The Society was named after Henry Bradshaw (1831–1886), Librarian of the Cambridge University Library, who had been interested in early printing and in bibliographic description.
He was known for his collection of oracle bones that were later donated to Cambridge University Library, where many were discovered to have been forgeries.
At Cambridge University Library, in 1982 and 1983, he worked with Wilfrid Lockwood and Andrew Dalby on the Scott Collection, formed by J. G. Scott, British administrator in the Shan States, whose activities he had already chronicled in his 1969 publication The Shan States and the British Annexation.
He is best remembered for creating the first fund for the purchase of books at the Cambridge University Library.
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Luard was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and of King's College London, and was Registrary of the University of Cambridge, and worked on cataloguing the manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library.
Parker Library on the Web was a multi-year undertaking of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, the Stanford University Libraries and the Cambridge University Library, to produce a high-resolution digital copy of every imageable page in the 538 manuscripts described in M. R. James Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College (Cambridge University Press, 1912).
Further, there are 41 books of the encyclopedia at the Library of Congress in the United States; 51 books in the United Kingdom held at the British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, and Cambridge University Library; and 5 books held in various libraries in Germany.