English Broadside Ballad Archive

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA) is a digital library of 17th-century English Broadside Ballads, a project of the English Department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The project archives ballads in multiple accessible digital formats.

The English Broadside Ballad Archive was created in 2003 by Patricia Fumerton, Professor of English at UCSB to digitize broadside ballads of the heyday of the 17th century. Many of these ballads are currently held in difficult to access libraries in both North America and the United Kingdom, often in fragile condition, and EBBA’s aim is to make them accessible to users in a variety of digital formats. Since then, EBBA has received six Collections and Resources grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, and Faculty Research Grants and Instructional Improvement Grants from the University of California, Santa Barbara. As of August 2015, the project has archived over 7000 of the estimated 11,000 extant broadside ballads.

As of August 2015, EBBA has archived 7,124 broadside ballads, from 20 different collections held at six different libraries worldwide. The collections range from the very well-known and recognized by name - such as those housed at the Pepys Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge - to the relatively unknown. The project has currently archived ballads from the following libraries, with partnerships in place to begin archiving ballads from several other libraries in the next two years.

In addition to cataloging all of its holdings exhaustively, EBBA archives ballads in up to five different formats, all designed to make the ballads more accessible to modern scholars and members of the public.

All ballads are archived on the website as a high quality, 600 dpi image of the ballad sheet, trimmed with a 2mm margin.

Those ballads that were pasted into albums or archived in any format other than loose-leaf are also archived on the website in another high quality photograph of the ballad sheet on its surrounding album page.

All ballads, often originally rendered in difficult to read black letter, or Gothic font, and other early modern typefaces, are transcribed into Times New Roman using a diplomatic double-keyed transcription process, and those transcriptions are included in the archive.

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