We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them.\u00a0 So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This would be quite a first — the obscurantism of UK libraries has to be experienced to be believed. The Andrew Mellon Foundation, who have done so much for the world in funding online initiatives, have granted them 300,000 GBP to do the job; not a huge sum, but probably enough. \u00a0The BBC article here<\/a> gives the impression that the incunables will go online.<\/p>\n But then a revealing aside:<\/p>\n Over the next five years the University library will produce detailed records for each item.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This made me look twice at the glowing claims, and look further.\u00a0 There’s no information on the library website<\/a> at all, which is not good news.\u00a0 History Today magazine has an article here<\/a>.\u00a0 This tells the real story:<\/p>\n Cambridge University announced, today, the beginning of a new project to catalogue, for the first time, the University Library\u2019s celebrated collection of incunabula<\/em>, pre-1501 printed books. The term incunabula literally means swaddling-clothes, or cradle, in Latin and was adopted to describe a book printed at an early date, in the first infancy of printing.<\/p>\n Very few records of the Library\u2019s 4,650 treasures are currently in its online catalogue. Records will begin to be catalogued this autumn and, over the next five years, the University Library will produce detailed records for each item, which will be accessible through its Newton Universal Catalogue. …<\/p>\n Although the project does not involve a complete page-by-page digitisation of the Library\u2019s incunabula, the Gutenberg Bible has been fully digitalised …<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As if anyone has any use for yet another Gutenberg online.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, the real intention is to have one or two staff members sit there for five years writing little card indexes (or whatever).\u00a0 Digitisation?\u00a0\u00a0Am I too cynical, to suppose that\u00a0they’ll merely do a\u00a0handful of books, as a sort of fig-leaf for what they really<\/em> wanted to do?<\/p>\n Not that cataloguing is bad; but what we need, desperately need, is ACCESS TO THE BOOKS!!!\u00a0 Not more catalogues.\u00a0 Compiling a catalogue was the excuse used in the 19th century by Vatican libraries for denying scholars access to the library, and refusing them sight of what catalogue existed.\u00a0 I don’t know if that ever-so-complete catalogue ever appeared, indeed.\u00a0 But the obstruction of access was real enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all know what we want — we want library holdings on the web, where we can all see them.\u00a0 So I was rather delighted to see a news article yesterday that Cambridge University Library were going to put their collection of pre-1500 printed books on the web.\u00a0 This would be quite a first — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23],"tags":[889],"class_list":["post-1820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-access","tag-information-access"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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