Theatre locations

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Frisby

Hi - I've looked through various posts and the old newsletters so apologies if I've missed something obvious but is there an activity to identify the location of the theatres for each playbill?
I noticed that there is a filter for location on the 'Take Part' page but this seems to only relate to the locations identified in the volume titles rather than all of the locations included within the volumes. Obviously some theatres are much better covered than others and it would be interesting to understand the distribution.

There are some playbills which provide a challenge as they don't actually include the name of the town they are in so I can imagine that these would require a bit of extra work when adding location details.

Thanks

mia

Hi Frisby - that's a great question! You're right about the current location filter, which is only based on the titles. I've asked someone with more curatorial knowledge of the collections to respond and see whether it might be useful to do a location task for some volumes.

If we did that, I'd want an easy way to choose from previously-entered values, as it'd be a pain to type out a location or theatre name again and again, so we mightn't be able to do it immediately, but we might add it to the list.

Thanks!

Frisby

That's great! It only occurred to me yesterday that location wasn't being covered.
I agree that it's better to provide the placenames as a dropdown list rather than manually entering them. Hopefully it would be possible to create a hierarchy so the playbills could then be filtered by specific theatre, town, county and country. Due to my interests I'd also like to be able to filter by theatre circuit but I can imagine that would be slightly more awkward to set up.

christian

Hello Frisby - thanks for raising queries about the locations of the playbills. It is a good question and I'm a little surprised that there haven't been more questions about it! One of the main reasons for launching this project is to capture more individual item-level details - information from each playbill sheet. The existing catalogue records describe what is held at volume or 'collection level' only - just one brief record covers a bunch of playbill sheets collated together into individual volumes. The British Library has acquired its great range of playbills from two sources: by purchase of individual sheets and collections of sheets from the book trade by past curators, and from donations or purchases of collections from known collectors, such as those collected by Sir Augustus Harris, manager at Covent Garden Theatre Royal Drury Lane; William Archer, the theatre critic; Sidney Carr Glynn; and William Barclay Squire. The main sequence of playbills (shelfmarked 'Playbills 1-482') comprise a range of periods, theatres and locations, some were already arranged by theatre or location but others - from miscellaneous locations and theatres - have been sorted into rough alphabetical groups in volumes. Researchers looking to use the playbills for their research have been supplied with a reference handlist which lists volumes by locations - this reference aid has generally only been available to readers in the Rare Books Reading Room (it hasn't been published). So, whilst we do have some form of guide for access to playbills by location it isn't exactly 'out there'. We think it would be great to have locations matched to individual playbills for the 'miscellaneous' regional volumes (there are about 40 venues in all), but the task would be best assisted with an automated list of known locations. I hope this is something that can be done in future. Meantime, I can email you a copy of the 'Register of Playbills' with locations / shelfmarks. Must be remembered that not all of the playbills volumes have been digitised, but it will help you find out what locations are covered in the collection.

Frisby

christian Thank you, the register would be very helpful to me. I'm researching my extended theatrical family, over the decades they performed at various theatres across the country so identifying whether relevant locations are covered by volumes within the collection (even if they aren't digitised) will be a great aid.