Search for BL playbills
blplaybills.org is a research tool, created by Sak Supple, to find and view playbills (theatre posters) from some collections of the British Library's theatrical playbills.
The original PDF data for all the playbills can be downloaded directly from the British Library here.
More British Library (BL) digital collections can be found here.
Read more about how Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML) has been used to create this site in this BL blog post.
Enter search text above to find playbills that contain that text.
Choose between text search (default) and semantic search (to use natural language search terms).
Optionally click the Match phrase checkbox to match an exact phrase for a text search. Do not add quotes to the phrase. This is useful if you're searching for a specific surname, or when too many results are returned for the search term.
TIP: Say you have done a search and found some playbills that are in Playbills 213 (2). If you want to see other playbills in that volume, enter Playbills 213 (2) in the search term and check the Match phrase checkbox. This will allow you to browse playbills in that volume.
If matches are found, a grid of matching playbills appear.
The left panel can be used to refine the results by date, location, organisation, theatre and British Library volume number.
Short video showing how to use each result card:
- A short extract of the summary of the original OCR text of the content
- Click on the vertical dots (more_vert) to see a scrollable view of the whole summary and the original playbill text
- Button to copy the summary and original OCR text to the clipboard
- Button to open high resolution copy of the image
- Low resolution image of the playbill (click to open a high resolution copy of the image)
- Theatre, if known
- Location of theatre
- Date range playbill published
- The volume/shelf mark
- Date range
- Location
- Organisation
- Theatre
- Volume
Semantic search
- Semantic search provides AI/ML enhanced search allowing natural language queries
- Choose between standard text search (including match exact phrase) and semantic search by selecting one of the radio buttons next to where you enter the search
- TIP: Unusual terms (e.g. Krakoviak) don't work well with semantic search; use text search with 'match phrase' instead
- TIP: use semantic search when a text search returns too many results or no results
- TIP: with semantic search keep the language simple and make the query brief
Examples of semantic search queries:
- Play in kings lynn in February
- Fairy Lake opera (a text search for this returns thousands of hits; using text search with match phrase, no hits are found; semantic search returns 31 playbills)
- African actor performing in Dublin
- Comedy performances in February
- Pirates in musicals
- Promenade concerts on Wednesday
BL Playbills collection
blplaybills.org does not contain every playbill the British Library has to offer, but has access to about 80,000 playbills made available by the Library under a Creative Commons license.
These include playbills digitised from over 500 physical volumes of theatrical English, Scottish, and Irish playbills between 1600 and 1902 (mostly 19th century).
Playbill text was created using optical character recognition (OCR) software taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence techniques with Google Gemini large language models (LLMs). This text is surprisingly accurate, and it can be searched to quickly find individual playbills using text and semantic searches.
The results provide access to a thumbnail and high resolution image of the individual playbill, a detailed summary (including actors, roles and events), and the original OCR text of the contents.
The search can be filtered to narrow the results.
It is also possible to copy the summary and original OCR text, as well as view/download a high resolution copy of the image.
Please send feedback to: blplaybills@gmail.com
