As Heavy as Two Cats or a King Penguin: Introducing the Bodleian Library’s Donor Register
Since the publication of our last blog post, the Shaping Scholarship team at UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters has been busy continuing our important research into early donations to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Our post-doctoral research associate Anna Lujz Gilbert has spent the past few months at the University of Oxford, examining hundreds of valuable rare books to establish which titles gifted to the library survive amongst the Bodleian’s thirteen million printed items. I’ve also joined the team as a research associate. When I’ve not been working on my DPhil (PhD) in English literature and women’s book history c.1550-1760 at the University of Oxford, I’ve been completing the Institute of Historical Research’s excellent course in database design and getting up to speed with the project’s progress. A key part of this has been getting to grips with Shaping Scholarship’s foundational document and the subject of this blog post: the first volume of Donor Register used to record the thousands of gifts to the library between 1602 and 1688.
