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 [...]
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. December 2023The Wasserzeicheninformationssystem (WZIS): an international database of early watermarksAlthough among watermark aficionados there is still no substitute for Gerhard Piccard’s [...]
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. Reformation Cardinal: Reginald Pole in 16th-Century Italy and England Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558) has long deserved a better press. Elizabethan propagandists handed [...]
A monthly series of bibliography- or book-related links recommended by members of the Society’s Council. A series initiated by Margaret Ford, Past President. The choice for October 2023 is by Council member Giles Bergel who writes about the British Book Trade Index. Read this month's Council's Choice where links to [...]
A monthly series of bibliography- or book-related links recommended by members of the Society’s Council. A series initiated by Margaret Ford, Past President. The choice for September 2023 is by Council member Daryl Green who writes about ‘Richard Sharpe’s Libraries and Books in Medieval England’. Read this month’s Council’s Choice [...]
