Following are some online sources of street literature (ballads/broadsides/chapbooks), pulled together from a discussion on C18-L begun by Fraser Eaton (the first seven descriptions are his; subsequent links are from Jim Chevalier; the last three were culled from my blog):
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: an online catalogue of holdings of over 30,000 ballads in several major Oxford collections, ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries; the database is a complete digitization of all the ballads.
The Word on the Street — Broadsides at the National Library of Scotland: online sample of nearly 1,800 Scottish broadsides, prose and verse, ranging from 1650 to 1910 and searchable by keyword, title, or subject, from the 250,000 or so held by the National Library of Scotland.
Lilly Library Chapbook Index: searchable index of 1,900 chapbooks — not themselves online — from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and the United States, which were part of the Elisabeth W. Ball collection of children's books (Indiana University).
Early Modern Center English Ballad Archive, 1500-1800 — The Pepys Ballads: an online archive of the 1,857 ballads of the Samuel Pepys collection held by Cambridge University.
An American Time Capsule: from the Library of Congress Printed Ephemera Collection, which comprises 28,000 primary-source items from the 17th Century to the present; over 10,000 items are presently available online in the digitized Printed Ephemera Collection.
The Elizabeth Nesbitt Room Chapbook Collection: index with colour reproductions of the chapbook covers, but not the chapbooks themselves, of over 270 English and American chapbooks (and a few Scottish chapbooks) from the years 1650-1850, held at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Scottish Chapbook Project: still under construction; participating institutions are: Glasgow University, University of Guelph, University of Indiana, and University of South Carolina.
Streetprint: Revolution and Romanticism: a wide range of types, from street ballads through chapbooks and tracts to valentines, from Britain and mostly from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Ballads and Broadsides Links on Folk Music of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America.
Sixteenth Century Ballads: "a collection of ballads from before 1600, containing sheet music and lyrics, both in their original form, and in a form intelligible to a modern listener."
Brown University Broadsides Collection.
The Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays: approximately 250,000 volumes of American and Canadian poetry, plays, and vocal music dating from 1609 to the present day.
Ballads & Broadsides Links at Legends.
From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing from the Michael Zinman Collection of early-American imprints.
Nineteenth-century British street ballads: a collaborative student project.
