In collaboration with the Senate House Library at the University of London, the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image at the University of Pennsylvania is pleased to announce the completion of the Seymour de Ricci Bibliotheca Britannica Manuscripta Digitized Archive, a corollary project to the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts.
The archive is a searchable database containing the digitized notes of the historian and bibliographer Seymour Montefiore Robert Rosso de Ricci (1881-1942), made for the compilation of his unfinished census of pre-1800 manuscripts in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. De Ricci's notes, gathered in thirty-four boxes containing over 60,000 index cards, are currently housed in the Senate House Library. They are divided into two main sections: one for repositories (approximately 40,000 slips) and one for collectors (approximately 20,000 slips). The cards contain information gleaned from wide reading and especially from sale catalogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
As the Senate House Library website for the archive states, the notes are "idiosyncratic but recklessly and persistently useful."
To learn more and access the archive, go to http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/dericci/index.html
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Lynn Ransom, Ph.D.
Project Manager, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image
The University of Pennsylvania Libraries
3420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206
215.898.7851