wrote to Guy Sylvestre, head of the National Library of Canada, asking him to try and organise a conference to ensure Canadian participation.[114] Sylvestre was sympathetic, and in September I re-wrote my paper The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: Past – Present – Future for the Canadian Association of Research Libraries [CARL].[115] An ad hoc Committee (ESTC-Canada) was established, with Richard Landon (Head of the Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto) as Chairman. It met only once, as no further meetings seemed necessary. Landon continues to represent Canada on the ESTC/NA Board and on the International Committee, which meets once a year. A meeting of Canadian rare book librarians was held in Ottawa on November 6. In due course most Canadian libraries participated and on the CD-ROM version of ESTC are represented by 68,138 copies.[116] For the more complete on-line file maintained at RLIN the total is now nearly 90,500.

On September 10 the inaugural meeting of the ESTC International Committee was held at the British Library, with Wilson as Chairman.[117] A new chronology was established as follows:

February 1980 NAIP started

June 1980 Completion of reading GK3

September 1980 200,000 volunteer records from U.K. libraries

December 1980 ESTC available on BLAISE

March 1981 British Library file mounted on RLIN

September 1981 British Library team completes cataloguing, begins proof-reading and editing

October 1982 Work begins on creating new records from other U.K. libraries

December 1982 British Library publishes edited COM

First edition of ESTC in COM format

In October I was required to provide the British Library with yet another forecast report.[118] I despaired at the number of these reports regularly demanded of me, but they did provide an opportunity to put on the official record issues I knew the British Library would rather not address, especially as by now funding was getting increasingly tight.

ESTC touches, one way or another, a number of important functions which the Reference Division must necessarily be concerned with: access to the collections through the new technology of computer-assisted cataloguing; balancing the requirement to catalogue the contemporary printed archive according to agreed international principles against the need to absorb, gradually, records for the historical collections into a machine-readable form compatible with those agreed principles but not necessarily to the full extent; demonstrating innovative applications for available technology; developing individual skills and harnessing energies; instituting a knowledge of the collections; identifying rarities and ensuring their preservation; above all motivating ability in the service of the past, understanding of which enables the future. Such functions are not bureaucratic: they are visionary. Achieving a balance between the bureaucratic convenience and the visionary ideal is not a new challenge: it is as old as Alexandria. The scenery does not change: merely the weather.

As long as the British Library saw ESTC as a central activity I was confident that it would continue to fund it. But the new Director General was still an unknown factor in a strategy which, internationally, was becoming extremely complex. What I already knew was that, after a distinguished career in public library service and a member of the British Library Board, he was inexperienced in managing a great research library and, understandably, over-awed by the tradition of the great librarians since Panizzi that had occupied his office.

The last three months of 1980 found me deeply involved in determining the most appropriate commercial company to undertake the massive task of microfilming all the items recorded in ESTC, interest having been expressed by several large companies.[119] Tight specifications for the quality of the filming had to be written, and those bidding for an exclusive contract with the British Library had to provide a clear statement regarding the royalties the British Library could expect to receive. Sample film had to be produced which adhered to the specification. Four companies submitted proposals: Chadwyck-Healey Ltd. [CH]; Newspaper Archive Developments Ltd. [NAD]; Research Publications Inc. [RPI]; and University Microfilms International [UMI].

In May 1981 the British Library Board approved the bid for microfilming every item in ESTC made by Research Publications Inc.[120] Draft agreements in principle were exchanged on May 21.[121] I had been designated by RPI as the Editor of this colossal enterprise and responsible for working out the details for the complex (unprecedented) task of getting books from Bloomsbury to Reading, where the filming would be done, and guaranteeing their safe (and rapid) return. Security aspects were uppermost in my mind since books had never previously been permitted off the premises for any purpose other than as loans for exhibitions.

Cold winds continued to blow throughout 1981, and I had to produce a report for the Keeper, Fulford, as the Library considered means to reduce the operating budget.[122]

While most institutions have been prepared to absorb the financial burden of cooperating in ESTC, it has been made clear to them that their support would result in positive benefits prior to the publication of the first edition of ESTC in 1986 in the form of separate catalogues of their holdings (in COM, printout or tape). Thus, the British Library has been seen widely as contributing to retrospective control not only of its own holdings, but of the National Printed Archive for which it has, I believe, some responsibility. … I appreciate that given the present economic climate the Library must establish priorities, and it may well be that ESTC suffers as a result. However, the extent to which the present staffing level can be reduced would depend on the Library’s willingness to incur considerable criticism from librarians and scholars throughout the world. … I realise that appeals to moral or scholarly obligations which a great research library ought to take into account in determining its objectives are unlikely to find much sympathy these days amongst those who are responsible for planning and policy, but perhaps the financial implications of drastically curtailing the ESTC after 1982 should be borne in mind. … It is clear that the Library faces difficult decisions in the next few years: I hope that ESTC, a project which has brought considerable benefits to the Library already, and enjoys the esteem not only of Reference Division staff but of numerous other institutions, will somehow survive with a capability to perform some (if not all) of the expectations of the library and scholarly communities.[123]

The summer of 1981 was a particularly depressing time for me. I confided in Judi Singleton.[124]

I would be less than honest if I did not admit to being more depressed than I have ever known myself in all my life. There just seems to be no way out of a series of predicaments, some of them self-inflicted, some of them the result of developments over which I really have no control. One of the worst features of life at the moment seems to be the inaccessibility of anyone who can really help. The so called leaders of the Library become increasingly remote as they build themselves shelters composed entirely of paperwork, bureaucratic jargon, and all the mindless garbage of “management theory”. … I talk to Ian Gibb a great deal, but he is helplessly caught in the Serbonian bog of Divisional Office problems, and is too tired to even think his way through some of the implications of decisions that are being made by people who have not the slightest interest in the objectives of a great library. And Wilson, determined to try and master all the complexities of an institution with over a thousand employees, succeeds only in getting everything muddled. But since “action” and “decision making” are the indispensable attributes of “good management” we get plenty of both, but with little regard for their implications. … And the Library’s forward planning more and more becomes inextricably involved with the computer conversion of GK: a benighted scheme which will sink us all, …[125]

The mounting of the ESTC file on BLAISE was finally achieved in December 1981, and I wrote Peter Lewis as follows:

Since returning from Australia I have now had several opportunities to work with the ESTC file on-line, and I must say that, in spite of all the difficulties in getting the file mounted it has certainly been worth it. My conviction that it would prove a powerful research tool – based on faith – has been more than vindicated, and I have been able to demonstrate the ways in which BLAISE will be able to help in the creation of subject packages which will form the basis of the RPI program to microfilm the substantive texts in ESTC. In many ways intelligent use of the file virtually makes redundant subject cataloguing.

In February 1982 a launch day for public access in the U.K. to ESTC was at last settled: May 4.[126] A number of conferences and promotional activities were planned for the year: which, of course, required my participation. It is a remarkable tribute to the now diminished editorial team that editing the file proceeded smoothly in spite of my constant absences. In my report to the meeting of the International Committee held at Göttingen on August 18 1982 I drew attention to the fact that staffing had significantly fallen since the project started in 1977.[127]

It must be admitted that, judged solely in quantitative terms, progress has been very disappointing. This has been due to a number of factors, the most important of which concerns staffing levels. The Committee will recall that in 1977 the British Library Board authorised the recruitment of twelve Research Assistants to recatalogue the holdings of the Reference Division. In the five years that have elapsed the team has been at full strength for just over four months. In January 1981 we lost one of the project’s most able and dependable cataloguers [Jane Douglas]: she has still not been replaced. In May of this year we lost a most valuable member of the team who had worked with the project from the beginning and had special responsibility for liaison with the American team at Baton Rouge [Christine Ferdinand]: she has not been replaced. Cataloguing had to be suspended for a six month period last year in order to carry out the arduous task of reading the entire General Catalogue and Supplements. Once work had resumed on cataloguing the now established number of remaining items it was becoming clear to me that attention had to be paid to the various options available to the project for ensuring that proof-reading and editing could be done efficiently and rapidly. The development of CORTEX (the Library’s microcomputer-based system for online editing) was urged on the Bibliographical Services Division as early as the summer of 1980. The first system was delivered to the project early in 1981. It proved cumbersome, unreliable, and difficult to use. A second version was put in hand, and this was delivered earlier this year. … Henry Snyder will confirm the staggering response to his appeals to American libraries to contribute records to ESTC, and the current list of contributing libraries is very impressive. One consequence of this influx of records to Baton Rouge has been a significant rise in the number of queries and notifications of bibliographical data submitted to the project in London. … These notifications form a vital part of the gradual process of improving the file, and I value them highly, but they do absorb a great deal of staff time. As the American team penetrate libraries such as Houghton, with highly detailed records, I can only see this problem increasing.

On January 31 1983 Snyder submitted a report to NEH on what had been achieved by ESTC/NA in its first three years.[128]

The results of the first three years of work on ESTC/NA have been most gratifying. We received more support from libraries than had been expected: 365 libraries agreed to contribute their holdings to the Catalogue. … Data has actually been received from 77% of them. The processing of records has progressed well. The RLIN computer support system works admirably. The use of the online file is growing steadily. By October 1, 1982, the ESTC/NA had received from contributing libraries 466,000 bibliographic records for eighteenth-century materials. Slightly over half (52%) of those processed were added to base file records as North American locations. The remainder were put aside for subsequent rechecking and new record creation. 105 new records were created. On October 1, 1982, the online RLIN file contained 135,551 records and 82,071 North American locations.

As I was to discover somewhat later Snyder’s reported statistics somehow never added up consistently. I suppose he assumed that no-one ever read these reports carefully and that exaggeration would likely never be detected. What cannot be denied, however, was the fact that, against all the odds, Snyder had managed to rescue the American enrichment from a decidedly stagnant state. Furthermore the search software at RLIN made it possible for online users to search no less than twelve record fields: ID [record number], PN [Personal name], PE (Personal name exact], CP (Corporate author phrase exact], TP [Title phrase exact], TW [Keyword in title], IPL [Imprint place], IW [Imprint word], IYR [Imprint year], NUC [Library code], CALL [Call number]. Subsequent enhancements now make it possible to search all fields in the ESTC record.

Knowing in considerable detail how ESTC/NA worked online I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the clumsy system we had to work with in London, but the dream of working with the files in a wholly online manner was still some way off.

In April 1983 NAIP reported progress to the International Committee: continued support from NEH and Mellon; 12,866 cataloguing records; and 3,707 records for broadsides.[129] While NAIP seemed content to work with Inforonics for their data management, the project still had no means of editing and updating their records. The International Committee met in 1983 in New York. In my own report[130] I drew attention to the onerous methodology we were required to employ – string-replacement – which meant that editing the 140,000+ base file records had already taken ten person years, but that publication of the British Library’s holdings in microfiche was scheduled for October. I remember my American colleagues being completely baffled by the intricacy of this process.

While some satisfaction can be gained from what has been achieved to date, there is no doubt that the project faces numerous difficulties in the years ahead, on both sides of the Atlantic. As always, it demands a nice balance of perception in devising strategies which take account of strength and weaknesses in the overall structure of the project. Although accorded the title of Editor it must bu now be obvious to all concerned that the position carries with it very little effective power to influence or control events. The NAIP project at Worcester devised for itself objectives and procedures which have only marginal relevance for ESTC (at the time of writing its activities concern a mere 5% of the potential ESTC file). The operation at Baton Rouge is entirely under the financial and administrative control of Henry Snyder, and priorities regarding input to the file are resolved locally. The EIP project had developed in its own way in Australia and New Zealand: and even within Australia there are regional differences in approach and procedures. This is probably unavoidable in a project the size of ESTC, but it does make it difficult to see where we are going, and what we hope to achieve. … The constraints under which we must work towards realising by 1986 what those who attended the June Conference in 1976 called the first edition of ESTC are threefold: mechanical; financial; bureaucratic. There are no easy alternative routes that I can see in any of them. At the mechanical there is the self-evident fact that RLIN and BLAISE are totally different systems. They were designed for different purposes. … Validation of record input on RLIN is strict and comprehensive; on BLAISE it is virtually non-existent. …On the bureaucratic side the London project is the victim of a cumbersome machinery which makes the simplest tasks difficult. Recruiting staff is one critical area where we have lost the equivalent of one full project-year since 1978.

My reports to the International Committee from now on tended to have a certain bluntness that I hoped might stir them to see the wider perspective: but I continued until 1989 to be hindered by the fact that any exercise of control over events had to take into account the quite separate entities which had been created. In a way the constituent sub-projects under the umbrella of ESTC behaved exactly like States within the Union: each jealously guarding what it saw as its particular privileges. Keeping the world project – for that is what ESTC had now become –on target and endeavouring to honour the promises I had made in 1976 was becoming increasingly difficult.

Snyder’s report to his North American Committee (which met on April 5) addressed seven issues for their consideration.[131]

First, should we seek support for another triennium? … Funding for the current triennium is running at about $800,000. I expect that another triennium would cost no less. … Second, … what about the future of the ESTC after these goals are completed? … Third, how can this continuing presence be funded? … Will the proceeds of the enriched microfiche edition of the file, to be published in 1988 or thereabouts, be enough with the royalties to provide this support? Could the institution housing the ESTC and its librarian provide some subvention? Fourth, where should this office be located? … Fifth, to what extent can or will RLIN continue to maintain the file for us? … Sixth, how can we encourage greater use of the file? … Seventh, should we give the ESTC in North America a more formal legal identity? …[132]

Snyder was right to ask these questions, because one of the issues I was never able to address with clarity was the long-term future of a project which would never be complete. To have put such a view to an increasingly embattled British Library would have been to frighten them, which is why I asked Snyder to put these questions to his Committee. At least the questions were then on record, since I punctiliously copied every document of importance to all those concerned. As I observe the project – admittedly at some distance – in 2003 it seems to me that the future seems somewhat bleak. I cannot believe that the hundreds of thousands of sub-standard records imported into ESTC in order to comprehend all printing from 1475 to 1800 in a single file will ever be brought up to the ESTC standard as I understood it in 1983. Simple mathematics suggests that the 300,000+ records for the period 1475-1700 are likely to remain as they stand.

One really good piece of news in 1983 was Jolliffe’s decision to ensure input of Bodleian holdings in ESTC.[133] However, the signal event in the project’s history to date was the publication in December of The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: The British Library Collections in microfiche which put at the disposal of scholars throughout the world an ordered and intellectually coherent listing, with separate indexes arranged chronologically and by place of publication, with separate listings for almanacs, songs and ballads, prospectuses, and advertisements. Supplied with the microfiches was a printed summary of the project’s history, the file structure, and the bibliographical principles adopted in the project written by myself with assistance from Michael Crump, then in post as Assistant Editor. The publication of the first phase of ESTC was celebrated with an exhibition devoted to the provincial book trade; the publication of Searching the Eighteenth Century,[134] to which I contributed an essay on “The History and Description of Books”; final preparations for a telecommunication link between London and Stanford so that both editorial teams could work to the same file; and the decision by the British Library to reduce the staff by five.

Though I vaguely “felt” the momentous changes which would occur in the years ahead as 1983 drew to a close, it was not very long before I understood clearly that we were on the threshold of changes that no one who attended the June Conference in 1976 could have foreseen. I had adhered, as closely as I dared, to the principle that ESTC was a scholarly project intended to further research; but it was becoming clear to me that the community driving the project forward was not an academic one but a library one. This brought with it some positive advantages, of course, but it also was responsible for creating a machine-readable file supposedly for the benefit of libraries that contributed records. Time and again I was told that no matter what costs were involved in creating AACR2 records and Library of Congress Name Authority Records they were essential for contributing libraries that would use these records for their own internal purposes. As far as I am aware not a single library has ever expressed the slightest interest in re-possessing records for ESTC books it supposedly holds. And the reason is not hard to understand, either: since the bulk of the location information now held on the file is listed as “unverified”. Out of a total of 468,272 records (October 3, 2003) fewer than 40% of the copies identified are listed as verified with shelf-marks provided.

Michael Crump’s essay – “The Origins of the ESTC: the Case for Vision” I found disappointing, not least because it says so little about the origins. Furthermore, I remain puzzled as to what vision is supposed to adumbrated by what he says. There is, however, a sentence which all who are concerned for the future of this project should pay attention to:

The British Library, under severe budget pressure, could be forgiven for having grown weary of the continued investment in the ESTC project which, from the point of view of record creation and the processing of reports, it has shouldered largely on its own.

But we live in an age of window-dressing, and the management of the British Library seems to have forgotten that it still has not published the English volume (the last) of the British Museum Catalogue of fifteenth century printing, started almost exactly a century ago.

Much of what developed in America between 1978 and 1983 is dealt with in Snyder’s essay “A History of the ESTC in North America” (pp. 105-127). It is, however, a somewhat biased account, suggesting that everything that happened derived from initiatives taken by himself. He nowhere mentions, for example, that the earliest explorations of the role which came to be undertaken by the Research Libraries Group were taken by myself: I introduced Ed Shaw to Harry Hookway, Don Richnell, and Richard Coward; and I visited Stanford to see for myself what RLIN had to offer before he became involved in ESTC.

Snyder’s encouragement of the drift in the direction of ESTC becoming a library-oriented project is made clear by the following:

From the beginning, I had been telling libraries that once their records were all entered they could have an extract of the relevant records together with their shelfmarks for loading into their Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) as an inducement to contribute. But I soon learned that the idiosyncratic headings employed by the British, taken from the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books, made the records unusable for American databases, which were built upon headings created according to AACR2 and deposited in the name authority file managed by the Library of Congress.

That AACR2 records would soon become required of ESTC cost the project vast sums of money; and the supposed benefits have been proven to be illusory. I find it amusing that the epithet, so scorned as a discriminator to separate authors with identical names, has now returned as a perfectly practical solution! 1983 saw the publication on 113 microfiches of The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: the British Library Collections. I do not recall a single adverse criticism from any quarter about the headings, the style of entry, or the quality of what was published. It was, however, the last time that the British origins of this project was to appear: from 1984 onwards everything that even suggested its origins in the British Library were stealthily removed. By the time scholars got used to the possibilities of searching the file online using either BLAISE or RLIN it had become an American file. I do not suggest that, given the circumstances in the British Library’s funding, there could have been an alternative to this, but with the drift towards becoming a library project much was lost: including, dare one use the word, the vision which had brought it into being. In Snyder’s book the word is often used, but by now it had become mere rhetoric and empty of meaning.

Changes in Direction 1984-1989

In 1985 Snyder was invited to move the project from Louisiana State University to the University of California at Riverside.

A native Californian, I had long aspired to retire to the Golden State, and although my home was in the North, I was pleased at the opportunity to return to the West Coast. When I broached the news to the staff they all agreed to move.

As I knew from private letters sent to me by Judi Singleton[135], the operational editor of ESTC in North America, the decision to move to California was just another example of the opportunism which had seen Snyder translated from Lawrence, Kansas to Baton Rouge. She had grave doubts about the move. Alas, she did not live to witness it.

Snyder’s Report to the International Committee in April 1985[136] was very optimistic: 16,000 new records had been created since 1983; a total of 702,754 records received in the last five years; a total of 442 contributing libraries; and that NEH had agreed to fund ESTC/NA for a further three years, with $500,000. By contrast the BL team were under great pressure from the management to increase productivity, and the project having to face the considerable additional expenditure required for the RLIN link, on which progress was disappointingly slow. McCoy (President of RLG) sent Wilson an email in which it seemed that we would not be working online until August.[137] My own Report was rather more gloomy.[138]

1984 has been a year unlike any other in the history of the project. Staffing was, inevitably – given the financial problems faced by the British Library – reduced. The mammoth task of creating AACR2 name authority records for all authors represented in ESTC by more than ten entries had to be completed. Hanging over all our activities in London has been the uncertainty of what the second phase would be like when the RLIN link is finally established: in addition we have been necessarily involved in the detailed planning which must precede an exercise of this magnitude. In the meantime, in spite of the fact that ESTC is a machine-readable file, a disproportionate amount of time has had to be spent in manual tasks: matching manual records, and filling in manual forms; filing computer-printed records; verifying tape exchanges between London and Stanford. … It is hardly surprising, therefore, if progress in adding new records and new locations has fallen short of the estimates given to the Committee at Oxford last year. It has to be said that our ability to satisfy the aspirations of those who came to London in 1976 is diminishing as the project becomes increasingly involved with the arcane, and for practical scholarly purposes obsolete preoccupatiopn with the whole gamut of “international standards”. This preoccupation has led to a curious situation whereby, for example, more effort has to be devoted to establishing cross-references for Defoe than to incorporating new records from the National Library of Ireland. … Scholars and cataloguers search the file much as they have the traditional tools since the early sixteenth century when the first library catalogues began to appear. No catalogue ever devised has universal relevance. There is always another beginning, another rehearsal before the description fits. That is the fascination of the hand-made book: it is always beyond grasp. All observations are provisional. Bibliography is not heraldry: it is archaeology.

It was becoming obvious to me that ESTC was now a library project, not an academic, scholarly one, and I often discussed this with Judi Singleton; but neither of us were in a position to counter this drift. My involvement with other aspects of British Library activity in 1985 necessitated a reduction in my responsibilities for ESTC and a corresponding increase in responsibility for Michael Crump. Though it was not until 1989 that I formally withdrew from the project, the daily management of the BL team and liaison with ESTC/NA gradually devolved on Crump. The opportunities for influencing events were decidedly dwindling.

The one participant in planning ESTC who has consistently advocated its importance for scholarship is Paul Korshin, and his contribution to Snyder’s book is, as I would have expected, very much concerned with history and with the academic objectives which were gradually overtaken by considerations only regarded as important by librarians.

As author of all the early proposals (1975-78) to the NEH and the ACLS, I have returned to that substantial archive to see how my colleagues and I envisaged that an ESTC would affect academic studies. It would be fair to say that few of us had any prophetic sense whatever. It would also be correct to concede that the NEH was originally skeptical about the project, for its Division of Research Grants insisted that we concern ourselves, at the London Conference, only with a feasibility study. The following is the closest to a statement of intellectual purpose in the entire initial application for the London Conference: An Eighteenth-Century STC would be of immense value to scholars in many disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, for it would provide a ready guide to and much bibliographical information concerning upwards of half a million titles in all of those fields … Librarians and rare-book cataloguers would benefit immeasurably: libraries would benefit from having their 1701-1800 contents added to a national data base, and rare-book cataloguers would gain invaluable assistance for their work. A published STC would make available to scholars a location list to 1701-1800 books and thus, inevitably, librarians would spend less time than they do now in answering queries. … In the ensuing fifty pages of the proposal, there is no suggestion that an ESTC might advance literary scholarship one iota.

Korshin is almost certainly correct in stating that few people in 1978 understood the implications of having bibliographical data in machine-readable form. I did, however, since I had become interested in the processing power of computers as a postgraduate student at Toronto, where I planned with Jess Bessinger the concordance to Beowulf; and later at Leeds when I arranged for the conversion of works by William Bullokar on language to machine-readable form. I have elsewhere alluded to the significance of 1964 as the year in which the computer began to alter our lives: all of this was twelve years before ESTC surfaced in London.[139] But I also understood that computers were feared – witness the closure of the Times in the late 1960s and its removal from Grays Inn Road to Docklands. They were feared in the British Library until I organised the Microcomputer Symposium in 1987, and subsequently trained some 300 staff in the potential of the microcomputer to revolutionise library administration at all levels. I recall discussing some of this with Korshin on his regular visits to London between 1978 and 1987. One paragraph in Korshin’s essay struck me as particularly revealing:

But in eighteenth-century literary studies, save for a few exceptions, poststructuralist methodologies attract few followers. The principal reason is that the avialbility of the ESTC online, where it is accessible to young research students and apprenctice scholars, has made it a natural starting point for most research. Since the ESTC is widely known, and since younger scholars tend to have great familiarity with computers and the techniques of searching databases, it is difficult to find acceptance in eighteenth-century studies for work that does not widely explore the print archive. … The best that any of us envisaged, in the formative years of 1975-78, was that scholars would use the ESTC as earlier generations had used the first STCs: to locate copies. As the richness of the computer fields developed under Robin Alston’s guidance, there was no sense that scholars might one day be able to search every word, indeed, every punctuation mark, in each of those fields. Alston and William Todd, who were the key figures in the evolution of this concept, merely thought that they would be making the task of matching easier.[140]

In looking back at much of what I said in lectures given between 1976 and 1989 in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, and Japan, I can detect an unwillingness to be too specific about the benefits of machine-readable databases: not because I did not understand them, but because the generation to whom I mostly addressed myself in these countries (the power brokers) belonged to a pre-automation age, and had never seen a microcomputer until well into middle age!

In November Wilson asked for a paper outlining my continuing role in ESTC as well as several other projects with which I was deeply involved, notably the training of over 300 BL staff, at all levels, in the basic skills demanded in the use of computers.[141] Crump responded to this in a memorandum to Andrew Phillips, Deputy Director, Development & Systems RD.[142]

I think that Robin has put his finger on some of the problems of the structure of ESTC and the difficulty of both his position as Editor and mine as Managing Editor. This difficulty seems to be the international nature of the project bringing pressures to bear upon the BL editorial centre which are beyond our control if viewed as only the UK office but fall within our remit if we are seen as the main editorial office. Robin rightly points to the cataloguing at the American Antiquarian Society as being far beyond the requirements of ESTC and therefore, if seen in a narrow sense, absorbing monies that might have been used in other parts of the project. …

The fifth, and in many ways the most important, meeting of the International Committee was held at Wolfson College, Oxford, on May 22 1986. In addition to the official members, also in attendance were Crump, Stephen Davis (LC), Epstein, Richard Landon (Toronto), Don McKenzie (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand), Brian McMullin (Monash University), Julian Roberts, Judi Singleton, and P. Vriesema (STCN[143], The Hague). The last item on the agenda was a “Congress to set standards”, a proposal put forward by Snyder whose energies seem not to have been consumed by ESTC, and who now had his eye on a retrospective union catalogue of European books printed before 1800. It worried me that, with so much still to accomplish, the Committee was being led into yet grander projects. It would not be long before Snyder made moves to incorporate STC and Wing, and rename ESTC as the English Short Title Catalogue – its present title.

At the meeting of the British Committee on June 19[144] I drew their attention to the fact that ESTC/NA seemed, as a matter of policy, to be accumulating additional locations for known items rather than creating new records from the vast pool to hand; a policy which was to continue for some years. This made Snyder’s processing statistics more attractive, but I have always assumed that what scholars needed was new material not 135 copies of the first edition of Johnson’s Dictionary.

By February 1986 Wilson’s successor as Director General was known: J.M. Smethurst, Librarian at the University of Aberdeen. He would be in post by July. Being the bureaucrat that he was, Wilson had made sure that when Smethurst took up his post my somewhat ambiguous position in the British Library was resolved. In effect, it would be written into my contract as a consultant that I was “to advise the Director General on all such matters as he judged appropriate”. Apart from the conversion of the General Catalogue, ESTC was now the most high-profile project within the Library, and association with it brought rich fruits in international recognition and travel.

For four months in 1986 I was seconded from the BL to survey the holdings of the seven libraries in the Consortium of University Research Libraries[145] [CURL] with a view to recommending whether or not they would be well served by OCLC. The findings were eventually published in eight consecutive numbers of the journal Research Libraries in OCLC: a Quarterly.[146]

At a meeting of the British Committee in October[147] my anxieties about the future of the project were shared by Ratcliffe.

In response to Dr Ratcliffe’s concern that this was not forceful enough Dr Alston confirmed that he had had occasion to be anxious about directions that the project had taken. He was more and more involved with other duties in the British Library. He felt that since 1978 when Henry Snyder had taken the project forward from a period of stagnation and Marcus McCorison had taken control of the American Imprints Program, he had had little control over the running of the project in that country.

Three days later the International Committee met.[148] Crump’s Report pointed out that problems with the RLIN link had resulted in the loss of over 600 person hours since February, and the project was plagued with ESTC terminals being ‘dropped’ by the system, leading to loss of any unsaved data. Targets for record creation and adding new holdings were seldom met.

While there is still a great deal of commitment to the project, morale has suffered over the past year. Many of the curators are now either at the top or approaching the top of the curator E scale and they are, not surprisingly, concerned as to their future. The relentless drive for statistics is hard to maintain at any time but especially when it comes in the context of what is perceived as less than enthusiastic support for the project (notably when it has taken so long to replace staff.) … Securing the future of the project after the end of the present phase is now seen to be a priority, not only for staff morale but also to prevent a sense that it is on offer to the highest bidder.[149]

1986 saw Snyder’s project uprooted from Louisiana and moved to Riverside, California.[150] I had always suspected that he would endeavour to return to his native California, and his position as Dean at Riverside certainly commanded a much higher salary than he had enjoyed at LSU. But I was getting very worried about Judi: her letters were getting increasingly depressed, and her health was deteriorating. Disaster struck on the last day of the year when, tragically, she died. In Factotum I wrote:[151]

It will be some time before the contribution of Judi Singleton to the project she loved, and loyally supported, can be assessed. I am certain of one thing, however: her sense of the discipline which is at the heart of all scholarly undertakings will be seen to be pervasive. … She impressed her personality upon ESTC in America: we owe it to her to ensure that the design is completed. That is how I think she would want to be remembered.

I could not see myself continuing to be “Editor” of ESTC for much longer. Mervyn Jannetta who had assisted me nobly in the early years was battling the bureaucracy in the British Library, and had grown morose. He shared my anxieties, but was in no position to offer more than sympathy. Judi had died; and I was deprived of the companionship of a wonderful lady who shared my aspirations for ESTC. But before I departed there was one important task to perform: to prepare a paper for the BL Board for its meeting in April 1987.[152] I was getting the impression that ESTC no longer carried their unqualified support. It was not a task that, it seemed to me, Crump should undertake. I reminded the Board that I had promised in 1977 a number of benefits which would flow from ESTC.

It would serve as a focus for Anglo-American cooperation in bringing about a natural, and urgently sequel to fifty years of such cooperation in the revision of STC and Wing, … It would, as a union catalogue based upon the resources of libraries throughout the world, signal the importance which the newly-formed British Library attached to scholarly endeavour, and the unique role which it occupies as the principle [sic] resource for the history of English civilisation. It would adopt computer technology to transform traditional methods of compiling catalogues and so encourage other national libraries to recognise the needs of researchers for flexible access to historical sources. It would serve as a nursery for training young staff in a sound and varied knowledge of the collections, … as well as in the possibilities provided by machine-readable records for advancing scholarship. It would bring to light many thousands of items never previously catalogued, … It would identify, in a clear and persuasive manner, both the strengths and the weaknesses of the collections and play a significant part in the Library’s preservation policy for the future. It would provide a substantial source of revenue for many years to come. The Board’s decision to support the project has been well vindicated. It has led to firm support by research libraries in Britain, North America, Europe, South Africa, Australasia and Japan. ESTC enjoys the support and cooperation of more institutions (more than 950) than any previous bibliographical project ever undertaken. … In addition, the example of ESTC has led to the establishment of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and the South Asia and Burma Retrospective Bibliography (SABREB) using similar cataloguing and bibliographical formats. Both projects are international in scope and are acknowledged as major contributions to bibliographical scholarship. … ESTC is widely regarded as a model for retrospective national projects in Holland, Germany, Scandinavia, Spain, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan; … The Editor has been invited to lecture at universities throughout the world. The academic community has begun to appreciate the importance of ESTC as a resource which radically alters the way in research is conducted, …

My appeal for funds for a further five years was, I am happy to say, successful.

Snyder’s determination to extend ESTC to include records for STC and Wing surfaced in a document dated 29 October 1987.[153] Given that there was no hope of processing all the records submitted to London and Riverside by 1989, I could not help wondering why extending the scope of ESTC back to 1475 was appropriate when so much remained to be done to complete the record for the eighteenth century: the original remit of the June Conference. The wisdom of this decision I leave for others to decide. As if extending ESTC back to Caxton were not enough, Snyder began looking at the possibility of adding the entire corpus of European printing from 1450 to ESTC, thereby creating a vast inchoate database of records amalgamated from whatever sources he could find. The prospect of this actually happening filled me with dread.

Though I continued to attend meetings of the International and British Committees until 1989, much of 1987 was taken up with planning a Microcomputer Symposium for British Library staff. Smethurst and I often discussed the unpreparedness of staff to cope with the impending automation in libraries and the general ignorance regarding rapidly developing technologies, including digitisation, information retrieval, hypertext, and online access to library catalogues. The Symposium took place on October 6-7, and was attended by over 100 staff at all levels. I brought together experts - and the required hardware - from the Air and Space Museum in Washington; the pioneer of library network software, Hank Epstein from Wisconsin; and Professor Ken Browning of Glasgow University, a leading authority on character sets using the Macintosh hypercard system.[154] Shortly after the conclusion of the Symposium I started the long process of training staff in the technology which would soon change forever the way in which libraries function. That would not be completed until 1990, the year in which I was appointed Professor of Library Studies at London University, and Director of the School of Library Archive & Information Studies at University College.

In January 1988 Smethurst wrote to me asking whether I would be prepared to “consider writing an extended article for publication giving the history of the ESTC project, nationally and internationally, together with an assessment of its present and potential impact as a scholarly research tool?”[155] I took this request – rightly as it turned out – to be a signal that changes in management were being contemplated.

Snyder’s view of events is, I suppose naturally, contradictory. His narrative of how I was “removed” from authority over ESTC matters I find amusing.

There were also changes at the British Library in 1986. Since Alston always contracted with the Library as a consultant and was not a regular member of the staff, he could not formally act as a supervisor. Initially, Mervin Jannetta was seconded from the department of early printed books to serve as the supervisor of record and as assistant to Alston. After the editing process undertaken for the production of the fiche [catalogue], he returned to his permanent post and was succeeded by Michael Crump, who had been with the project since the test phase in 1976. Crump visited Baton Rouige in 1984 and established a good working relationship with Singleton. In 1986, still serving as a consultant, Alston was reassigned to other tasks in the British Library, and Crump assumed formal responsibility for the project, although Alston retained a titular responsibility. Subsequently his new obligations to the Nineteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue (supra) proved to be a direct conflict of interest, and, in the summer of 1989, he was removed altogether from the project.

What Snyder could not have known at the time (or today for that matter) was that I engineered my removal tactically; but not before I had established the terms on which I would continue to advise the British Library on a number of important issues, including training staff for the computer age which was almost upon us in every aspect of library administration. I planned the 1987 Microcomputer Symposium: a week in which British Library staff were exposed to the developments in automation which were about to change their working lives for ever. I negotiated the basis upon which the Chadwyck-Healey project to microfilm and catalogue to exacting standards several thousand important works printed in the nineteenth century. These records fulfilled exactly what I had hoped for in ESTC, and are widely regarded today as the best machine-readable records for books printed before 1900 available on any system.

Much of 1988 was devoted to sorting out agreements between ESTC[156] and the Bibliographical Society (the proprietor of STC) and the Modern Language Association (proprietor of Wing). I found myself in a difficult position, since I had been on the Advisory Committee for Wing for some years, and in 1988 I was elected President of the Bibliographical Society. For obvious reasons I avoided becoming involved in discussions between the various parties which, at times, had become rancorous.

The last meeting of the International Committee I attended was held at the American Antiquarian Society on October 26-27 1989. I had a premonition that it would be my last, as I made no attempt to hide my feelings about the way the project was being administered. Snyder was, I realised, annoyed by what he considered disloyal criticism. That criticism related to two arduous tasks which I had undertaken during the summer: to compile a thorough statistical analysis of the ESTC file; and to proof-read 35,000 records produced by BLAISE. The sample was carefully chosen and included records selected for all headings beginning with F; titles beginning with F; records relating to Pope, Swift, Fielding, Gay, Johnson, Berkeley, Congreve, Dryden, London, City of London, Dublin, Edinburgh, England, Ireland Scotland. In spite of the efforts made to convert headings to AACR2, 22% of the file still had GK headings, often mixed within a heading with AACR2 forms. Misfiling was detected, and the sample suggested that the whole file was subject to 7% error, or 17,000 records. Other errors noted were: inconsistent references to bibliographical works (field 534); punctuation; duplicate records; unexpanded initials; inconsistent use of upper case; miscoded headings; language code errors; subfield errors; indicator errors. I suggested that, based on my own experience, it would take eight cataloguers six months to identify and correct errors in the whole file. It was never undertaken.[157] The statistical analysis[158] identified obvious errors in the place of publication and date fields, a substantial number of volumes in the Chadwick Collection that had not been catalogued, and demonstrated that the number of libraries with fewer than ten books recorded was close to 50%.[159] However the statistics were analysed it was apparent to me that the project was, at that time, barely 50% complete. In my “Summary” I concluded:

It is extraordinarily difficult to assess a file as large as ESTC when so much vital information is unavailable. What I have been able to discover leads me to the following conclusions: The file has errors and inconsistencies of 100,000+. It will take 8 years to incorporate the holdings of libraries which have been promised a machine-readable record of their eighteenth century books. It will take 18 years to complete an English STC. In its present state the file is not publishable. If publication in any format (fiche or CD-ROM) is planned in the near future, then a sustained period of editing must be undertaken, and the corporate headings made to conform to AACR2. A file containing a mixture of GK headings and AACR2 headings will be regarded as distinctly odd.[160]

Past - Present - Future

The subtitle of Snyder’s book was supposed to encourage the view that the reader would be provided with a balanced historical narrative of events leading up to 1998; some assessment of what the celebrations in New York were in fact celebrating; and giving the academic and library communities glimpses of future developments. Unfortunately, the book seems to me to fail on all counts. Balanced history, supported by documentation, is notably absent, and references to sources which readers can examine and judge for themselves are virtually non-existent. The reasons for celebration in 1998 with the database now burdened with swathes of material never envisaged in 1976 are nowhere to be found. And where this juggernaut is heading is even harder to discover. The costs involved in getting to 1998 are staggering, and would have deterred any institutional administrator or funding agency from being seduced by the dream in 1976 had they been even hinted at. Snyder’s enumeration of the grants awarded to the American contribution between 1979 and 1999 amounts to $10,605,667, to which must be added about $5,000,000 for NAIP, and at least $15,000,000 for the contribution made by the British Library over a period of twenty-seven years. This does not, of course, include the considerable contribution made by Göttingen University with Bernhard Fabian’s wonderful printed catalogue; contributions made by South African libraries and organised by the South African Library; the Early Imprints Project for Australia and New Zealand; and vast sums spent by hundreds of contributing libraries throughout the world. And all this expenditure has got us where? My guess is about half-way down the road to completion.

The eighteenth century component in ESTC is, as indeed it should be, well on the way to a satisfactory conclusion once the doubts which lurk as informal notes in thousands of records are resolved; the huge number of unverified locations are transformed into verified ones; inconsistencies in headings removed; errors corrected. These are difficult to quantify; but my informed guess after having consulted over a five-year period some 50,000 records, is that at least 100,000 records require attention. For the records imported into the file from OCLC and other sources (excluding, of course, the splendid records contributed by NAIP) there is work a-plenty for another twenty five years. Is it realistic to imagine that the wells will continue to furnish resources for that long? The records for the STC period from1475 to 1640 have one significant advantage over those for Wing: they have been the subject of detailed bibliographical scrutiny for over a century. The records for Wing will demand a huge effort to bring them up to the standards set by STC and the ESTC records created at the British Library. And now that periodical literature is included, how much effort will be needed to bring the eighteenth century records up to the standard of Nelson & Seccombe?[161] I find little in Snyder’s book to suggest that all this has been carefully thought out. I suppose we should be grateful that it has never occurred to Snyder that he should include all engraved material printed before 1801!

ESTC is, in common with most human endeavours, imperfect. I still believe that wrong turnings were taken, and opportunities missed. But it is the best, given the project’s immensely complex history, that we are likely to get for a long time to come. That complexity is, I trust, made clear in this essay. It is a personal view, and as such, inevitably coloured by personal prejudices, but many personal prejudices have played their part in getting us from June 1976 to the beginning of the new millenium. And Snyder’s book abounds in personal prejudices. I am pleased, of course, that the result to date is undoubtedly a research tool unlike any other currently available.[162] It must be accepted that the world has changed beyond recognition in the 28 years since Ian Willison got me involved in what history will, I feel sure, judge as one of the heroic enterprises of the twentieth century.

Robin Alston

October 2003

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[1] P. 4.

[2] Bibliography, Machine Readble Cataloguing and the ESTC. London, British Library, 1978.

[3] Paul J. Korshin. The Use of Facsimiles in Teaching. A Preliminary Report based on an Experiment conducted at the University of Pennsylvania during 1970. Scolar Press, [1971.] Pp. 13. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[4] These are briefly described in an Appendix to Korshin’s Planning Grant document of April 21 1976: Project LOC; the National Central Library’s Union Catalogue (transferred to the British Library in 1973); the Bentley Project, dating from 1970, subsequently abandoned; the Cameron HPB Project, never completed because of lack of financial support; the Brack STC Project, based on meetings held at the Modern Language Association in the early 1970s; the Eddy Project at Cornell; the Western Kentucky Project, directed by Donald Brightup, subsequently abandoned; the Xerox-UMF Project; the Dawsons-Wallis Project.

[5] Noteworthy were the computer-generated concordances produced at Cornell University, and the Beowulf concordance which I started with Jess Bessinger at Toronto University in 1955.

[6] Text quoted from a copy of Jolliffe’s typescript – Bodleian archive..

[7] The NEH was established by Act of Congress on September 29, 1965. (P.L. 89-209). Its contribution to the arts and humanities since 1966 has been immense.

[8] Copy in Bodleian archive. See further below.

[9] British Library. First Annual Report 1973-74. 1974. P. 3.

[10] The decision to abandon the January Conference was formally made on December 30 1975: letter to me from Stephen Green, then Personal Assistant to Hookway, later to have a number of important positions in the British Library. In the early years of ESTC’s development Stephen was immensely helpful in advising me how to avoid bureaucratyic pitfalls.

[11] As a Trustee from 1969 to 1974 Tim Munby had always regarded the Museum Library as one of his particular responsibilities. As a distinguished scholar and as Librarian of King’s College, Cambridge, he brought to the British Library Board a sound understanding of what the Library stood for, both in Britain and abroad.

[12] For the background to the British Library’s interest in Retrospective Universal Bibliographical Control [RUBC] see I.R. Willison, ‘The English Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue’, in The Culture of the Book (Melbourne, 1999).

[13] Photocopy of original in Bodleian archive.

[14] Peter Wallis was at that time a Reader in the Department of Education at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and his project was called PHIBB [Project for Historical Bio-Bibliography]. Newsletter I was published in January 1976, and outlined his plans for a union catalogue of books to the year 1800 based on the L-O-C libraries.

[15] Copy in Bodleian archive.

[16] Original in Bodleain archive.

[17] Omitted from the Checklist were works attributed to Addison (many doubtful) and his periodical works. I originally estimated that the inclusion of American library holdings would be likely to improve my total by 20%.

[18] Jolliffe had devised the fingerprint as a machine-dependent device for matching varying issues/editions of a work. Subsequently modified the rules were published in Libri, 1974, no.3, pp. [240}-47. Although no field for a fingerprint was established as international MARC standard it continued to be recorded at the BN in Paris and the NLS in Edinburgh. Its eventual demise was a slow process and intruded into the affairs of ESTC at regular intervals up to 1990.

[19] Copy in Bodleain archive..

[20] Dated April 13 1976. Photocopy in Bodleain archive.

[21] The meeting took place between 4 pm and 7.30, and at dinner from 8 pm to 1 am on May 7.

[22] “A Summary of Discussion on the Eighteenth-Century STC” was circulated on May 8. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[23] A point in the future that was beginning to seem a long way off.

[24] A correction string is a coded message which gives the text as it stands followed by the text as it should be. The dangers will be familiar to those who use the “Search and Replace” function in wordprocessing software: unless great care is exercised this remarrkable facility can frequently produce unwanted results.

[25] BAB 2001 (1769. 7S).

[26] As late as 1982 OCLC was regularly shipping millions of computer-generated cards to its subscribing libraries.

[27] R.C. Alston. The English Eighteenth-Century S.T.C. A Pilot Project conducted from December 13, 1976 to June 13, 1977 by R.C. Alston & J.L. Wood. June 13, 1977. From The Research Assistants were: Michael Crump, Jane Douglas, John Fuggles, Frances Harris, Susan Jeffs, and Patrick Vasey. Original in Bodleian archive.

[28] These project diaries are all in Bodleian archive. They reflect the number of records created by each member of the team (including myself) as well as the periods I was away from my desk on administrative duties and travel.

²⁷ Original in Bodleian archive.

[30] Present: Hookway, Coward, Richnell, Fulford, Christophers, Green, and myself. Minutes in Bodleian archive.

[31] Present: Tom Adams, Richard Coward, Korshin, John Finzi (LC), Bill Matheson (LC), C. Hamilton (LC), John Price (LC), Joe Howard (LC), P. de la Garza (LC), and myself.

[32] BLB 77/37. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[33] Present: Lucia Rather, Richard Carpenter, Christophers, Coward, and myself. Minutes in Bodleian archive.

[34] Original, with manuscript corrections and additions, in Bodleian archive.

[35] Dated June 14 and written on Council on Library Resources (Washington) notepaper. Photocopy in Bodleian archive.

[36] Project LOC: a Summary with Comments. Dated June 27 1977. Original in Bodleian archive.

[37] John Feather. Tests on the Use of the “fingerprint” in Library Catalogues. July 1977. Original in Bodleian archive.

[38] Dated August 10 1977. Original in Bodleian archive.

[39] Project LOC. A Synopsis of Scope and Methodology, with Comments. Submitted to an informal Conference at Brasenose College Oxford. September 1 1977. Original in Bodleian archive.

[40] Robert Shackleton circulated a report on the meeting on September 5. Present were: Francis, Bryant, Ceadel, Feather, Fulford, Norman Higham, Jolliffe, Roberts, Shackleton, and myself. Copy in Bodleian archive. In a letter to Richnell (September 7) Shackleton continued to argue for including fingerprints in ESTC records: “I very much hope that you will be able to take positive account of this view in the planning of ESTC. It is a fairly widespread opinion that the fingerprint is an important addition to descriptive bibliography.” History suggests otherwise.

[41] Corrected original in Bodleian archive: December 1976.

[42] Thomas R. Adams. A Draft of a Management Structure for the Eighteenth Century Short-Title Catalogue of English Books. Dated November 10, 1977. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[43] I knew most of these personally, with the exception of Bridenbaugh, Hindle, and Morgan. It was an impressive list: Bridenbaugh was Professor Emeritus of History at Brown University; Belanger was then an Assistant Professor in the School of Library Service at Columbia University; Tom Adams was Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; James Clifford was Professor Emeritus of English at Columbia University; James Hart was Director of the Bancroft Library at Berkeley; Hindle was a Curator at the Smithsonian Institution; Mary Hyde, a noted book collector, who subsequently married Lord Eccles; Gwyn Kolb, Chairman of the English Department at the University of Chicago; William Matheson was Chief of the Rare Books Division at the Library of Congress; Marcus McCorison was Director of the American Antiquarian Society; Morgan was Sterling Professor at Yale; Tanselle was Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin (later to hold high office at the Guggenheim Foundation in New York); Wolf was Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

[44] Manuscript letter in Bodleian archive, dated November 15 1977.

[45] In August I published an account of progress to date in The Direction Line, No. 4, pp. [1]-15. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[46] My count is 65 meetings between January 1976 and 1989.

[47] Head of Rare Books at Yale University Library. I had first met her in 1963 when hundreds of items I needed to examine were in boxes awaiting removal to the new Beinecke Library. She found every one for me!

[48] As principal officer of the Research Tools Program within NEH Farr was the key person in ESTC’s funding in America.

[49] ESTC Cataloging Manual. Prepared at the Library of Congress. November 1977. My copy (in the Bodleain archive) bristles with comments and objections. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[50] BM epithets sometimes possess a subtlety rare in other catalogues: e.g. those of sufficient fame to merit the epithet “the Poet”, as distinct from “Poet”, or “Poetaster”.

[51] Present: Richnell, Shackleton, Ceadel, Ratcliffe, Barker, Jolliffe, Roberts, and myself. I submitted an Interim Report on progress since October 1977. I could now say publicly that the funding for NYPL-OT was assured and that Belanger would be starting work at the New York Public Library on March 1.

[52] Helmut Vogt, the Director, communicated formally Gottingen’s plans in a letter to Richnell dated February 6. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[53] Ceadel confirmed the start in a letter to Richnell dated September 18. A penciled note by Richnell reads: ‘Robin - Why is the news so good, all of a sudden? It makes me uneasy.’

[54] As well as photocopies of the entire collection of ballads assembled by Sir Frederic Madden.

[55] A substantial document, over 200 pages long. It is historically useful, and gives an accurate summary of developments to date. It was entirely overtaken by events, however, and AIPP became the North American Imprints Project (NAIP) located at the American Antiquarian Society and managed by Marcus McCorison.

[56] Letter dated February 22 1978 in Bodleian archive. I detected the hand of Bryant in this move, which worried me, but there were, as yet, no grounds for opposing the plan.

[57] Letter dated February 27 1978. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[58] Dated March 12 1978. Photocopy in Bodleian archive..

[59] 5 handwritten pages: in Bodleian archive.

[60] Facsimile was briefly revived by Henry Snyder when the project was established at Baton Rouge.

[61] Lawrence F. Buckland (Inforonics Inc.), John F. Knapp (Research Libraries Group, Branford), and John J. Nitti (Assistant Professor of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin. These estimated gentlemen were mapping a territory which none of them understood, a problem which ESTC has had to cope with over most of its history.

[62] There was one in the Sheraton Street building before the move to St Pancras, but I imagine it was discarded. I once urged Peter Lewis to donate one to the Science Museum.

[63] Report of Visit to New York Public Library. 16-23 April 1978. Original in Bodleian archive.

[64] The Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue. Past – Present – Future. Dated August 21, 1978. Copies of this were sent to members of the British Committee.

[65] Dated July 23 1978. Original in Bodleian archive.

[66] It is a long letter, and it was copied to members of the American Committee – “to make sure that he does not keep it to himself.” Copy in Bodleian archive.

[67] Tyson was a Program Officer in Research Materials Programs at NEH.

[68] Copy in Bodleian archive.

[69] Original in Bodleian archive.

[70] Based on questionnaires returned by 129 libraries in America and Canada. The total number of copies reported was 1,602,534. This was the first time anyone had attempted to assess the magnitude of the American ‘enrichment’ phase.

[71] Pp. 6-7.

[72] Statement at ESTC Meeting in New York. 15 September 1978. Original in Bodleian archive.

[73] It could be said (not unkindly) that Snyder did for bibliography in America what Sol Hurok had done for theatre and ballet. Their origins were in some ways similar, too: both had careers which started in trade.

[74] Edwin died on February 20, 1991. As a tribute I printed and circulated to his many friends a piece printed in The Library in March 1894 by another great Philadelphia librarian, Albert Edmunds. It was called “The Librarian’s Dream”. Edmunds was Librarian of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

[75] The survey was conducted between September 25 and October 6.

[76] The number of records with Lpro holdings on the ESTC CD-ROM is 12,569; the total on RLIN is 15,590 (October 2003).

[77] Original in Bodleian archive.

[78] The survey was conducted between September 25 and October 6.

[79] The total given here is based on the search fin lw public record office.

[80] The Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue: Past – Present– Future. Original in Bodleian archive.

[81] The principal libraries covered were the John Johnson collection in Bodley; Guildhall; Society of Antiquaries; Cambridge University Library, the Tunbridge Wells Museum, and the Rylands in Manchester.

[82] These included Sweden, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

[83] British Library. Fifth Annual Report 1977-78, pp. 20-21.

[84] British Library. Fourth Annual Report 1976-77, p. 18.

[85] Copy in Bodleian archive.

[86] Korshin suggests in his contribution that: “After all, none of us had the slightest intimation that the ESTC would, within twenty years, profoundly influence historical studies of primary materials.” P. 187.

[87] Pp. 1-6.

[88] After 1989, when I ceased to exercise any influence on the development of ESTC, the failure of those directly responsible for the project to understand the necessity of constantly monitoring the integrity of the file has led to many thousands of errors, most of which, I fear, will remain uncorrected for many years to come. One of the recognised advantages in dealing with a machine-readable file is its susceptibility to automated techniques for verifying the integrity of certain data fields: e.g. location symbols, places of publication, &c. In the period up to 1989 I regularly downloaded such data elements and subjected them to testing in programs I had written in dBaseIII. “Integrity programming” is now accepted as a vital part of automation husbandry.

[89] Letter to Andrew Phillips, then Head of Reference Division’s administration, dated January 18. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[90] Data Processing for the ESTC. A Report to the British Library. July 1979. Pp. 110. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[91] The Editing and Enrichment of the ESTC File: a Forward View. Pp. 8. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[92] The first number appeared in March 1978, a slim effort of eight pages. In all 40 numbers were publiished, with several supplementary numbers, including indexes. Mt own complete set in Bodleian archive

[93] The bibslip is illustrated in Bibliography Machine Readable Cataloguing and the ESTC, p. 37.

[94] The ‘problems’ files for the period up to 1989 were established in both British Library and American editorial offices and represented an attempt to resolve bibliographical discrepancies between a description on the base file and records submitted by other libraries. These files cover thousands of items. I do not know whether a similar procedure is operating today. They have been deposited in the Bodleain archive.

[95] Letter dated January 3 1979. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[96] Dated January 9 1979. Original in Bodleain archive.

[97] In fact, when RLIN took over from BALLOTTS I immediately took steps to get ESTC adopted as an RLIN database project. Original correspondence between John Haeger and myself in Bodleian archive. Snyder suggests that this initiative was his own.

[98] This division would lead, in due course, to some intricate problems, including the obvious fact that AIPP (soon to be NAIP) and ESTC became rivals in securing funding, with NAIP usually succeeding in the struggle. The budget for the first NAIP proposal to NEH was $661,323 for 1979-82; the first ESTC/NA budget for its first proposal was $422,229 for 1979-82. A decision was deferred, and Snyder was forced to reduce his budget to $300,000. One of the consequences of the highly successful funding of NAIP was the drift of the whole ESTC away from being a scholarly project and more a library one.

[99] Letter dated January 12 1979. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[100] Letter to Lumiansky dated February 7 1979. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[101] Dated July 26 1979. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[102] This was reported in the revived Facsimile, Vol. 1, no. 1, March 1980. The total awarded to ESTC/NA was $316,000; NAIP was awarded $430,000. A second, and final, number appeared in October 1980.

[103] Her application for the post of Assistant Director of ESTC/NA was dated June 11 1979.

[104] Although Judith was trained as a librarian we seldom disagreed on matters of principle where the scholarly objectives should take precedence over library practices.

[105] The revised Rules for Bibliographic Description of Early Printed Books, Pamphlets, Broadsides, and Single Sheets. [November 1979]. Pp. 49. Copy sent to me by Ben Tucker on December 6 1979. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[106] Interim draft. Proposals for establishing Standards for the Cataloguing of Rare Books and Specialised Research Materials in Machine-Readable Form. September 1979. Pp. [80]. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[107] Held at LC with Hookway as Chairman. Also present were Richnell, Snyder, Matheson, McCorison, and myself. Copy of minutes in Bodleian archive

[108] Letter dated February 5 1980. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[109] Letter and summary dated March 31 1980. Original in Bodleian archive.

[110] Letter from Haeger. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[111] Christine Ferdinand reported to Alexander Wilson, the new DG, on our visit: Report of a Visit to ESTC/NA, some American Libraries, and RLG, March 1980. Dated April 18 1980. Copy in Bodleian archive. Wilson was delighted at the positive progress achieved on this visit. For reservations about the kind of searches possible on Eureka see note 174 below.

[112] British Library News. No. 51, March 1980.

[113] Dated June 10 1980. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[114] Dated April 9 1980. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[115] Dated September 1, 1980. Original in Bodleian archive.

[116] 65 libraries are represented.

[117] Present were Fulford, Ratcliffe, Snyder, Matheson, E. Shaw (President of RLG), Epstein, Fabian, and myself. Minutes (original) in Bodleian archive..

[118] The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (ESTC): Planning for the Future 1980-1985. October 13 1980. Pp. 7. Original in Bodleian archive.

[119] Given the fact that for many years University Microfilms had been engaged on filming every item in STC and Wing [neither projects as yet completed] it was inevitable that ESTC would attract the attention of the large microfilm companies.

[120] B 81/49. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[121] The final contract was not signed until December 9 1981. Copy in Bodleian archive. I prepared for both RPI and the British Library a detailed strategy for the filming of books, as Editorial Director of the project. Within a year, when this strategy had proven to be effective, I was told by Shelley Kramer (President of RPI) that my services were no longer required. The lesson to be learned from this shabby treatment is not to tell your client more than 50% of what he/she needs to know at any one time.

[122] Dated June 3 1981. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[123] Every year, from 1981 to 1990, I faced demands for cutting costs: but because I made my major pleas to the Board itself throughout this period the project suffered less than others within the Reference Division.

[124] Letter dated June 8 1981. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[125] There were three attempts to convert the General Catalogue (GK): the last one undertaken by Saztech, on which the current OPAC is based. Most of the documentation for these are in the Bodleian archive.

[126] Letter to me from Susan Hills, dated February 4 1982. Original in Bodleian archive.

[127] Original in Bodleian archive.

[128] Narrative Report of Accomplishment: Louisiana State University. Pp. 14. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[129] The North American Imprints Program. Report to the ESTC International Committee. April [4] 1983. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[130] ESTC at the British Library. A Report submitted to the International Committee. New York. April [4] 1983. Pp. 7. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[131] Untitled. Dated April 5 1983. Pp. 17. Copy in Bodleian archive. North American Committee for the ESTC. A Report of the Meeting. Trustees Room, NYPL, April 5, 1983. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[132] ESTC/NA was eventually incorporated in 1984. Correspondence on the implications of this between Snyder and Wilson [et al] in Bodleian archive.

[133] By now Bodley’s Librarian. Letter to Wilson, dated July 25 1983. Copy in Bodleian archive. The CD-ROM version contains 76,611 Bodley holdings.

[134] Edited by M. Crump and M. Harris. British Library. 1983. Pp. 104. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[135] Originals in Bodleian archive.

[136] Dated March 21 1985. Copy in Bodleian archive. The meeting was held in the Fisher Library at the University of Toronto, April 15-16. Copy of Minutes in Bodleian archive.

[137] Email dated March 3 1985. Copy in Bodleian archive. This was the first email received by a Director General in the Reference Division.

[138] Dated March 27 1985. Pp. 4. Original in Bodleain archive. The Toronto meeting was attended by no fewer than twelve librarians, including Margaret Scott (National Library of Canada), Henriette Avram (LC), and Ray Frantz (Virginia University and liaison with ARL. This was the last meeting chaired by Wilson, who retired in February 1986.

[139] See www.r-alston.co.uk/essays.htm - “Educating librarians”; Bournemouth, 1996.

[140] Pp. 185-6.

[141] Dated November 17 1985. Original in Bodleian archive.

[142] Dated November 20 1985. Copy in Bodleian archive. After B.C. Bloomfield’s retirement in 1990 as Director of Collection Development, Phillips became Chairman of the British Committee. Reference Division was now called Humanities & Social Sciences.

[143] The Dutch national retrospective union catalogue of books based at the Royal Library in The Hague.

[144] Held in the British Library’s Novello House headquarters. Minutes p. 2. Copy in Bodleian archive..

[145] Bodley, Cambridge, London University, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh, Glasgow. A Report on Special Collections and a Statistical Analysis of Holdings. Undertaken at the request of CURL and OCLC Europe. Dated March 1 1986. Pp. 130. Original in Bodleian archive.

[146] Published between 1988 and 1990, Nos. 27-34. The journal ceased publication after No. 34. Copies in Bodleian archive. This report was, I believe, the most comprehensive survey of the special collections of the major British research libraries ever undertaken.

[147] Held in the BL on October 3 1986. Present: B.C. Bloomfield (Chairman), John Barnard (Leeds), G.K.S. Browning (Glasgow), Henry Heaney (Librarian, Glasgow University), Mervyn Jannetta, Fred Ratcliffe (Manchester), R.J. Roberts (Bodley), Crump, myself. Copy of Minutes in Bodleian archive.

[148] At the British Library, October 6-7 1986. Minutes in Bodleian archive.

[149] M.J. Crump. Briefing for the ESTC British & International Committees. P. 6. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[150] May 1986. Though glossed over in letters from Snyder to London the move was very upsetting to Judi Singleton and her team. Martha Smith left the project on December 31 1985, and Holly Phelps left on September 15 1985.

[151] No. 23, February 1987, p. [3].

[152] BLB 87/21. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[153] The English Short Title Catalogue. Pp. [6]. Copy in Bodleian archive.

[154] R.C. Alston. The British Library Microcomputer Symposium. October 6-7 1987. British Library. Pp. 105.

[155] Letter dated January 18 1988. Original in Bodleian archive.. I have no record of having declined or accepted; but many years on, this account partly serves such a purpose.

[156] Now the English Short Title Catalogue.

[157] The errors formed Annex 5 to the papers for the British Committee at their meeting on November 9 1989. The Minutes do not record any discussion on this.

[158] The Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue: an Interim Report. May 1989. Pp. 82. Because of its sensitive nature it was never officially released. Original in Bodleian archive

[159] In 1989 140 libraries had 1 location, and 240 had fewer than 5 (i.e. 45% of all libraries then listed as participating institutions). Even on the CD-ROM it is quickly evident, if one scans the Library indexes, that hundreds of libraries are represented by fewer than ten holdings. The actual total is 1078: 496 for British, 338 for North American, and 244 for “Other” libraries. The situation in 2003 is admirably summarised by Alain Beylit in “ESTC Contributing Libraries”: http://cbsr26.ucr.edu/rlinlibstats.html.

[160] P. 17.

[161] Nelson, Carolyn & Matthew Seccombe, British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641-1700: a Short-Title Catalogue. New York, Modern Language Association, 1987.

[162] I do feel disappointed that the most current file (on Eureka) is only available to institutions which are part of the Research Libraries Group, and that the British Library’s version (on BLAISE) has now been abandoned. It should also be mentioned that the variety of searches available on the Eureka file is quite restricted, compared with what used to be possible with ELHILL software on BLAISE. The CD-ROM version, however, is excellent, but is now over five years behind the data held on the RLIN file. Given the enormous contribution of British and Irish libraries to ESTC it seems strange that American libraries have better access to the file than those in the British Isles. Furthermore, over 11,000 British Library copies of books printed before 1801 are recorded only on the RLIN file and are not accessible to readers in the new St Pancras building on the British Library’s OPAC. Most of these books have the shelfmark RB.23xx.