   
Section on Rare Books and ManuscriptsNewsletter - Summer 2000PeopleChair: Dr Alice Prochaska, Special Collections, British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, United Kingdom, Tel. *(44)(20)74127501, Fax *(44)(20)74127400 E-mail: alice.prochaska@bl.ukSecretary/Treasurer: Dr Wolfgang Undorf, Unit Book History, Lib. Binding & Planning of Stacks, Kungl. Biblioteket, Box 5039, SE-10241 Stockholm, Sweden, Tel. *(46)(8)463095, Fax *(46)(8)4634004 E-mail: wolfgang.undorf@kb.se Information Coordinator:Professor Henry L. Snyder, 220 Trinity Avenue, Kensington, CA 94708-1139, USA, Tel. (510) - 528 - 5113, Fax (510) - 528 - 4155, E-mail: hlsnyder@earthlink.net 66th IFLA Conference in Jerusalem"The people of the book invite the keepers of the book."As you all know, this year's conference will start in Jerusalem on August 11th, 2000. The SC's first meeting will be on Saturday, 12. 8. 2000 at 11 : 30 a.m. On Wednesday, 16.8.2000, there will be a joint meeting of Rare Books and Manuscripts with Art Libraries. The Theme is "Manuscripts Relating to the Middle East: Collection Development and Collection Management Policies" Details as far as known today:
On Thursday, workshops will take place. This year we will have a joint workshop with Preservation and Conservation. The subject is "Preservation of Parchment and Medieval Manuscripts", the location the National and University Library. Pre?registration is required. Please register with the Department of Conservation and Restoration at shinshin@vms.huji.il. The SC's second meeting will be on Friday, 18. 8. 2000, at 8 : 00 to 10 : 15 a.m. Apart from the meetings of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section there will be, as usual, lots of interesting meetings and lectures from other sections. UNESCO will present its new programme for the Information Society on Sunday. On Monday, there is a start-up meeting to consider a discussion group on Digital Libraries, on Tuesday the Art Libraries will have a special workshop on "Art Reference in the Digital Age" and, equally on Tuesday, there will be interesting Poster Sessions. You will find details on those and many other items in the Programme of the 66th Annual Conference. Book HistoryNews from ABHBCorrection of the proof prints of the 28th Annual Bibliography of the History of the Printed Book and Libraries (ABHB) is in steady progress. In September 2000 this volume, covering publications of the year 1997, will come from the press.That bibliographies - even a Bibliography of the History of the Book - are produced by the printing press is no longer obvious. For several years online availability of ABHB has been discussed. In fact all records which have been put into the database since 1990, are already available online for users, but only locally in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Dutch National Library in The Hague. However, some months ago it was decided to present this integrated database also on the website of the KB (www.kb.nl) under the new name Book History Online. A test file was shown during the Sharp Conference in Mainz, Germany, on the 10th of July 2000. Expectations are that all 24.000 individual records of the last decade will become available early in 2001 for anyone using the Internet. The price will not be an obstacle for any user. Free consultation will be included in the costs of a (virtual) membership of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, at the annual amount of DFL 30,- (Euro 13,60; US $ 13,-). Apart from that, Kluwer Academic Publishers will continue to publish paper volumes for the next couple of years. Online availability of any reference work offers better and faster searching options than the printed version. It goes without saying that this applies to ABHB as well. All fields, for example, will be searchable by word, and every record which has been checked and entered by the editors, will be available immediately. But at the same time corrections and refinements regarding the content can be realised; automation, after all, should be more than online delivery of the same information that used to be printed. For that reason the definition of the subjects will be investigated again and the same goes for the demarcation in time. Addition of an authority file of subject headings or keywords, apart from the systematic classification, is being considered. Other proposals to refine the classification are warmly welcomed. There are also plans for links to other relevant web pages and to full text electronic articles. The present scheme of cooperation between the editorial team in The Hague and the National Committees, which are linked to major, preferably national depository libraries all around the world, has proved to be a guarantee for the quality and completeness of ABHB. Most contributing institutions deserve nothing but praise for their work, so there is every reason for continuing this scheme. However, a greater flexibility can be achieved in the submission of titles, by both the National Committees and individual scholars who come across lacunas. An electronic form to indicate such titles, will become part of the new website. By the way, the Editorial Committee is still looking for National Committees for a quite a lot of African and Asian areas and a few European countries¼ [From Jan Bos, Royal Library, The Hague] Professor emer. Elizabeth Eisenstein, University of Michigan, is currently doing a book-length survey on Western attitudes toward printing from Gutenberg to the late twentieth century. BibliopolisResearch tool for the history of the printed book in the NetherlandsBackground InformationAlthough urgently needed, there is as yet no overview of the history of the printed book in the Netherlands. For over five centuries, the book has been the medium for spreading texts and disseminating knowledge. During long periods the Netherlands have been one of the world's most important book producing countries. But only in the past decennia the study of the history of the book in the Netherlands has evolved into a fully fledged academic study, focusing on production, distribution and consumption of printed information. Bibliology is highly interdisciplinary by nature, with strong ties to the history of literature, economics, art, and ? more generally ? cultural history. In this mutually stimulating atmosphere the lack of an overview of the history of the book is widely deplored, especially since the other disciplines have had such overviews for many years and often in several different forms.The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, has initiated a project to create such an overview, together with various other information systems regarding the history of the book. The end result, which will become available in the spring of 2002, will be called Bibliopolis: an interactive tool, based on World Wide Web technology, for the research on the history of the Dutch book. ContentBibliopolis uses innovative information and networking technology for the processing and dissemination of the results of research and documentation in the field of the history of the book. The system consists of five components, that are interlinked:
Project informationThe project started in March 1998 with financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), and will run for four years. For more information about the project you are kindly referred to: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands, Drs. Marco de Niet, P.O.Box 90407, 2509 LK The Hague, The Netherlands, tel.: +31 70 3140 489; fax.: +31 70 3140 501; E-mail: marco.deniet@kb.nl [From Jan Bos]DatabasesNews from SCIPIOSCIPIO File has been enriched by Grolier Club Library's Retrospective Conversion Project. Over 12,000 French bookseller and book auction catalogue records thus were added to RLG's SCIPIO Art and Rare Book Sales Catalogue file. Some more 1,000 records came from the same source representing Belgian and Dutch book auction catalogues, primarily from the nineteenth century. Book auctions catalogues from France have been added, too. About 90 % of the material is unique in SCIPIO.Also in RLG Focus Issue 43, April 2000, there is an article by Wes Taoka, explaining that you can now use a new option in the menue of the SCIPIO file. When a search result set is too large for your purposes, you can now limit it to special locations. By the way, there are more than 650,000 records in the file now. MALVINEManuscripts and Letters via Integrated Networks in EuropeMALVINE marks the staring point of a new era of searching for modern manuscripts, of cataloguing modern manuscripts and of their preservation in Europe. MALVINE opens new and enhanced access to disparate holdings of modern manuscripts and letters, kept and catalogued in European libraries, archives, documentation centres and museums. The idea of MALVINE is to build a network of these institutions in Europe which is independent of heterogeneous technical solutions, and which is accessible from all over the world as if being a homogenous unified data base. A multilingual user interface, the agreement to a common terminology and the offer of digitised copies of the precious original documents will make the access to modern manuscripts and letters a well organised service of many institutions in Europe. The material Modern manuscripts may include:
As cultural life has never been isolated within one nation or region, all kinds of national/ international relationships between these collections exist. Letters show for example the connections which my German ancestors had to famous people in Italy, Danmark or Poland. Europe's cultural history is defined by those relations, whose documents are kept in as many places as there are institutions with archival functions. The BackgroundIt is well known that institutions owning manuscripts apply a considerable variety of cataloguing rules. Cataloguing rules for printed books which are being commonly used in European libraries have only recently been adapted for this special kind of material.Another difficulty is caused by the fact that manuscripts are not only kept in libraries but also in archives, museums and documentation centres. Obviously the staff in these institutions is trained in different ways. An archivist and a librarian will have considerably differing views about the treatment and cataloguing of manuscripts. There is a third reason for tackling the problem of providing information about this specific material: The tradition of cataloguing manuscripts in a rather detailed way has resulted in a number of printed catalogues. The main disadvantage of these catalogues are the high costs involved and, resulting from this, their scarcity. The MALVINE solution demonstrates, that big changes within the cataloguing traditions of the institutions can be avoided. MALVINE shows that unification on a certain level is necessary but that grown traditions and specific interests need not be given up in order to reach a broader public from all over the world. MALVINE makes this "hidden" information accessible to online users world wide and thus allows for a detailed look at the rich past and present of European written cultural history. The UsersThere are both expert users and public users:Expert users include:
The BenefitsMALVINE will not only enhance the access to modern manuscripts in Europe, but will also enhance data exchange between most heterogeneous systems and most different sorts of cataloguing traditions. It will facilitate the contacts between the information holders and the users by offering special tools to make the users' expertise useful in the improvement of the actual catalogue record. Co-operation with publishers will close the circle concerning the provision of free and democratic access to the cultural heritage of Europe. The major service objectives of MALVINE are:regarding the collecting organisations:
The Technical SolutionThe technical solution enhances the interoperability of different interfaces. It enables all institutions, large or small, to present their own special holdings to a broad public and thus contribute to the aims of the information society. Another aim of MALVINE is to contribute the optimisation of the workflow in libraries, archives, museums and documentation centres. The improved access will bridge the differences in languages and technical equipment and thus facilitate the growing of a unified Europe.The technical basis for the MALVINE concept and demonstrator now available in a test version is mainly based on already existing standards and S&R-components available from other EU-projects. The primary goal consists in achieving interoperability of different OPACs containing different types of data. This means that two levels of interoperability have been considered: technical interoperability and semantic interoperability. The basic problem consists in doing a 'multi server search' at the same time, initiated by a Z39.50 based client system. An appropriate solution will be achieved by introducing a 'retrieval manager' between the Z39.50 client- and server system. This software component is located at a "search server". To achieve "semantic interoperability" the Retrieval Manager at the search server site has access to a "knowledge base". The "knowledge base" includes the semantics of different OPACs as well as terms taken out of the MALVINE thesaurus and assists the navigation process on the collection level. The Retrieval Manager provides "slots" for the integration of different OPACs described by different Z39.50 application profiles. On the semantic level the MALVINE project has investigated the applicability of the Dublin Core Meta Data Set. The development of a specific (Z39.50) MALVINE profile which allows the integration of different types of collections (bibliographic and object types) has been investigated. The consortium decided to promote the establishment and the future maintenance of this specific MALVINE profile. The basic protocol software has been taken from the ONE project. On the client side standard Web browsers are being used making necessary the inclusion of an http/Z39.50 gateway in the search server. A "standard" OPAC system can be set up using a "MALVINE" toolbox to enable the participants of the MALVINE project who do not have a Z39.50 server system to connect to the network. This toolbox includes the generation of an OPAC connected to the MALVINE Z39.50 target system which provides a gateway to SQL-data bases. To "fill" this OPAC with data, a data entry and a data exchange system are included in the "MALVINE-tool box". Both modules have access to the OPAC data base either via an API or an ODBC connection. SGML was investigated to introduce a standard for multimedia data processing (data encoding, data exchange, product generation). The integration of different business functions (accounting, billing, document delivery, and copyright management) will be based on the results of other projects if available. It is foreseen that the MALVINE business model is based on an "or Information Brokerage Service" (ABS). The integration of other softArchitecture fware agents on different layers is dependent on the results of a second study-work done within the MALVINE project. The MALVINE ConsortiumStaatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Berlin (Co-ordinator)Crossnet Systems Ltd., Newbury (Manager) JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz (System Developer) Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon Biblioteca de Universidad Complutense, Madrid British Library, London Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach Forschungsstelle und Dokumentationszentrum für Österreichische Philosophie, Graz Fraunhofer Institut für Systementwicklung und Technologie, Berlin Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, Paris Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Universität Wien, Vienna Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine, Paris. National Museum of Danmark, Copenhagen Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Swiss National Library, Bern University of Bergen, Bergen
Sponsoring partner:
MALVINE can be tested, all comments and questions are very welcome. From the Journals/Recent PublicationsRBMS - Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship - has changed not only its name but also broadened its contents last year. It is now RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage and covers ²issues pertaining to the world inhabited by special collections libraries and cultural heritage institutions.² It is still the Association of College and Research Libraries' journal and on the website (www.rbms.nd.edu) you can find the contents for all issues of the previous section journal, Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship (1986?1999).Buchhandelsgeschichte published a list of contents to the journal from 1997 - 1999 in its most recent issue (2/2000). With the issue 20-27 December 1999 AB Bookman's Weekly after more than 50 years stopped publication. The Rare Books Newsletter, fortunately, is well and going. There was a double number 62-63 Summer 99/Winter 1999/2000 recently. After six years, Richard Ovenden turned over editing the journal to Nigel Roche from St. Bride Printing Library, London. Richard Ovenden is now Head of Special Collections, Edinburgh University Library. He did not leave, though, without writing the main article in the latest issue of the newsletter. It is a paper delivered at UMIST in June 1999 on sales of books and manuscripts and the "Library Associations Rare Books Group Guidelines" for such necessities. There is a new interesting online newsletter from the British Library's Department of Early Printed Collections. Number 1, Summer 2000, of News from Early Printed Collections is full of details on acquisitions, appointments and recent and forthcoming events. Congratulations to our colleagues for this fine achievement - we are looking forward to the next issue! I'am sure you all know the address, but just in case ... It is http://www.bl.uk/collections/epc/epcnews.htm. The RBMS has recently published two documents that you can find on its website (www.rbms.nd.edu): Guidelines for Borrowing of Special Collections Materials for Exhibition. Final version posted June 21, 2000; document revised June 23, 1999 and Final version of the revised ACRL Guidelines for the Security of Rare Book, Manuscript, and Other Special Collections. The National Preservation Office has recently produced six new leaflets on the following subjects available on the NPO's website(www.bl.uk/services/preservation): 1. Photocopying of library and archive materials, 2. Guidance for exhibiting archive and library materials, 3. Good handling principles and practice for library and archive Materials, 4. Preparing funding applications for preservation and conservation projects, 5. The application and use of standards in the care and management of libraries and archives, and 6. Preservation of photographic material. You can also order a free hardcover copy of the leaflets from The National Preservation Office, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, Tel: 020 7412 7612, Fax: 020 7412 7796, Email: npo@bl.uk. The ECPA has recently published a report In the Picture. Preservation and Digitisation of European Photographic Collections, which describes the way in which European institutions manage their photographic collections in terms of preservation and digitisation. The research was done within the framework of the EU project 'Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access' (SEPIA). It is available in electronic form or as hard copy from ECPA. The first volume of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain is available now. It is volume 3 of the series and covers the years 1400 through 1557. Edited by L. Hellinga and J. B. Trapp the volume has more than 740 pages and many illustrations, and, expectedly, makes one curious for the volumes to come. Colleagues working on the history of the booktrade in Germany might be interested to learn that the Boersenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels celebrating its 175th anniversary this year has republished some important older works (e.g. Kapp/Goldfriedrich or Schmidt) on a CD-ROM. It is called Geschichte des deutschen Buchwesens , edited by Mark Lehmstedt and has been published by Directmedia Publishing, Berlin. Forthcoming EventsSeptember 2000:The Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA) project will held a conference on Written in light: Photographic collections in a digital age at the Public Record Office, London from 12th?14th September 2000. For details, please contact: Tim Padfield, Public Record Office, Kew, Richmond TW9 4DU, Telephone: +44 (0)20 8392 5295 ext 2351 Email: Tim PadfieldThe Library Association's Rare Books Group annual study conference will take place at Hertford College, University of Oxford, from 13th September ? 15th September 2000. The conference this year is on Manuscript Books & Their Readers and will focus on manuscript books from the medieval period till today. The programme and registration information is available from Gaye Morgan, Assistant Librarian, All Souls College, Oxford OX1 4AL, Telephone 01865 279318, E-mail: Gaye.Morgan@All-Souls.ox.ac.uk. October 2000:October 18th?19th, 2000 a conference on Mass Deacidification in Practice will be held in Bückeburg, Germany. Contact for details and registration can be found under www.knaw.nl/ecpa/conference/conference-e.html or from ECPA, PO Box 19121, NL?1000 GC - Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Telephone: +00 31 20 551 08 39.November 2000:Under the Hammer: Book auctions since the seventeenth century is the title of a conference on November 25-26, 2000 at Birkbeck College and Waterstone's Piccadilly. Organisers will be Michael Harris, Giles Mandelbrote and Robin Myers. Speakers and theirtopics will include T.A. Birrell on "Books and buyers in seventeenth?century English auction sales", Arthur Freeman on "The jazz age library of Jerome Kern", Michael Harris/Giles Mandelbrote on "The organisation of book auctions in late seventeenth?century London", Arnold Hunt on "The sale of Richard Heber's library 1834-1837", Otto Lankhorst on "Dutch book auctions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", Paul Needham on "Reconstructing William Morris's library of early printing", Nigel Ramsay on "The eighteenth-century collector and the salerooms", and Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly on "The Property of a Distinguished Poisoner: Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and the Griffiths family library". Conference fee is £70, details can be got from Michael Harris, Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College, 26 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DQ (tel: 020 7631 6680; fax: 020 7631 6686; E-mail: m.harris@bbk.ac.uk). [Note from the editor: An article on the subject of book auctions has been promised to our Newsletter by Giles Mandelbrote. Unfortunately, he could not manage to finish it before closing date for this issue, so we will publish it later on.]ExhibitionThe Guggenheim Foundation will have an installation The Making of a Medieval Book from August 15 ? November 5, 2000. It will be explained how illuminated manuscripts were made in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.Conference in August 2001On SHARP web, a call for papers is to be found for Colonial and Post?Colonial Cultures of the Book, an international conference to be held at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, 6?8 August, 2001. The keynote speaker will be Professor Robert Darnton, Princeton University. Abstracts (500 words maximum) should be sent by 1 December 2000 to Professor John Gouws, Department of English, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6140, South Africa; or, ideally, by E-mail to j.gouws@ru.ac.za.From the LibrariesStockholm:A Specimen of Printing TypePeter Sohm's early 19th century collection of literature and material for a history of printing, now in the Royal Library, the National Library of Sweden, is famous for the rarity of its content. It consists of more than twohundred books, amongst them works originally in the possession of the great German printer and historian of printing, Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf. Among the unique items Isaac Moore's Specimen of Printing Types attracts special and increasing attention. There are another fifty or so mainly 18th century individual type specimens, many of them of greatest rarity.To avoid damage from handling originals and to increase accessibility, the library has decided to digitize the type specimens and make them accessible through its homepage. In a first step, all broadsheets will be digitized. Then may follow bound type specimens. In preparation of this digitizing project, the revision of the catalogue of the Sohm collection from the year 1951 shall be brought to an end. Please, look for information on the homepage of the Section for Book History, Planning of Stacks and Library Bindings (http://www.kb.se/Bmn/engelsk.htm). [From Dr. Wolfgang Undorf, Kungl. Biblioteket, Stockholm] The Royal Library has recently translated into English its "Swedish imprints before 1700" pages on the library's website. London:The programme for the British Library's Gutenberg anniversary celebrations has been published. Details can be found in the EPC Newsletter (v. From the Journals) or on the library's homepage. There will be an Open House day on September 24th, as well as the Panizzi Lectures in November (on lithography), and many other events.Libraries join in a transatlantic electronic partnershipThe British Library and the New York Public Library are two of the six founding organisations in a new enterprise: FATHOM.com. The new company is based at Columbia University in New York and the other partners are the London School of Economics (LSE), Cambridge University Press and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Additional organisations from both Britain and the USA are joining the partnership, contributing content designed to provide a 'high quality knowledge portal' which will appeal to higher education students and 'lifelong learners' all over the world.For the British Library, one of the great benefits our partnership in FATHOM.com will bring is the opportunity to present unique and rare collections to new audiences: exploiting the expertise of staff in writing about the collections, and digital technology to display examples of material which until now has only been available in our reading rooms. The site is expected to provide its first examples of content in late June or early July, and I would be delighted to receive comments from IFLA colleagues. Please do visit us at http://www.fathom.com. [From Dr. Alice Prochaska, Director Special Collections, The British Library] Dublin:
Chester Beatty Library has moved to the restored and extended Clock Tower of Dublin Castle. There is a lavishly illustrated article in Ireland of the Welcomes Vol. 49 No. 4 (July-August 2000). The address is Dublin Castle, Dublin 2, Ireland, Tel. +353 1 407 0750, Fax + 353 1 407 0760, website: www.cbl.ie.
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