Academic Dress in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published to great acclaim in 2004, contains over 50,000 biographical articles of men and women who have contributed to the history of Britain. The printed edition runs to sixty volumes and has 60,000 pages; it was written by 10,000 specialist contributors and was a multimillion- pound project funded by the British Academy and Oxford University Press. It took over thirteen years to complete, replaces the Victorian DNB and the online edition has all the links and connections to the National Portrait Gallery and other sites you would expect of a major academic resource. But, for Burgon Society members, the question is: what does it say about academic dress? [Excerpt]