RED What coloured your thinking.........

The mission of the Reading Experience Database (RED) at the Open University is to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of British subjects from 1450 to 1945.

Professor Bob Owens and Dr Mary Hammond at the OU, in collaboration with Professor Simon Eliot from Reading University conceived this novel electronic resource which aims to provide the first fully collated body of historical evidence for the experience and practices of British readers (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/redback.htm).

Drawing from a wide range of sources and linked with easily searchable key words, it is an expandable information resource which fulfils a long felt need for empirical data on what readers read and what they made of their reading over this period. Its uses cut across disciplinary boundaries and have a user-value far beyond the academic community.

The Reading Experience Database (RED) (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED) was originally conceived and launched at the OU in 1996. A reading experience is a term which covers any recorded engagement with a written or printed text and goes beyond the mere fact of possession. The definition of text is also broad and covers books, manuscripts newspapers, journals, advertisements, playbills scripts pamphlets, almanacs etc.

If you would like to contribute information to the database then follow the link to http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/RED/contribute.htm.

Contact Prof. Bob Owens, Literature Department: w.r.owens@open.ac.uk