History

The series know as 'Ancient Petitions' in The National Archives: Public Record Office consists of 17,629 petitions presented to the English crown between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, written in Anglo-Norman French, Latin and Middle English. They provide a wealth of unexploited data on the political, legal, social, cultural and biographical history of later medieval England and of its dependencies.

The University of Bristol, UK, holds over 33,000 pages in the Brunel Collection. This collection contains the personal papers of the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a key figure in the Industrial Revolution. However, despite its importance as a scholarly resource, no electronic catalogue of the collection exists and physical access is limited. In 2003 the University was awarded an AHRB resource enhancement grant to carry out a pilot digitization project to bring this resource to a wider audience via the Internet.

Between 1953, and 1999 when it closed its film department, Arts Council England commissioned or participated in the production of 485 films, which recorded all aspects of - mainly contemporary British - art. The subject matter, length and format of the films are as varied as they are eclectic. Moreover, because of the Council’s liberal attitude to sponsorship, and the creative freedom their commissions offered, they also attracted some of the best film-makers in the UK. Indeed, some of them provide a unique record of a partnership between the Arts Council, artists and film-makers.

The History of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama research project (1999-2004) operated under the aegis of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford. It has in many ways pioneered the developing discipline of Performance Reception. It has done this by documenting as comprehensively as possible all performances worldwide of Greek and Roman drama and their adaptations between the Renaissance and the present, while hand-in-hand with that also exploring ways of interpreting those findings and that material.