The Bodleian Library Slide Collection at Purdue: Guides to Illustrated Prose Lancelot Manuscripts

Abstract

Founded by Thomas H. Ohlgren in the early 1970s, by the year 2000 the Bodleian Slide Collection at Purdue University had grown to 1099 slide sets of the illuminated pages and partial texts from the chief Western manuscripts and early printed books—dating from the ninth through the sixteenth centuries—in the Bodleian, several Oxford College libraries, and several other libraries. Sold as unmounted rolls of color transparency film, the 35 mm transparencies were mounted as slides for use by faculty and students in the Medieval Studies program at Purdue and have proved an invaluable resource for those in the university community interested in exploring the images and iconography of the medieval world. Today, the slides in the collection number well over 20,000 and include images ranging from medieval maps, luxurious carpet pages, herbals, bestiaries, marginalia, objects excavated at archaelogical digs, and more. For a time in the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s the slide sets were available for rental by people outside Purdue University, but this practice was stopped because of the high maintenance costs. (For an online list of the collection, go to http://www.cla.purdue.edu/medieval-studies/Ohlgren/index.html .)