MEDIATE: Printed catalogues of private libraries
Speaker(s): Anna de Wilde
Related events: New sources for book history – International Conference
Releated Working Group(s):
Collection: CERl conferences
Recorded: November 28, 2017
Abstract:
Anna de Wilde, Helwi Blom, Rindert Jagersma, Juliette Reboul (Radboud University, The Netherlands), MEDIATE: Printed catalogues of private libraries as a source for European Book History; Potentialities and Challenges
The aim of the ERC-funded MEDIATE project (September 2016 – August 2021, PI prof. dr. Alicia Montoya, Radboud University Nijmegen) is to study the circulation of books in eighteenth-century Europe. The project focuses on the movement of books and ideas traditionally associated with the Enlightenment, from intellectual elites toward broader, ‘middle-class’ audiences, and the persistence of religious reading material and its interaction with the new ideas of the Enlightenment. The project draws on a large corpus of printed catalogues of private libraries. To realize its goals, we will build two digital, open access resources: BIBLIO database (Bibliography of Individually-owned Book and Library Inventories Online, 1665 - 1820), containing basic bibliographic records for all extant private library (sales) catalogues in the Dutch Republic, France and the British Isles for the period 1665 – 1820.
MEDIATE database (Middlebrow Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in Europe, 1665 – 1820), containing fully searchable text files of transcriptions and book data extracted from a corpus of ± 2500 small to mid-range private library catalogues for this period. Besides data on books, the MEDIATE database focuses on data on book owners. Linked Open Data on books and owners will be rendered interoperable with other existing bibliographic and bibliometric databases. In our presentation, we discuss the nature(s) of our source material and its potential for comparative book historical research in a digital age. Especially the annotated copies contain a wealth of information, e.g. on owners, buyers and prices.
We will set out some of the challenges we meet in defining, harvesting and interpreting our source material. We will also address some questions regarding metadata fields in our database(s) and interoperability with other sources.
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