Using Mediawiki technology for bibliographical data
The Bibliographical Society is offering a new resource for presenting bibliographical digital data online. Our new resource is a ‘wiki farm’ which uses the technologies of MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki to host complex bibliographical datasets which benefit from the powerful indexing and hypertext linking capabilities of wikis.
We welcome expressions of interest from bibliographical scholars with similar datasets which might benefit this initiative. We are interested in particular in offering wiki facilities to recipients of the Society’s bursaries.
The first offerings are three wikis created by members of the Society (March 2026). A fourth Semantic Mediawiki database is an e-publication of the Society but is currently hosted separately from the wiki farm.
The London Book Trades – a biographical and documentary resource
A MediaWiki resource with records for over 30,000 members of the London Book Trade up to the mid-nineteenth century, based on a new extraction of the data from the original database created by Michael Turner, with a redesign of the contents and interface by David Macfarlane.
This new version, known as LBT2, does not yet contain all the original data. We envisage two or three updates as more contents are retrieved and restructured. The new web site has explanatory pages with a full history of the project and its new technical implementation.
Bibliography of editions of the Satires of Juvenal published in Europe up to the year 1600.
https://juvenal.bibsoc.org.uk/
This started life as an appendix to David Shaw’s PhD thesis in the 1960s. It has since been much expanded. Its life as a Mediawiki application was undertaken to explore the possibilities of wiki technology for publication of bibliographical data.
The software fully indexes all the characteristics defined as ‘categories’, enabling researchers to explore aspects such as bibliographical formats, sheet sizes, geographical distribution patterns and chronologies. Where possible, images are included showing title pages, colophons and opening page of text. Each record has an attached PDF giving a full traditional bibliographical description and discussion of the edition.
A Typographical Catalogue of books printed in France 1501–1520 in the British Library
https://frenchpostincunables.bibsoc.org.uk/
Started in the 1930s by Frank Isaac as a successor to Proctor’s Index of British Library books printed in Germany 1501 to 1520 and Isaac’s Index for Italy, this project was revived by David Shaw. It has been revised and completed on more modern lines. This implementation as a wiki offers full indexing of all categorized features: names of printers, booksellers and editors, printing towns, year dates, types, devices, formats and other bibliographical categories. The descriptions include fuller titles and imprints, collations, bibliographical references, etc.
Book Owners Online
https://bookowners.online/
It is a publication of the Bibliographical Society in partnership with the UCL Centre for Lives and Letters (CELL), with a rationale developed by David Pearson, a past-president of the Society, and is hosted by CELL at University College, London.