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The Spellman Collection of Victorian Music Covers, a unique collection of 800 items depicting the nature of popular music and popular imagery of Victorian life, culture and preoccupations, is now available online via the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS). The digital collection focuses primarily on illustrated music covers published in Britain from 1840 –1900 and features examples of the work of the outstanding music illustrators of the period, particularly John Brandard and Alfred Concanen. One of the largest groups in the collection depicts people, most prominently, music hall artistes in the roles they made famous. Other categories include women in many contexts, children, the royal family, representations of ethnicity, soldiers, sports and pastimes, animals and natural history, travel and transport, and events. The general character of the images may be sentimental, romantic, fantastic, religious, allegorical or symbolic, comic, or documentary. The images digitised under the JISC Image Digitisation Project (JIDI), and available on the VADS website, were selected because of their social, documentary, artistic, and technical merits. This resulting digital corpus indicates the nature of the genre of printed Victorian music covers in general and of the Spellman collection in particular. The Spellman Collection is searchable online at http://vads.ahds.ac.uk. VADS now provides nearly 12,500 visual arts images for use in research, learning and teaching. --------------------------------- Brenda Brinkley Information Officer Visual Arts Data Service Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College Falkner Road Farnham Surrey GU9 7DS Tel: 01252 892723 Fax: 01252 892725 email: [log in to unmask]