The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML), housed at the English Folk Dance and Song Society in London, is putting its catalogue online. The pilot phase was completed recently, and features the Leslie Shepard Collection.

Leslie Alan Shepard (1917–2004) was a collector of books and printed ephemera on a variety of subjects, including folk song and broadside ballads. Born in East London in 1917, Shepard moved to Ireland in 1969, settling in Dublin where he died in 2004. He wrote about street literature, early moving images, the paranormal as well as other subjects. Towards the end of his life and after his death, Shepard’s books and printed items were dispersed, and his Bram Stoker collection was given to the Dublin City Library. He donated material of Irish interest to the Irish Traditional Music Archive shortly after its foundation, and his books relating to the subjects of broadsides and printing, folk music and street literature were bestowed on the VWML in 2002. This collection of 1,471 items was transported to London, organised, labelled and catalogued in an internal database.

The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library is a collection of material on traditional arts and culture. It includes books, manuscripts, off-prints, pamphlets, periodicals, serials, press cuttings, broadsides, prints, paintings, line drawings, photographs, slides, artefacts, ephemera, records, reel-to-reel tapes, phonograph cylinders, videos, cine films, CDs and audio cassettes.

koha.efdss.org