Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all

Oxford’s Bodleian library has archives full of rare and beautiful treasures. Putting these online for all to enjoy is a brilliant, democratic move

• Click here to see a gallery of images from the new Bodleian online

I’ve got a secret vice. I love to visit rare book rooms and leaf through the pages of 16th-century traveller’s tales or 15th-century editions of Petrarch with their brilliantly coloured pictures. Once, I even found a design by Botticelli in a religious tract in the British Library.

This is not actually as criminal or difficult as it sounds. I was researching a book at the time and all the yellow-leafed volumes whose pictures I pored over in the rare books room at St Pancras were more or less relevant to it. Anyone with a British Library pass can do the same. But it raises the question of what great libraries are for: is the research they make possible just for PhD students assembling demographic data on medieval Norfolk or should the rich, aesthetic delights of illuminated manuscripts, 18th-century caricatures and scientific illustrations be available for us all to enjoy as art?

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