[Selectively re-blogged from the Cultures of Knowledge blog, with permission from the authors.]

Early Modern Letters Online – or EMLO for short – is a growing union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence. The project is based at the Faculty of History, Oxford. At the heart of EMLO is the The ‘Index of Literary Correspondence’.

The ‘Index of Literary Correspondence’ in the Bodleian Library is a card catalogue which occupies an imposing set of wooden filing drawers at the ‘Selden End’ of the Duke Humfrey’s Library.

It is a remarkable free-standing resource, describing a significant percentage of Bodleian’s rich holdings of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence, and had been accessible until recently only to those working on-site. Now you can read in Ghosts in the Machine: (Re)Constructing the Bodleian’s Index of Literary Correspondence, 1927-1963 about the history of its creation. The blog post documents a wonderful piece of Bodleian Library history and profiles the staff involved at the time.

As part of the EMLO project The Index of Literary Correspondence has been scanned and digitised, and now its 48,691 unique records can be searched and browsed online within EMLO, radically improving the discoverability and manipulability of the cards and the letters to which they refer.

Do you know something about the Index of Literary Correspondence? Get in touch with EMLO researchers. Email: cofk@humanities.ox.ac.uk.