[adapted from Bodleian Libraries news 9 July 2015.]

Readers and members of the public can now explore the Bodleian Libraries’ extraordinary collection of digitized books, manuscripts, maps, art and other materials through a single website.

The Digital.Bodleian website, launched on 8 July, includes more than 100,000 images covering everything from beautifully illustrated manuscripts and centuries-old maps to Victorian board games and Conservative Party election posters from the last 100 years.

For the first time the public can view digital versions of library materials, many of which were only previously accessible by obtaining an Oxford University Bodleian Libraries’ readers card. At digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk visitors can view a diverse range of stunning images, find out more about the Bodleian’s incredible historic collections, and even curate their own customized image collections within the website.

Digital.Bodleian also allows users to download images for non-commercial use, make private notes and annotations, leave public comments on images and share images on social media. The resource is particularly suited to educational use as all images are available under an open license allowing for use in presentations, on virtual learning environments and on other non-commercial platforms.

The History and Politics section includes:

• The Gough Map: Gateway to Medieval Britain
• Political prints from the Curzon Collection (a selection of 1,400 political cartoons and satire from England and the Continent on Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon’s career)
• Bringing Laxton to Life (a 17th-century survey and map of Laxton, Nottinghamshire).
• Seeing is Believing: Traditional and Colonial Images of Popular Culture (watercolours of life in 18th century and late 19th century Burma from previously uncatalogued manuscripts in the Bodleian)
• Cobbett’s Parliamentary History
• Arthur Evans Archive (records and papers of Sir Arthur Evans, many relating to excavations at Knossos on Crete between 1900 and 1931)
• Exploring Egypt in the 19^th Century (complete facsimile of publications from the early nineteeth-century expeditions to Egypt by Champollion and Rosellini.)
• Conservative Party Elections Posters, 1909-2007 (posters from the Conservative Party Archive representing election publicity throughout the 20th century up to recent times.)

Other collections of interest to historians are:

• Greek and Hebrew manuscripts digitized as part of the Polonsky Project, a joint initiative between the Bodleian Libraries and the Vatican Library, generously funded by the Polonsky Foundation.
• Medieval and Renaissance manuscript illuminations
• Blockbooks and woodcut prints
• Early printing in Europe
• Hundreds of board games, writing blanks, and other 18^th and 19^th century children’s games
• Victorian playbills, handbills, postcards and posters from the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera

History of Science and Medicine researchers might like to look at:

• The Entymologists Useful Compendium  (Key works in 19th-century entomology from the library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.)
• Key Works of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Century Geological Literature (Rare books relating to the history of science, geology, palaeontology, petrology, and mineralogy)
• SJC MS17: A unique work of medieval science (complete facsimile of a computistical assortment executed about 1110 in Thorney Abbey, Cambridgeshire, from St John’s College Oxford).

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