Digital Scriptorium As a new Council member, I’d like to highlight the Digital Scriptorium as an increasingly indispensable portal into North American repositories of medieval and early modern manuscripts. It has the potential to become a national union catalogue, with 15,000 records from 37 member institutions’ collections currently available and [...]
Book fittings recorded on the Portable Antiquities Database My Presidential Address to the Bibliographical Society earlier this year (19 March 2024) included details of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) database: https://finds.org.uk/ My intention was to draw attention to this well designed and enormous database which might offer suggestions of how [...]
The Koopman Collection at the KB, The Hague Anyone interested in the French illustrated book or in modern artist’s books will enjoy the online presentation of the Koopman Collection at the KB, the National Library of the Netherlands: https://collecties.kb.nl/en/koopman-collection With a focus on French literature and the book arts from [...]
AALT: Digitised documents from medieval and early modern England The website of the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT.html) is the result of a collaboration between the University of Houston Law Center in the US and The National Archives (TNA) in the UK, which was first drawn up in 2006. Its aim [...]
The CERL Thesaurus : naming the world of early modern Europe The CERL Thesaurus is one of the many resources made available by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. The linguistic diversity and the troubled history of Europe mean that there often are dramatic variations in names used for the [...]
A digitised card catalogue for Russian books One of the problems of using common databases such as OCLC/WorldCat when researching Russian books is their comparative incompleteness. Many titles simply aren’t listed at all. A free online resource I like to use is the old card catalogue of the National Library [...]
A union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World FIHRIST is the union catalogue of manuscripts from the Islamicate World, a collaborative project to map the manuscript collections housed in more than twenty participating institutions in the UK and Ireland. It is a fast-growing catalogue, with new holdings added regularly [...]
Priorities and Perils In this series celebrating and promoting digital resources that support book history, perhaps we should pause, take a minute’s silence, to reflect on the recent calamitous events at the British Library? I’m sure all readers will know that the BL’s website, services and e-resources went offline following [...]
Historical Conversion of Currency Studies of book history invariably involve determinations of monetary value, and even though we all know how imperfectly historical values are correlated with contemporary ones, it doesn't stop us from trying. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread! I've always been unhappy with attempts to [...]
The History of Information (dot com) At first glance, the intriguing website HistoryofInformation.com looks like just another aggregation of historical facts. It isn’t! Jeremy M. Norman has set himself the task of building a meta-history site: a history of data collections tagged by subject category. The resulting website is a [...]
The Plantin Press Online Christophe Plantin was born near the French town of Tours, probably around 1520. After working in Caen and Paris he moved to Antwerp, then one of the most important commercial cities in Europe, where he established a successful publishing house. In 1576, he purchased a building [...]
A monthly series of bibliography- or book-related links recommended by members of the Society’s Council, initiated by Margaret Ford, Past President. Earlier posts can be found at Council’s Choice. The Melville Electronic Library The parts of the Melville Electronic Library which may be of particular interest to bibliographers [who will already [...]
