Tag: 21. August 2020

“Approaching the history of books through their ownership and use has
become standard thinking and we have seen a great increase in work on
provenance, private libraries, the history of reading, the book as a
material object – there are many ways of badging it. Library catalogues
and other databases now contain huge quantities of data on former
ownership of books. What we do not have is a directory of owners, where
we can turn for up to date information on the size, contents and fate of
people’s libraries, to help identify markings and to place particular
books in a wider context.

/Book Owners Online/– https://bookowners.online/
– has been created to fill that
gap. Based on the software than runs/Wikipedia/, it is designed as an
easy-to-use database built round a backbone of owners of all kinds, with
details of their careers and libraries, and on where to look for more
information. It includes images of characteristic markings, where these
can be obtained, such as inscriptions, bookplates and armorials. It
gathers evidence from a wide range of sources – surviving books, lists
and inventories, sale catalogues, information from wills, use of
bookplates, and more – rather than from any particular libraries. It is
not a comprehensive provenance index for all the names to be found in
books – which would be a different undertaking – but concentrates on
people who we know owned enough books to justify a narrative.

The project is a collaboration between the*Bibliographical Society*and
the*Centre for Editing Lives & Letters*at*UCL*, with support from the
the*Bodleian Library*. It currently covers only seventeenth-century
English book owners – people who died between 1610 and 1715 – but it is
designed to be scalable and we hope to expand it chronologically and
geographically. This first phase is now ready to be used and we would
like to encourage the book-historical community to discover it, engage
with it, and give us feedback on improving it . We’d be very grateful if
you could help to publicise it any way you can, through links on
websites or social media, by citing it or reviewing it, by telling your
colleagues and students.

It’s not perfect and it never will be. It’s an online database, free to
access, easy to edit. We hope it will be useful and become embedded in
our book-historical reference landscape – do please have a look.”

Dieses neue provenienzgeschichtliche Online-Nachschlagewerk ist so mangelhaft, dass man in die Tischkante beißen möchte.

Dass man mit englischen Bucheignern des 17. Jahrhunderts beginnt, ist so unendlich anglozentrisch ignorant, dass man am liebsten die Seite wieder schließen möchte.

Nach PERSONAVINO bewertet:

PERmalink: NEIN

SOcial Media/Sharing: NEIN

Nachnutzung: Ja, aber nur CC-BY-NC

Annotation/Feedback: NEIN

Kein Direktlink vom Eintrag aus.

VIewer: Die Auflösung der Bilder könnte besser sein.

NOrmdaten: NEIN.

Das ist bei einem solchen Projekt unverzeihlich.

Ergänzend: Bei der jeweiligen Literatur sind die Vornamen abgekürzt, online verfügbare Literatur wird kaum nachgewiesen, allenfalls das kostenpflichtige National Dictionary.

Wieso gibt es keine Verküpfung z.B. mit CERLs MEI, etwa bei Laud:

https://bookowners.online/William_Laud

https://data.cerl.org/owners/00013103

Ich breche … ab.

#buchgeschichte #provenienz