Kennen Sie schon … das Crowdsourcing-Projekt „In the Spotlight“ der British Library?

Das Mot­to des Pro­jek­ts: „Help bring past per­for­mances from the British Library’s his­toric play­bills col­lec­tion to life.“

The British Library holds a sig­nif­i­cant col­lec­tion of play­bills dat­ing from the 1730s to the 1950s. These play­bills list enter­tain­ments at the­atres, fairs, plea­sure gar­dens and oth­er such venues. Small ‚hand­bills‘ were cir­cu­lat­ed amongst the­atre-goers enjoy­ing the per­for­mance while larg­er ‚great bills‘ were post­ed on walls and win­dows. The Library’s col­lec­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 234,000 play­bills has been bound into over 1000 vol­umes, some of which have been digi­tised – and now we need your help to bring them back into the spot­light.

These sin­gle-sheet items are usu­al­ly ephemer­al (fires always need­ed light­ing!) and the Library’s col­lec­tion only exists thanks to zeal­ous col­lec­tors who saved a large num­ber of sheets. These play­bills offer a wealth of his­tor­i­cal detail with thou­sands of per­son­al names of actors, play­wrights, com­posers, and the­atre man­agers. Less well-known and even for­got­ten plays are pre­served along­side pop­u­lar per­for­mances and much-loved dra­mas. Some of these plays may not have been inde­pen­dent­ly record­ed in print­ed form, while some songs may not have been com­mit­ted to any print­ed score – tran­scribers may well dis­cov­er pre­vi­ous­ly lost plays or songs!

The rich details cap­tured on each his­tor­i­cal page – from for­got­ten per­son­al names to pop­u­lar songs and plays to lost moments in the­atri­cal his­to­ry – aren’t yet avail­able to search online. You can help unlock this impor­tant col­lec­tion – every con­tri­bu­tion, large or small, makes a dif­fer­ence.

We’ve launched In the Spot­light to make these digi­tised play­bills more find­able online, and to give peo­ple a chance to see past enter­tain­ments as rep­re­sent­ed in this col­lec­tion. You can help tran­scribe titles, names and loca­tions to make the play­bills eas­i­er to find.

https://www.libcrowds.com/collection/playbills/about

Weit­ere Infos find­en Sie auf der Web­site des Pro­jek­ts.

Für die ver­schiede­nen Crowd­sourc­ing-Pro­jek­te der British Library gibt es auch einen Twit­ter-Account: @LibCrowds.