The Clark Library has several digital collections and projects ongoing. Two large digitization projects focus on early modern manuscript material. We are digitizing over 300 English manuscripts through a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Digitizing Hidden Collections grant and approximately 285 early modern annotated books through a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. The collections will grow in the coming months as more items are digitized and published online. For the most part, the facsimiles are hosted on Calisphere, the University of California’s platform for digital collections.

Early Modern English Manuscripts

This collection contains complete digital scans of over 300 early modern English bound manuscripts from the Clark Library. Dating primarily from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, these handwritten texts comprise a vast range of manuscript genres, including commonplace books, miscellanies, recipe collections, historical treatises, literary manuscripts, sermon notebooks, scientific texts, heraldic manuals, musical collections, travel narratives, legal compilations, and account books. Together, these items offer an expansive research archive for historians and literary critics, with particular strengths in social history, history of food and medicine, musicology, textual studies, and history of the book. Digitization of these items has been made possible by the generous support of CLIR, who awarded the Clark a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant in 2015.

Early Modern Annotated Books

Comprising over 250 early modern printed books bearing handwritten annotations, this collection offers rich evidence for studying the material history of reading. The books collected here range in subject matter (from science and natural history to literature and philosophy), time period (1472–1818), and type of annotation (from scholarly commentary and cross-referencing to printers’ notations and polemical criticism). The annotators themselves include translator John Florio, literary critic John Dennis, painter William Hogarth, French bibliophile François-Louis Jamet, English ephemera collector Narcissus Luttrell, avian enthusiast Judith Gowing, York printer Thomas Gent, London lawyer Thomas Turner, country vicar Thomas Austen, and many other identified and unidentified readers. Digitization of these items has been made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded the Clark a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant in 2017. The project concludes at the end of October 2018, when the remainder of the digitized annotated books will be published online.

Eric Gill Art Collection

Collection of work created by the English artist Eric Gill (1882-1940). The collection is hosted by the UCLA Digital Library but will be migrated to Calisphere in the future.