Blog

Each year, CERL organises a seminar to coincide with the Annual General Meeting of members. This year the theme of the CERL seminar is Collections and Networks: Reconstructing the Historical Context of Texts, Publications and Objects with Digital Methods. Our host this year is the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, and the event will take place on Wednesday 9 October 2019.

This seminar should appeal to both rare-book librarians and digital humanists, and we hope to generate a fruitful exchanges of ideas on how such projects are shaped, what tools are available to virtually (re-)create collections, on how such new collections can be made accessible and be displayed.

During the seminar the SUB Göttingen will present a number of its digital edition projects, such as the Fontane’s Notizbücher project, which aims to deliver a diplomatic edition of the novelists notebooks; the Interdisciplinary Dictionary of Classical Mayan, an edition of Mayan epigraphic and manuscript text; and the Asch-project, which virtually reconnects the books and objects collected by Georg Thomas von Asch (1729-1807).

In a separate session, we will focus on the Heritage of the Printed Book(HPB) database. In his presentation, Andreas Walker will describe his work on making the HPB available as Linked Open Data, and his endeavours to create a user-friendly interface for such data. Brian Geiger and Bryan Tarpley of UC Riverside, will speak about similar issues related to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC).

Mikko Tolonen and Leo Lahti will describe their analysis of large datasets containing bibliographical records such as Fennica, the Finnish national bibliography, the English Short Title Catalogue and CERL’s HPB database. Finally, we have an exciting range of speakers who, among other things, will re-acquaint you with the Cultures of Knowledge / Early Modern Letters Online project and will introduce you to the new British Library / Thuring Institute project: Living with Machines.

The programme of the CERL 2019 seminar is available here: https://www.cerl.org/services/seminars/presentations2019. Attendance is free, although we do ask that you register with secretariat@cerl.org.