The Boyle Papers

The catalogue entries used here derive from the catalogue of the Boyle Papers, Letters and ancillary manuscripts at the Royal Society originally published by University Publications of America in 1992; this was entirely revised in 2004, and the revised version is now available on the Royal Society website. Both the original and the revised versions of the catalogue were prepared under the supervision of Professor Michael Hunter, and all enquiries about the catalogue should be addressed to him at m.hunter@bbk.ac.uk .

The interface has been designed and executed by Stella Wong.

The creation of the digitised images, their editing, and their provision in online form as part of the revised Boyle website was generously funded by a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of a project entitled 'Robert Boyle for the 21 st Century'. The joint partners in this project were Birkbeck (University of London), the Royal Society and Access to Archives (A2A).

The images were created by the Higher Education Digitisation Service.

The library and archive staff of the Royal Society have provided constant support in the preparation of this resource, particularly Joanna Corden, archivist, and Karen Peters, Head of Library and Information Services.

Crucial advice has been provided throughout by the staff of Access to Archives, notably Sarah Stark and Bill Stocking.

Advice on IT has been provided by Alan Forth, David Murray, Rosalind Rutherford and Adrian Tribe of Birkbeck's Central Computing Services.

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Technical and copyright information

The digitised manuscript images

All manuscript images are taken from the Boyle Papers at The Royal Society.

The manuscript images were digitized by HEDS (Higher Education Digitisation Service) at a resolution of 600dpi in a TIFF lossless image format. The images were then batch optimised for presentation on the web as compressed JPEG files at 72dpi using Adobe© Photoshop CS software. All the images are in colour and presented as double page spreads. The majority of the files are sized at 1024 pixels wide but in some instances the manuscript images are slightly larger at 1150 pixels wide to aid legibility where the manuscript text is hard to read or faded. The average file size per image is approximately 180-200 KB which may incur increased download times on low bandwidth connections.

The image file names are in the form, 'bp02_001v-002r', i.e. Boyle Papers volume 2, folios 1v-2r. The equivalent reference in the text would be abbreviated as BP 2, fols. 1v-2.

Copyright information

All manuscript images are the copyright of The Royal Society.

All materials and digitised images are provided solely for scholarly study, research purposes and for the general public. Commercial use or publication of any of the material and/or the digitised images without prior authorization is strictly prohibited.

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