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Introduction
England
Wales
Scotland
Ireland
Islands
Index
Types of Library
Societies
Sources
Statistics
Country House Libraries
Private Collections
Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries
Summary Statistics
Email:
r_alston@sunbeach.net
Barbados Address:
67 Ocean City
St. Philip
Barbados
Tel/Fax: 246 416 9097
Yorkshire Address:
8 Silver Street
Masham, N.
Yorkshire
HG4 4DX.
Tel: 01765 688341
Updated:
05-04-2008
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 This database will shortly be transferred
to the Institute of English Studies, School
of Advanced Study, University of London.
The Library History Database now contains information on
over 27,000 libraries in the British Isles,
and is based on over 1,200 published works. It is regularly updated, but additions and corrections are
usually added to the main files for England,
Wales, Scotland, Ireland,
and the Islands. It takes much longer to get
up-dates into the various long and complex subsidiary files.
If you want to know more about the project - and the data
in preparation - click on Introduction in the Contents Frame. Otherwise, just browse the
200+ files which this site offers.
Cultural historians have under-estimated the number of
libraries available for reading, whether for entertainment or for
self-improvement. As the data presented here demonstrates there was provision
of print in almost every market town in the British
Isles by the year 1820, and by 1850 in hundreds of villages with
a population of less than 500 souls. The sheer variety of libraries so far
discovered is quite extraordinary: libraries devoted to the arts and
sciences; libraries in the workplace; libraries on omnibuses; libraries in
inns; libraries on the estates of wealthy landowners provided for the
workers; libraries associated with every type of society; village libraries
provided by benevolent pastors.
My thanks to all those who have sent in corrections and/or
additions. These are too numerous to acknowledge individually. I have receive
emails about this database almost every day since 1998!
The three-volume Cambridge
History of Libraries in Britain
appeared late in 2006, and I received my copy a few days ago. I have been
asked to review this immense undertaking (which I started many years ago) for
The Library. Users of LHD may be
puzzled to note that this contribution to library history has not been mentioned
by any contributor in Volumes I and II, which deal with the period to 1850.
Robin Alston
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