CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) has announced the inaugural round of projects for “Digitizing Hidden Collections and Archives: Enabling New Scholarship through Increasing Access to Unique Materials,” an initiative made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of eighteen successful proposals, “Digitizing British Manuscripts at UCLA’s Clark Library, 1601–1800” provides for the creation of electronic facsimiles of 300 bound manuscripts produced in Great Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Clark’s collection complements holdings of other research libraries and specifically enriches the digital resources available to scholars of British cultural, political, and social history. The manuscripts comprise commonplace books, sermons, inventories, poems, plays, recipe books, accounts, and music.

Image: Gull. Hutton, Methodos facilis, or, A plain and easy way for attaining the knowledge and practice of common arithmetick both in whole and broken numbers opera et studio studio Gull. Hutton, 1701. [MS.2001.003, UCLA Clark Library]

Sample opening of this mathematical instructional text, complete with hand-drawn charts, diagrams, and tables throughout. Composed by “Gull.” (probably Guglielmus) Hutton, the volume includes instruction on simple addition and subtraction as well as mathematical “sports and pastimes” and how to use counting frames in business.