Documents and Collections

Amongst the main features of letters and collections requiring careful definition are the following:

1. physical characteristics of letters (watermarks, folding, seals, ribbons, etc.);
2. stages in letter composition (draft, fair copy, copy sent; autograph and scribal version);
3. genres of learned letters (epistles dedicatory, letters to the reader, formal testimonials, official correspondence, newsletters, etc.);
4. reciprocal relationships between letters and other documents and media (oral discussions, minutes, diaries, commonplace books, printed books, news media, scholarly journals, enclosures);
5. modes of dissemination (forwarding, circulation, and reading by recipients; recipients’ copies and extracts);
6. modes of collection and preservation, including:
   • personal collections, auto-archived by correspondents themselves, with or without related material assembled by others (e.g. Leibniz-Archiv, Hannover);
   • named collections, assembled by individual or corporate collectors (e.g. Waller Manuscript Collection, Uppsala);
   • institutional collections of official, semi-official and related correspondence (e.g. Royal Society of London);
   • letters preserved with non-epistolary material, whether manuscript or print (often overlooked in cataloguing and therefore difficult to track down: e.g. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole);
   • composite collections of manuscript correspondence, composed of several of the above categories (e.g. Bodleian Library, Oxford);
   • collections of early modern correspondence printed during the period;
   • subsequent scholarly editions of correspondence, in printed or digital form;
7. dispersion and destruction (missing letters; deliberate destruction and theft; accidental or collateral loss or destruction; means of tracking provenance of collections and of individual letters).

The necessary precondition for the orderly collection of data on individual learned letters scattered across Europe is a census of the main collections of early modern learned correspondence.
Sourcing collections-level descriptions is a complex task, given the existence of relevant materials in manuscript, print, and digital form. A variety of methods must be developed for harvesting existing data and generating new descriptions, amongst which are the following:

1. for existing data on early modern printed collections of correspondence:
   • assemble existing bibliographies of early modern printed letter collections (e.g. Estermann);
   • extract collections of printed letters from national historical bibliographies (e.g. STC, Wing, VD 16, VD 17, USTC, etc.);
2. for existing finding aids (print and digital) for manuscript correspondence:
   • assemble a bibliography of printed catalogues of early modern manuscript correspondence;
   • consolidate understanding of scope and method of existing union catalogues of relevant mss material (e.g. CEN, Kalliope, e-manuscripta);
   • assemble links to electronic catalogues and findings aids for major relevant manuscript collections (e.g. Leiden UB);
3. for the scholarly crowd-sourcing of new catalogue-level descriptions, infrastructure and workflows must be devised and piloted, along the following lines:
   • design webform to facilitate the efficient, collaborative inputting of collection-level descriptions of printed and manuscript correspondence into a common database;
   • experiment with use of this infrastructure for scholarly crowd-sourcing;
   • advertise the opportunity to contribute to this database via associations for archives, libraries, special collections, rare books, and relevant academic fields, potentially in each country across the COST Action;
   • establish monitoring procedures for quality control and prioritization of data inputting and systems development.