Abstract
The article describes the creation of an innovative computer database of manuscript English verse in Leeds University Library, outlining the record structure and the free-text search techniques, and explaining in detail the nature of the 17 different fields. It discusses the indexing prob lems encountered in the course of the work, particularly the best means of subject indexing. The solution, unconventionally, has been a discur sive content field in which the user of the database is explicitly informed about the poem's subject matter and emphases in words not drawn from a controlled thesaurus, but nevertheless designed to be helpful for retrieval purposes. It is recognized that this particularized approach will have drawbacks for researchers necessitat ing the use of synonyms and other techniques, but the database has already successfully answered many different kinds of enquiry. BCMSV aims to be an informative finding list, not a comprehensive catalogue, and one of the intentions is to encourage scholars to come to Leeds to see the manuscripts for themselves rather than provide long-distance answers to all possible questions.
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