As the REED project moves forward with its transition to digital publication, the staff in Toronto has been consulting widely to determine the best system to make the collections fully searchable and interoperable. Once this has been established for the forthcoming publications, the system will be extended to the ‘legacy’ volumes. REED users know that the indexes of the big red books are not systematically consistent although, since the first edition of Chester (1979), they have been very detailed. This is not true of our first collection (York, 1979). In 1979 most humanities scholars, ourselves included, were naïve about the possible use of computer programming to create a detailed index. Not only was the computer program we used inadequate for the task but there were also errors made in the base text that was used to generate the references. The index to York has long been a major embarrassment. Some years ago, Margaret Rogerson, the co-editor of the collection with myself, undertook to re-index the collection. She has done a magnificent job. However, since all the indexes of the ‘legacy’ volumes will be converted to the new digitised finding system we have decided, rather than offering the index to users in print, to provide it here on the REED Pre-publication site. I have been using it myself since I received it from Margaret and have made it available to students of early drama here in Toronto. We are now pleased to share it with all REED users.
As with all material on this pre-publication site, the index is a draft and has not been carefully checked by the REED staff for completeness and accuracy. Please let us know if you find any errors or omissions.
–Alexandra F. Johnston
REED Pre-Publication Collections 