Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Testing the record-editing interface.

Comparing calendars.

Yesterday provided us with a valuable opportunity to bring individual CofK researchers together with OULS technical experts for a day of intensive training and consultation on various aspects of our nascent union catalogue of seventeenth-century intellectual correspondence. Scholars working on the Aubrey, Lister, Lhwyd, Hartlib, and Comenius collections explored the latest iteration of the pilot database; tested its online interface for the editing of letter records as well as our free-standing application for the collection of epistolary data; and compared individual calendars against each other as well as Project standards. The first version of the catalogue will be launched at the Universal Reformation conference, which will take place in Oxford on 21-23 September 2010.

We are currently seeking an Editorial Assistant (1.0FTE) to help us with the online publication of the Bodleian Library’s card catalogue of seventeenth-century manuscript correspondence. To be based in the History Faculty, the assistant, who will be employed for six months in the first instance, will be responsible for providing basic quality assurance on metadata from the cards which has been keyed and supplied by an outsourcing company. Working with online tools for the display and editing of data developed specifically for the Project, they will ensure that all records have been tagged in compliance with Project standards; that within each individual field dates, names, and places have been expressed correctly and without typographical errors; and implement necessary changes directly onto the records by means of a simple data entry interface. The closing date for applications is noon on Friday 5 February 2010; for full details and how to apply, please see here.

Electronic Enlightenment, the pioneering online archive of over 55,000 eighteenth-century letters, has just released its second version. New features introduced include additional content (for example the correspondence of Gustavus III and Adam Smith), and a more powerful range of search and browse functions (you can now sort letters by language, age of writer/recipient, and date range; lives by occupation and nationality; and sources by archive/country and title/publisher of early editions). The site has also been given a fresh new look. Electronic Enlightenment is a research project of the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford, and is distributed by OUP.