The blplaybills.org website provides a way to search for, view and download archival playbills from Great Britain and Ireland, 1600-1902, as curated by the British Library (BL).

The website is independently produced using assets made available by the British Library under a Creative Commons licence as part of an open data initiative.

The playbill data

Playbills were promotional flyers advertising entertainment events at theatres, fairs and pleasure gardens.

The BL playbills data originated as document scans (digitised from microfilm, the most viable approach for fragile artefacts) in PDF format, each file containing hundreds of individual playbills, grouped by volume (usually organised by theatre, region and/or period of history).

In total there are more than 80,000 scanned playbills available.

Beside the PDFs, there is also metadata describing where in the Library these playbills could be found (volumes, shelfmarks etc). Including this information meant researchers could search for information online, and also have the volume reference at hand when visiting the Library.

This data is useful to anyone researching theatre, music, history and literature. Making it easy to find, view and download playbills using simple text searches over the internet is a good way to bring the playbills to a wider audience.

This is how blplaybills.org came into existence: the goal was to turn playbill data from the British Library into a searchable online database and image store.

You can read more in an article by Sak Supple published in the British Library’s web site at: https://bit.ly/3REGY2O.