[15618] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: Institut d'Histoire du Livre, & Google (?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Wed Dec 15 20:00:53 2004
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2004 12:26:41 -0800
From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.COM>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-to: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
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FYI France: Institut d'Histoire du Livre, & Google (?)
Of linkage, between "digital libraries" old & new...
A reminder to everyone of the Book History Workshop being offered
in Lyon, April 25-28, by the Institut d'Histoire du Livre and the
Rare Book School:
* Introduction to the study of incunabula
tutor: Kristian Jensen
"Topics include: the invention of printing; the most important
catalogues, their aims, strengths and weaknesses; the
interpretation of colophons; books as physical objects providing
evidence of how the printers of incunabula worked (vellum, paper
studies; formats; gatherings; signatures; the identification of
type and printing house practices); illustration, lay-out and
texts; decoration; distribution; early provenance and later
collectors. These issues will also be addressed through practical
sessions based on the incunabula of Lyon City Library..."
* Type, lettering and calligraphy, part two: 1830-1980
tutor: James Mosley
"An examination of typefaces and related letterforms. Topics
include: commercial typography and the evolution of decorative
display types: Perrin, Whittingham, and the revival of old style
typefaces; the types of the private presses; art nouveau: the
artist and printmaker as letter designer; Edward Johnston and
broad-pen calligraphy; type design for machine production: the
American Typefounders Company, Mergenthaler Linotype, Monotype
(in the USA and Britain); new types in Germany and France..."
* Printed ephemera under the magnifying glass
tutor: Michael Twyman
"This course addresses printed ephemera from several different
directions, but principally with the needs of the curator,
collector and dealer in mind. It will focus on nineteenth-century
British and French ephemera, though many of the general issues
raised relate to all periods and to material in other languages..."
"The major processes used in the production of ephemera provide
the focus of some sessions, and considerable attention will be
paid to their identification. They include relief printing from
type and wood, intaglio printing, monochrome lithography,
chromolithography, relief printing in colour, and the
photomechanical processes. Other sessions address particular
categories of ephemera: the 19th-century notice and poster, the
design and production of forms, label printing, and monochrome
jobbing lithography..."
* Introduction to analytical bibliography
tutor: Neil Harris
"This course offers a practical introduction to the examination
of printed artefacts of the hand-press period, with emphasis on
Venetian Renaissance printing, including the figure of Aldus.
"Analytical bibliography began as a working tool for the study of
the printed texts of Shakespeare and other dramatists of the
Elizabethan (1558-1603) and Jacobean (1603-25) periods. Its
pioneers were figures such as A. W. Pollard, R. B. McKerrow and
W. W. Greg...
"Practical sessions, organised in small groups, will allow
students to see the Renaissance books as a manufactured object
and to pick out phenomena that usually escape even practised
scholars, such as variants of state and issue, cancellans leaves,
set-offs, blind impressions, recurrent damaged type, frisket -
bite, standing type, head-lines left in the skeleton, and
evidence for setting by formes. Visits to the Lyons Printing
Museum and the rare book collections at the Lyons City Library
will give the students the opportunity of examining tools,
equipment and printed documents at first hand, as well as
practice in writing bibliographical descriptions and collational
formulae..."
* French gold-tooled bindings 1507-1967 : major workshops
and collectors
tutors: Isabelle de Conihout et Pascal Ract-Madoux
"Since the publication in 1951 of Louis-Marie Michon's _La
reliure française_ -- an excellent but sparsely illustrated study
which is now, inevitably, rather out of date -- there has been no
serious study of French bookbinding as a whole.
"Isabelle de Conihout and Pascal Ract-Madoux aim in their course
to fill this gap by offering a close examination of a large
number of remarkable bindings from the period 1507-1967. A
hundred or so original bindings (and several hundred photographic
reproductions) will be presented and described. Although bindings
are physically inseparable from the content which they enclose,
they also have to be considered as autonomous artefacts. French
deluxe bindings in particular have to be considered as works of
art as much as historical objects.
"Areas covered by the course include:
- decorative arts and the evolution of design: one or several
golden ages?
- dating bookbindings
- identifying the workshop which produced the binding: binder's
tools, styles
- recognising bindings from the principal workshops
- why do deluxe bindings exist?
- why were they made?
- identifying the person for whom the binding was made
- ownership marks
- highly decorated bindings and more modestly decorated deluxe
bindings
- identifying fakes and altered bindings
- research tools (bibliographies, catalogues, studies, etc.)
"The first three days of the course will finish with a
presentation and discussion of a selection of Lyon City Library's
most precious bookbindings. Participants will thus have an
exceptional opportunity to discover at close quarters highly
decorated bindings and discuss them with the tutors.
"The fourth and last day of the course will take place at the
Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris and will be given over to an
examination of this prestigious library's most precious bindings."
** Further details, and registration, may be found at,
http://ihl.enssib.fr
http://ihl.enssib.fr/siteihl.php?page=6&aflng=en
--oOo--
And now, about Googlization, and linkages to the above:
As long as we are Googlizing everything, nowadays --
"Google to Scan Books From Big Libraries"
Wed Dec 15, 3:35 AM ET
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer
"SAN FRANCISCO - Stacks of hard-to-find books are being
scanned into Google Inc.'s widely used Internet search
engine in its attempt to establish a massive online
reading room for five major libraries.
"Material from the New York Public Library as well as
libraries at four universities -- Harvard, Stanford,
Michigan and Oxford -- will be indexed on Mountain View,
Calif.-based Google under the ambitious initiative
announced late Monday..."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041215/ap_on_hi_te/googling_libraries_10
[See also:
http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/print_library.html
http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html
-- plus _many_ other news stories, now]
-- the "digitization of everything", the best term I have seen so
far for this being "omnigooglization" -- we might do well to
consider, yet again, the effects of all this upon "the books" --
"Fewer fingers upon the precious pages", is the first thought
which occurs to many: 19th and early 20th c. acid paper
collections, yellow and brittle and crumbling, may better be
preserved, thereby -- the more which can be digitized, and the
more rapidly, the more which then can be squirreled away into
low-usage & atmospherically-controlled & inexpensive archives,
from which they will emerge only rarely, in the future, and then
only into subdued lighting... with soft pencils in use only...
and white gloves... all ink pens to be left at the sanctum door...
But "getting to there from here" also presents a problem. Printed
books, to be scanned, must be subjected to the various risks
presented by sharp-edged machines: including "automatic page
turners" -- those being only a little less paper-unfriendly than
the saliva - & - occasionally - peanut - butter - besmirched
human thumb.
There also are the immense handling difficulties: the de-shelving
and re-shelving of ancient book collections -- most of which, by
the "80-20 Rule" governing any inventory, may have rested in situ
& largely untouched for over a century -- and the ever-present
tendency of student bookstack pages to "drop" things, also their
arrangement of the old books into interesting configurations,
crammed too tightly into interesting containers...
Such transition problems, involved in both the transport and the
scanning of these elderly printed items, are being left to "the
librarians", per the latest news from the enormous Googleprint
project just-announced. Let us hope that this is truly an appeal
to "the experts", and not simply a setup of scapegoats: so much
can go wrong, in the improper handling of a brittle and crumbling
old book... This Googleprint digitization effort may be the
greatest service done for Print Culture since Gutenberg, altho
not if it damages the books. So let us hope that they'll be careful.
But, if it works... The library "content" of Oxford plus Harvard
plus UMichigan plus Stanford plus NYPL should provide the world
with some wonderful digital text resources; and may save, for the
world, some wonderful artifacts, of the Era Before Bits & Bytes.
There _was_ such an Era, once... as all of us less adept at
videogames than others are can well remember...
Joyeux Noël,
Jack Kessler, kessler@well.com
--oOo--
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