Incunabula Short Title Catalog

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Origin of the incunabula in the ISTC by region

The Incunabula Short Title Catalog ( ISTC , German  Incunabula Short Title Catalog ) is one of the British Library assisted project to create an international catalog of incunabula . Work at the ISTC began in 1980, and from the very beginning was geared towards the electronic recording of catalog data and the inclusion of data from various national incunabula catalogs. Today the ISTC combines the incunabula entries of the most important European and North American catalogs and sees itself primarily as a meta catalog. Entries in the ISTC are significantly shorter than the catalog entries in the complete catalog of Wiegendrucke (GW), which began in 1925, but the different approaches mean that the ISTC has greater coverage.

history

Language distribution of the incunabula of the ISTC

In 1980 Lotte Hellinga , incunabula expert and employee of the British Library, initiated a project to create an international catalog of short titles for incunabula. She chose Incunabula in American libraries (1964) by Frederick R. Goff (1916–1982) as the starting point for the new catalog. Although the entries in Goff were very short, the work contained a large number of entries that were recorded in a very regular form. The second point in particular met the electronic recording in MARC format planned in the ISTC project . After the permission of the Goff rights holder was obtained, the complete Goff catalog was recorded. The next union catalogs to be tackled were the Italian Indice generale degli incunaboli delle biblioteche d'Italia (IGI), the Dutch Incunabula in Dutch libraries (IDL) and the Belgian Catalog des livres imprimes au quinzieme siecle des bibliotheques de Belgique . Most of the new entries come from the incunabula catalog of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB-Ink), whose employees use the ISTC as the basis for their work.

The number of incunabula, i.e. the works printed with movable type between 1455 and 1500, is estimated at 27,500. No printed catalog lists more than 60% of these works: the GW had over 12,000 entries in 2000, Goff just under 13,000 and Hain over 16,000. In comparison, the CD-ROM edition of the ISTC had 26,550 entries on incunabula. However, there are also occasional duplicates , so that the coverage is not quite 95%.

Other important catalogs of short titles are the international USTC (15th and 16th centuries), the English ESTC (1473–1800) and the STCN for Dutch book printing between 1540 and 1800.

literature

  • Lotte Hellinga, John Goldfinch (Ed.): Bibliography and the study of 15th-century civilization. Papers presented at a Colloquium at the British Library, September 26-28 , 1984. British Library, London 1987, ISBN 0-7123-0049-X ( British Library Occasional Papers 5).
  • Kristian Jensen: The Incunabula Short Title Catalog and a Public Web Interface. In: Hannelore Benkert (Hrsg.): The library between author and reader. Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-465-03252-7 , pp. 240–248.

See also

Web links

Commons : Incunabula Short Title Catalog  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Incunabula Short Title Catalog . British Library . Retrieved March 2, 2011.
  2. ^ Kristian Jensen: The Incunabula Short Title Catalog and a Public Web Interface . In: Hannelore Benkert (Hrsg.): The library between author and reader . Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 240–248.
  3. ↑ Michael Milway: Forgotten Bestsellers from the Dawn of Reformation . In: Robert Bast, Andrew Gow, Heiko Oberman (Eds.): Continuity and change: the harvest of late medieval and Reformation history . BRILL, Leiden 2000, ISBN 90-04-11633-8 , pp. 115-116.