The BCMSV database: a progress report and a case study

BCMSV is a computer database of information about individual items of seventeenth and eighteenth‐century manuscript English verse in the Brotherton Collection of Leeds University Library. Its recent worldwide availability via the Internet provides an opportunity to describe the purpose and nature of the project, to outline the database record structure, and to give examples of current search techniques (with illustrative examples). Concludes with an examination of one of the manuscripts indexed in BCMSV, Brotherton Collection MS Lt 11, which was compiled apparently in a Yorkshire household at different dates from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. Shows that analysis of the manuscript (which predominantly contains anonymous satires) is now greatly facilitated by its inclusion in BCMSV. Reproduces a manuscript page containing one of three “satires upon the Wakefield ladies”.