New England Shakespeare Oxford Library (NESOL) joins the Internet Archive to provide online access to all things Oxfordian
By William Boyle
The New England Shakespeare Oxford Library (NESOL) is pleased to announce that it has signed an agreement with the Internet Archive to become a “Partner Library” in the IA’s Open Library project, and share its growing collection of Shakespeare authorship books and other materials with the world through the Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program. In joining Open Library, NESOL joins hundreds of other libraries around the world that are making their collections available to their patrons in digital format.
NESOL, founded in 2006, was recently incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit library in order to lay the groundwork to function as a legal, full-fledged library, and to begin the work of collecting and archiving the full range of Oxfordian research and publications from the past century. The current NESOL Trustees are Alex McNeil, William Boyle, Hank Whittemore, and Catherine Hatinguais.
The library’s core book collection was assembled by former Shakespeare Oxford Society President Elisabeth “Betty” Sears in the 1990s to 2000s, to which was added the book collections of Charles and William Boyle. In the last five years NESOL’s holdings have more than doubled with the addition in 2018 of 700-plus books from the late Prof. Daniel L. Wright’s collection, and, in 2019, the late W. Ron Hess’s collection of photocopied books and other materials. The Hess collection is comprised of approximately 500-600 binders containing more than 1,000 separate publications, ranging from multi-volume books, to pamphlets and journal articles, to printouts of research materials on web sites in the 1990s to 2000s.
NESOL is currently working on cataloging all these items and making as many of them available online to the Oxfordian community—and the world—as possible. While the library maintains a public access catalog of all its book holdings (NESOL catalog), its main outreach project in making its resources available to all is through the SOAR (Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources) catalog/database, which is separate from, and larger than, the NESOL catalog.
In SOAR all the articles ever published in Oxfordian newsletters, journals, etc. are cataloged and linked to full-text versions that can be called up with a simple click. The library now has started the process of providing access to the contents of our book collection by cataloging each book chapter separately (like an article) in SOAR, and then linking each chapter record to the starting page of that chapter in the Internet Archive/Open Library copy of the book. You already can see each chapter of Mark Anderson’s 2005 book, Shakespeare by Another Name, by making a simple search in SOAR (note there is no space between Anderson and 2005):
Before the emergence of the Controlled Digital Lending program, only works in the public domain could be made freely available online. With the new and evolving practice of CDL, libraries now have the option of scanning their non-public domain materials and making them available by lending the scanned copy, which is protected by digital rights management software and cannot be copied. An example of how the library world’s view of CDL is evolving is the fact that the Boston Library Consortium has embarked on a project to enable all its member libraries to lend to each other through interlibrary loans and to their patrons using CDL. They have issued a position paper on their project:
Statement on Using Controlled Digital Lending as a Mechanism for Interlibrary Loan
and recent major news stories have covered their plans. For example, see:
CDL accelerates Boston Library Consortium
In the age of COVID, more and more libraries are turning to CDL to serve their patrons, and in response major publishers are taking the Internet Archive to court to demand that the practice be stopped. This is a huge battle, with much at stake for everyone. See this Time magazine article for background on this lawsuit:
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle interviewed in Time magazine (October 2021): I Set Out to Build the Next Library of Alexandria. Now I Wonder: Will There Be Libraries in 25 Years?
For articles and videos giving recent history and background about Controlled Digital Lending, see:
Information video at the Internet Archive site
A Symposium presentation by Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive’s Open Library Director, Empowering Libraries Through Controlled Digital Lending (2022)
