Scottish Chapbooks Catalogue

This collaborative project began in 1999 between the University of Glasgow’s Special Collections and the University of Strathclyde (Centre for Scottish Cultural Studies). The aim was to create a web accessible union database of Scottish chapbooks. Funded by a small British Academy grant, the project began by extending an existing Microsoft Access database of chapbooks held by the University of Glasgow containing 1200 items. The project involved detailed cataloguing of these chapbooks to ballad first line level including contents. Peter Asplin (Special Collections) reconstructed the Scottish Chapbooks database and Mark Denham (Information Services) produced a Web version in Cold Fusion. This was accessible via the Special Collections website. The data was refined and developed in 2001 with advice from other partners, including the National Library of Scotland. Details of chapbooks from other libraries (385 items from Edinburgh Central Library and 144 duplicates from Stirling University) were added to the database. In 2004-05, data from 3,739 chapbooks from the National Library of Scotland was added following a grant from the British Library’s Full Disclosure initiative to catalogue the Lauriston Castle Collection of chapbooks. The main impediment to expanding the catalogue to include the holdings of other library collections was funding the staffing costs to catalogue the books as well as convert the data. At 2019, the web based chapbooks catalogue held details of 4624 different chapbooks in 7878 copies incorporating 11360 individual works including variant versions.