Whilst extending heartfelt apologies to all who have been frustrated by the abrupt disappearances of EMLO over the past couple of weeks, I’m pleased to report that the issues with Bodleian’s servers have been resolved successfully and it is possible once again to explore without interruption the metadata for the newly uploaded volumes of epistolary heavyweights Oldenburg and Bayle.

Despite EMLO being offline for extended periods, behind the scenes it has been an action-packed few weeks. One particular highlight came in the form of a visit from Aalto, Finland, by our talented colleague Jouni Tuominen. Jouni has been working on a tool to search individual correspondence catalogues across metadata in the whole of EMLO to identify different scholarly interpretations of the same letter. His work involves strings (proverbial ‘balls’, no less) of complicated queries, and the results mean it will be possible for us to provide links in EMLO between these alternative scholarly interpretations and, for statistical purposes, to count each letter just once. Bravo Jouni!

Two curves with links. (Source of image: Wikimedia Commons)

I’m extremely sorry to have to put out an ‘extraordinary’ post but, should you be hoping to access EMLO to consult the latest volume of Henry Oldenburg’s letters published this week (metadata from volume XII of the Halls’ edition), you will find that, unfortunately, the catalogue is not available at present. This is due to server issues at the Bodleian Libraries. Work will continue around the clock until the service is restored and, in the meantime, I’d like to extend heartfelt apologies. If you end up, along with the team here at EMLO, keeping one eye on the clock until the union catalogue reappears, l’ll leave you with a time-related early modern image for company.

Clockmakers’ workshop, attributed to the workshop of Philips Galle. c. 1589–93. Engraving, 20.1 by 26.9cm. (Rijksmusuem, Amsterdam; inv. no.: RP-P-1904-1032)