Playbills exhibition at Theatre Royal, York

York Playbills Project partners met recently to discuss staging an exhibition of playbills at the Theatre Royal, York, to follow on from the York 800 project. We are planning to open the exhibition on February 4th 2013, and to run complementary events at York St John University's Fountains Learning Centre and the University of York.

It is also hoped to further develop the use of the playbills as an educational resource. The online playbills collection was originally developed in conjunction with York St. John's Students as Researcher project, as described in the presentation at the Sheffield Life-share Digital Collaboration Colloquium in 2011, and we are aiming to work alongside students and staff there in taking the project onwards.

Student researcher recruited to work on Playbills Project

York St John University has recruited a student researcher to work on the York Playbills Project. The funding for this comes from a "Student as Researcher" initiative under the Teaching Enhancement Student Success (TESS) funding stream. As part of the project, the researcher will scan and add more playbills to the digital archive; she will also investigate with faculties their use as a learning resource, and produce a report at the end of the project on her experiences. The Student as Researcher project is due to end in August 2011.

Scheduled maintenance

On Wednesday February 24 2010 we will be performing maintenance and upgrades to our digital archive. We anticipate that this work will take no more than one day to complete, and will commence Wednesday morning. The archive should come back online by Thursday February 25 2010 at the latest.

The affected sites (digarch.yorksj.ac.uk, www.yorkshireplaybills.org.uk) will be unavailable during this window.

More playbills added

Thanks to the efforts of Anika Pfuetzner, an exchange student from Germany who was with us in December, we have been able to add some new playbills to the collection.

These new additions are from the 19th century, and mainly relate to performances at the Theatre Royal in York. They are part of the Hailstone collection which is held by the York Minster Library.

Yorkshire Theatres playbills and posters - launch event

Tonight (3rd June), the press night for Pinter's The Homecoming at York Theatre Royal, sees the launch of the Yorkshire Theatres playbills & posters website. This online resource, which is comprised of digital images of theatrical playbills and posters dating from the 18th century to the present day, is freely available from http://www.yorkshireplaybills.org.uk.

The project, to investigate the feasibility of the digitisation of these artefacts, has resulted in a small collection of high quality digital images that have been released under a Creative Commons license, specifically designed to encourage re-use of the images for non-commercial purposes.