The NEH has awarded Patricia Fumerton her 6th grant, $260,000, toward UCSB’s English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu.

With third-party contributions and cost-share the total amount is $538,000. This brings the amount to date awarded to EBBA to 3 1/2 million dollars, the majority of which has gone towards supporting graduate students across UCSB’s historical fields primarily in the English Department but also in Music, Art History, and History.

The latest NEH grant will go towards including in the archive of already over 7,000 broadside ballads and 5,000 recordings, another 900 pre-1701 printed ballads from Chetham Library, Manchester; Manchester Central Library; the Society of Antiquaries, London; and the Beinecke Library, Yale University. In addition, the approximately 1,880 broadside ballads held at the Pepys Library, Cambridge University, will be re-filmed in high resolution color and re-archived as such. Finally, the grant will fund transcription of the early modern recordings, with text underlay, and upgrading of the database to include, among other features, user-friendly visualization tools.

Patricia Fumerton was aided in writing her grant proposal by Dr. Carl Stahmer at UC-Davis and many post and current graduate students at UCSB, including Erik Bell from the Music Department and, from English, Dr. Megan E. Palmer, Kristy McCants, Katie Adkison, Rachel Levinson-Emley and the extraordinary staff of SASC, especially Brian Reynolds.