Welsh Ballads – completing the British ballad network
The Welsh Ballads project will fill the final gap in the network of digitized collections of printed ballads around Britain, the Bodleian, National Library of Scotland and Glasgow University having undertaken projects on English and Scottish ballads already; between them these three contain about 30,000 ballads.
Cardiff University with the National Library of Wales and Bangor and Lampeter university libraries hold the main Welsh printed ballads collections (in both Welsh and English). A total of 5,000 ballads will be digitized, from the earliest 18th Century ballads to the final few published in the 20th Century. In total this will produce around 20,000 pages of digitized text images (all out of copyright).
A website portal will be developed from a pilot which already exists at Cardiff. This will provide a gateway and an academic resource for access and study of the ballad in Wales, Britain, and in its international context, and will link to the catalogue and ballad images.
Outputs from the project will include: a) a detailed online catalogue of 5,000 ballads; b) 20,000 digitised page images of 5,000 ballads; c) an academic web portal to ballad studies; d) a joint seminar in Cardiff with colleagues from Oxford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and possibly Ireland, to explore further developments of the cluster or network of ballad resources, and as an element in a wider dissemination programme on this topic.
Lead institution: Cardiff University Library
Partner institutions: National Library of Wales, Bangor University, University of Wales Lampeter
Project Plan
Download the Project Plan (pdf)
