How can I contribute?

We would like you to contribute information to the database and help us to make this resource usefully and fully searchable by providing details of whatever evidence you have of a relevant Reading Experience. If you have documented evidence of a reading experience from the period covered, please complete a RED form.

Please fill in as much of this form as you can. Only questions 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 are compulsory, and should only take a few minutes to complete. However, we would like you to provide as much information as possible. In particular, we would be grateful if you would complete all of Section One. At the end of Section One, there is the option to submit the form, or to continue filling in further information. Sections Two and Three are optional. However, if you do have information relating to any of the listed fields, please do enter it, as this will be very helpful for charting historical patterns of reading.

Alternatively, we have a hard copy version of the form which can be downloaded here in Word format [65KB] or as an RTF file [85KB]. Please feel free to fill this in by hand and return it by post to this address. Otherwise, you can fill it on your computer and email it back to us as an attachment. Please also take time to consult the notes on filling in the RED form, available here, and our sample completed forms.

We also suggest that, before contributing to the database, you briefly search its current contents: we hope that this will prevent you from wasting your time by contributing an experience that we may have already stored. Furthermore, a team of dedicated volunteers are currently working through a variety of sources which describe the reading experiences of a number of famous individuals. Although stored in our system, these details of these experiences may not yet be available through our search pages. Follow this link for a list of the readers currently being researched by our volunteers.

Anyone interested in working on a particular individual who lived in or visited Britain during the period 1450-1945 and who left letters, diaries, annotated books, autobiographies etc. which contain references to their reading should get in touch with one of the RED directors listed below. Follow this link for a list of famous readers whose experiences have not yet been entered into the database.

RED is looking for volunteers to work their way systematically through such materials in order to record evidence of reading.