Thursday 13 December 2018

Works by Eliza Haywood online

Regular visitors to this page (my list of original editions of works by Eliza Haywood available for free online) will have noticed that the pace of additions has slowed. This is not because I am neglecting the page or failing to search for new scans. Rather, fewer and fewer scans of original editions of Haywood's works are appearing online, on Google Books, The Internet Archive, and elsewhere.

Often now, when I am able to make an addition to my list of links to Haywood's works, it is because I have found something that was so abominably catalogued that it has been invisible online for years. And, usually, I am able to locate these otherwise-invisible texts only because I discover a new search engine, or a new way to do a search.

When I made my last update to my list of "Facsimile Texts and Downloadable pdfs" I discovered just such a new way of searching the Internet Archive. When you search the Internet Archive catalogue for editions of works authored ("Created") by Eliza Haywood (presently 7 items as "Eliza Haywood" [here]—mostly LibriVox recordings—and 25 items as [Haywood, Eliza] here), it is possible to sort the results according to "Date Archived"—a proxy for when the item was first uploaded to the internet.


If you combine the information from the two screen-caps above (ignoring the LibriVox recordings) you will see that the total number of volumes per year are: 2006 (2), 2007 (3), 2008 (2), 2009 (9), 2010 (7), 2011 (1), 2012 (1), 2013 (0), 2014 (1), 2015 (0), 2016 (0), 2017 (0), 2018 (1). That is, after a steady climb from 2006 to 2010, there has been a collapse in the number of new scans of works by Haywood on the Internet Archive. Below is a graph of the data.


I am not sure why fewer scans are appearing on the Internet Archive. It is probably because, as more of her works were scanned, fewer remained to be scanned—a possibility based on the assumption that those doing the scanning are reluctant to "double-up" by scanning a second or third copy of the same edition. It is also likely that those doing the scanning simply do not have access to either works which are yet to be scanned or even second or third copies of editions which have already been scanned.

The first item on my list of scans, for instance, is the Boston Public Library copy of Ab.1.4b Love in Excess, 4th ed. (1722)—which is the only copy known, so no other copy can be scanned. The second item is the British Library copy of Ab.4.1b The British Recluse, 2nd. ed. (1722). There are only two other copies of this edition, at Glasgow University and Reading University. These universities are unlikely to prioritise the scanning and uploading of another copy of The British Recluse until they have scanned and uploaded all the works they hold which are not already online.

Although I don't have easy access to similar data for Google Books, my impression is that there is a similar pattern there. Which means that, with only a few new scans made available in the last six years, it could be a very long time before there is a significant increase to the number of Haywood's works available online.

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