The Corvey Collection at the University of Nebraska

In Spring 1999 the University Libraries at the University of Nebraska acquired the full English-language Belles Lettres portion of the Corvey Collection in the form of a microfiche archive, thus making available to students and scholars at the University of Nebraska these remarkable resources. In Spring 2000 the French and German portions were added. With these additions the Corvey Collection includes

• 3290 titles (by 1289 different authors) in English, including 1071 titles by women
• 3261 titles in French, including 509 titles by women
• 2653 titles in German.

The entire collection is now available for consultation and study at Love Library on the main campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Facilities are available in the Microforms Collection for viewing and printing the microfiche comprising the Corvey Collection. This splendid research archive is supported by four other extensive microform archives held by the University Libraries:

• the Early British Periodicals series, which includes a broad range of periodicals from the British Isles from the years primarily before 1800,
• the English Literary Periodicals series, which covers the majority of English-language literary periodicals and journals beginning in the later 18^th century,
• the British Periodicals in the Creative Arts series, and
• the complete Early American Imprints through 1819.

The presence of these fouradditional extensive microform archives make possible at the University of Nebraska the systematic study of British Romantic literature in its historical context within the contemporary print culture. Taken together with these microform archives and other traditional print materials that further supplement the literary and cultural history of British Romanticism, the Corvey Collection provides an unparalleled resource for the detailed study of British Romanticism.

One of the special initiatives that will be undertaken at the University of Nebraska is the study of British Romanticism in historical context, including the reception history of Romantic texts. We envision the creation of an electronic research archive that will be linked to other archives via the World Wide Web, making possible the increasingly seamless assembly of primary text materials, historical and contextual materials, and critical and bibliographical resources. We anticipate that Nebraska will become a center for this contextual study, a project that has important implications for the further study of historically neglected, marginalized, or suppressed writers, and therefore for the further reassessment of the British literary landscape generally. As these extensive resources are explored by more and more scholars, it is reasonable to expect that scholarship will discover many new and unexpected relationships among authors and texts from the period. Indeed, it is reasonable also to anticipate that by means of the coordinated collaborative efforts of scholars working in many places and on many authors Romantic scholarship in general may begin moving toward attributing to individual authors - even if only tentatively - some of the many anonymous works whose authors' identities have historically eluded us.