BibSoc’s Wikis

The Bibliographical Society is offering a new resource for presenting bibliographical digital data. 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 particilar in offering wiki facilities to recipients of the Society’s bursaries.

The first offerings are three wikis created by members of the Society (February 2026).

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.

Started in the 1930s by Frank Isaac as a successor to Proctor’s Germany and Isaac’s Italy, this project was revived by David Shaw at the request of the British Library in the 1970s. It has been revised and completed on more modern lines. Its final implementation as a wiki offers full indexing of all categorized features: names of printers, booksellers and editors, printing towns, year dates, types, formats and other bibliographical categories. The descriptions include fuller titles and imprints, collations, bibliographical references, etc.