The (Partial) Return of the Bodleian Broadside Ballads
Something about broadside ballads has recommended them as subjects for digital resources. As popular, ephemeral publications they have always promised to yield more in the aggregate than singly, while the apparent simplicity of digitizing a broadside, a single sheet printed on one side only, is obvious.
The Bodleian Ballads database began life in 1999 as one of the first digital resources from the Bodleian Library. This was a standalone digital resource collating ballads from several different collections within the Bodleian Library. It was only the first of several online ballads resources, including notably the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. EBBA went farther than others, providing transcriptions of ballad texts.
Cyber-security concerns prompted the temporary closure of the Bodleian Ballads digital resource in November 2024. Now, in October 2025, all of the more than 35,000 records have returned to public view, discoverable as a discrete collection within SOLO, the Bodleian’s online catalogue.
Missing, for now, are the digital images. A further stage in the return of this resource, with completion in view by summer 2026, is the linking of new digital images to the records, vastly improving on the black and white images from microfilm presented in the earlier versions.
[Old and new versions of images]
From October 2025, the ballad records are available via SOLO. The ballads can be searched as a discrete collection within this catalogue.
New high-resolution images will be available as a collection on Digital Bodleian from Summer 2026.
For more information, email rare.books@bodleian.ox.ac.uk .
Alexandra Franklin, Member of Council
