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English Broadside Ballad Archive
In May 2003, EBBA set its sights first on digitizing the largest extant collection of English broadside ballads published in the 17th century: the five volumes of ballads collected by Samuel Pepys held at Magdalene College, Cambridge. With seed monies and then more substantial funding, the full archiving of the Pepys Collection of over 1,800 ballads was completed. Our next undertaking, with continued funding, was to archive the second largest collection of English 17th century black-letter ballads: the four volumes (in five books) of Roxburghe Ballads held at the British Library, London, some 1,500 broadside ballads. In 2010, EBBA began archiving the Euing collection of 408 black-letter ballads held at the University of Glasgow as well as the approximately 600 early broadside ballads at the Huntington Library in Pasadena (including the many broadside ballads collected in the 17th century by Narcissus Luttrell and later bound in what is known as the Bindley collection; the invaluable Britwell collection of some 90 loose black-letter ballads of the 16th century; and many other bound and loose sheets not in named collections). Between 2012 and 2014, we fully archived the broadside ballad collections from the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, including the important Crawford Collection. We are currently archiving the more than 1,150 broadside ballads in the collections of Harvard University's Houghton Library.