Catalogue Descriptions Research Articles

KNYGŲ KOLEKCIJOS IN CORPORE LIETUVOS BIBLIOTEKOSE

A book collection in corpore is usually used to describe a historically formed, indivisible collection of books having a historic, scientific and cultural value. Specialized research on this topic in Lithuania has been scanty, if any, with the exception of research conducted on acquiring and storing book collections in libraries as well as similar topics. The article aims at investigating the theoretical aspects of using the term book collection and providing the analysis of existing practices and trends with regard to book collections both in Lithuanian and foreign libraries. To achieve this objective, the following methods of literary analysis and empirical research have been used: analysis of library websites, expert survey, interviews with the library staff taking care of book collections at their disposal. The objects of research are the book collections in corpore, acquired and stored in the National Library of Lithuania, libraries of state-level and county libraries. The libraries which decide to store and preserve book collections in corpore, undertake a museum function, that is, the inherent function pertinent to a memory institution. This function is not characteristic of public libraries. However, it is among the core functions of the libraries having the national and state status.Based on the criterion of the former owner, collections in corpore can be grouped as follows: personal libraries (the libraries of outstanding statesmen, public figures, science and culture mak­ers) and book heritage of various institutions (institutional libraries). It turned out that currently 144 collections in corpore are being stored in the National Library of Lithuania, state-level and coun­ty libraries, with personal libraries identified as the prevailing group among them (137). The seven remaining collections in corpore are institutional libraries.The analysis of the information available in library websites on the collections in corpore revealed that the material presented is rather scarce and the websites do not contain comprehensive infor­mation about the scope of the respective collections. Thus, the user’s access to information is rather restricted. Today, the acquisition of collections in corpore has been reduced in scope, reflecting the current situation in librarianship. The status of some of the libraries which have acquired a great many book collections in corpore (for example, Vilnius University Library) have to be reviewed. Hav­ing established whether we are dealing with a collection in corpore or whether it is merely a donated collection of books, we can integrate the books in question into the library holdings, marking book provenance indicators in a bibliographic description in the online catalogue. Due to their exclusiv­ity, book collections in corpore are becoming book monuments. Such a status puts their custodians under an obligation to treat them as the sets of documents having special value, that is, as book monuments.

Revisiting Archive Collections: Developing Models for Participatory Cataloguing

Against the backdrop of a flurry of legacy projects linked into the 2012 Olympics this article takes the work being done by the archive participants of The Mandeville Legacy project in the South East Region as a way of appraising the recently developed Revisiting Archive Collections (RAC) cataloguing methodology. In order to look at the way that this participative approach to cataloguing has developed, the article first reflects on some of the core professional assumptions that archivists hold about the ‘cataloguing voice’—that it should be single, neutral, informed, anonymous—and considers the way that some recent archive theory and practice has begun to qualify these previous certainties. The development of the Revisiting Collections model, first for museums and then for archives, is then described. Finally, the article summarizes and evaluates the work of the five South East Region record offices which have used RAC over the past 18 months. Each office worked with groups of disabled people to look at selected records reflecting the historical treatment of disability; and then sought to capture the responses and contributions which these generated and to incorporate them within catalogue descriptions.

Student-Directed Learning: An Exercise in Student Engagement

Student engagement and retention is a concern of many university professors. To engage sophomore-level students in a Sociology of Aging class, I challenged them to design the course in a way that would make the outcome personally meaningful to them. The class was asked to identify specific learning objectives related to the university's course catalog description, to choose assignments that would evaluate their learning, to weight assignments based upon their perception of importance, and to designate due dates for assignments. A qualitative review of their feedback on this exercise is provided.

LIETUVOS NACIONALINĖS MARTYNO MAŽVYDO BIBLIOTEKOS RETŲ KNYGŲ IR RANKRAŠČIŲ SKYRIAUS PALEOTIPŲ RINKINYS

Lietuvos nacionalinė Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekaGedimino pr. 51, LT-01504 Vilnius, LietuvaEl. paštas: viktorija.vait@gmail.comStraipsnyje nagrinėjami Lietuvos nacionalinės Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekos Retų knygų ir rankraščių skyriaus paleotipai: jų leidimo vieta, spaustuvininkai, tematika bei proveniencijos, dėmesį telkiant į retesnius, Lietuvos knygos kultūrai svarbesnius leidinius. Iš šiame skyriuje saugomų daugiau kaip 800 paleotipų analizuojama tik dalis jų, nes daugiau negu 200 knygų teturi kortelinį bibliografinį aprašą ir išsamiai juos ištirti šiuo metu neįmanoma. Dalies šių paleotipų analizė papildo jau esamus tyrimus, praplečia senosios knygos kultūros vaizdą.Reikšminiai žodžiai: knygotyra, paleotipai, retos knygos, spaustuvininkai, proveniencijos.THE COLLECTION OF POST-INCUNABULA IN THE MARTYNAS MAŽVYDAS NATIONAL LIBRARY OF LITHUANIAViktorija VAITKEVIČIŪTĖ AbstractPost-incunabula or the books printed in the first half of the 16th century (from January 1, 1501 to January 1, 1551), along with incunabula, are considered to be the oldest and most valuable publications in the world. Due to their likeness to incunabula and publishing specifics, post-incunabula are considered to be historical treasures and monuments of culture. The Rare Book and Manuscript Department of the National Library of Lithuania has in its holdings more than 800 post-incunabula, not including the ones kept at the Department of the National Archival Fund of Published Documents. The exact number is still unknown, since not all the books have been included into the electronic catalogue: more than 200 of them have only a card catalogue description and are awaiting a more detailed study. This article analyses specific features of part of the post-incunabula collection in the NLL Rare Book and Manuscript Department: their place of publication, publishers, thematics and provenances. Principal attention is accorded to the books that are rarer, more interesting and more important for Lithuania’s culture and book culture in general.The most of the post-incunabula kept in the Rare Book and Manuscript Department were published in Germany, many in Switzerland, France and Italy. There also is a small number of post-incunabula published in Poland (Cracow). Of the publications produced by Cracow’s printers, the article discusses those by Jan Haller (ca. 1467–1525), Hieronim Wietor (ca. 1480–1546) and Florian Ungler (d. 1536). It is necessary to mention Aldines – the publications by one of themost famous European printers, Aldo Manuzio (Lat. Aldus Manutius; ca. 1450–1515) and by his descendants. The article also touches upon the work of such acclaimed French publishers as Henri Estienne (lat. Henricus Stephanus, ca. 1460–1520), founder of the famous dinasty of printers, and the Lyonese printer Sébastien Gryphius (ca. 1493–1556). The Rare Book and Manuscript Department also keeps quite a few post-incunabula published by Johannes Frobenof Basel (1460–1537).As to the content aspect, the collection of post-incunabula in the department is versatile. For the most part, it is made up by religious literature: sermons, bibles, theological treatises, Church Fathers’ writings. There are many works by and commentaries on classical authors, of whom Cicero, at the time of the Renaissance viewed as the greatest authority on rhetoric, is the most famous one. The post-incunabula collection illuminates the emergence of the Reformations and the related spread of new ideas in the first half of the XVIth century. The Rare Book and Manuscript Department boasts a number of works by the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and by the most acclaimed humanist of the times, Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536).The provenances in the post-incunabula (manuscript inscriptions, stamps, bookplates) provide much interesting information. Most often found are ownership marks of the establishments that since the olden times had been preserving books: various monasteries, churches and priest seminaries,. The notable representative of the post-incunabulum culture is the Bernardine Order. According to the electronic catalogue, the Rare Book and Manuscript Departmenthas in its holdings 21 post-incunabula formerly kept by the library of the Tytuvėnai Bernardine Monastery. Most provenance inscriptions are from Kaunas Priest Seminary, the library of the Samogitian Priest Seminary, the library of the Vilnius Seminary and Kražiai College. Of the XIXth century personal libraries,particularly noteworthy are the collections of Jonas Krizostomas Gintila (1788–1857), XIXth-century bibliophile, hebraist and administrator of the Samogitian Diocese, and of Friedrich August Gotthold (1778–1858), educator and music theorist. A separate, rather abundant group of provenance inscriptions consists of the books that formerly belonged to Königsberg University. An in-depth study of all the post-incunabula kept in the NLL would significantly add to the existing research and broaden the understanding of old book culture.

Listy z Ziemi Wałeckiej i Krajny do końca XVIII w. z zasobu Archiwum Państwowego w Toruniu

This article tries to familiarise the correspondence from Wałcz region and Krajna to Toruń magistrate on the basis of letters stored in the holding of State Archives in Toruń. 75 catalogue descriptions of letters from 12 towns located in the north-western territories next to the borders of pre-partition Republic of Poland were presented. One cannot exclude that there are more of them in Toruń Archives, but only two sections chosen from so called Catalogue II (Acts of Toruń) and Catalogue III (Craftsman letters) were submitted in the query.Chronological borders of the correspondence presented are from 1402 to 1799; however, majority of the correspondence come from the XVIII century. The authors are both private persons and institutions (craftsman associations, city councils, evangelical commune council). Among craftsmen and city council letters one can find so called birth certificates (Geburtsbrief ), job certificates (Lehrbrief ) and ecommending letters (Empfehlungsbrief ). Court letters concern cases similar to contemporary ones: inheritance issues, suits for vendor cheating, legal proceeding in case of murders and others. Private persons ask the city council of Toruń to help them execute debts from Toruń inhabitants. Evangelical commune from Łobżenica asks a few times for financial help.Material gathered in the article constitutes the excellent source for research on chancery’s functioning at that time, both when it comes to senders and recipients of letters.One can see some regularity in the forms of some typical documents – just like crafts man letters mentioned above – independently of the town they were issued. After the first partition of Poland (1772), when the territories under discussion were taken over by Prussia, there appeared even printed forms of certificates of craftsmen training. Court correspondence was ad hoc in nature, where only polite forms of address were repeated. Later, letter content was described and the recipient noted down the date of their receipt. Only a few craftsman letters were written on the parchment paper, rest of them were paper. Thanks to that, one can find water marks next to common samples; there are also watermarks hardly ever met in the subject literature. With majority of letters there are seals of senders, among others hanging wax seals, shellac seals, paper-shellac seals and wafer seals. The correspondence was mainly in German language due to the neighbourhood of Brandenburg and later – Prussia. Latin and Polish languages were used as well. The condition of letters varies a lot – from excellent to poor. Letters of Catalogue III are currently stored separately while the letters of Catalogue II are stored in sewn files.

The Future of the Literary Past

[B]y carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior: they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of paper, for its previously multimedia vectors.—Jacques Derrida, Paper MachineThis essay explores some of the ways that the contemporary mediascape has begun to transform the questions we can ask of our students and ourselves. Our subject derives from an undergraduate English course, Literary History and/as Media History, that we designed to address the lack of critical attention paid in the curriculum to the media of literary works. The course, whose catalog description follows, was intended to cover a lot of historical ground while highlighting theoretical questions that generally remain unasked in Norton Anthology–style surveys:Living in an era of rapid technological innovation, we tend to forget that print itself was once a new medium. The history of English and American literature since the Renaissance has been as much a response to the development of new material formats (scribal copying, printed playtexts, newspaper and serial publication, “little magazines,” radio, film, television, the internet) as it has been a succession of ideal literary forms (poems, plays, and novels). This course will survey literary works from the sixteenth to the twentieth century in relation to the history of media. What can these histories say to each other? Are they, indeed, one history?

Online Access to the Catalogue and Bibliography of Cartographic Materials of the National Library of Poland (NLP)

Access to information about cartographic materials in the National Library of Poland has been improved by new functionalities intended to keep up with users’ new needs and technological trends. From mid-January 2010 on readers of maps and atlases kept in the library can find catalogue descriptions of these materials through the special website. Three different forms of access to descriptions of cartographic materials are available on the website: (1) Catalogues/Catalogues online — database search in the central computer catalogue of the National Library of Poland (NLP); (2) Bibliographies online. Cartographic documents [download .pdf files — in Polish]; (3) Bibliographies online. Cartographic documents [search database] — access to the database in the MAK system containing items from the published bibliography of cartographic materials.

Cross‐cutting in the face of history: The case of Attack on a China Mission

This article explores, from historiographical and archival perspectives, the tumultuous trajectory of Attack on a China Mission (1900) by James Williamson. Seen by traditional historians as a precursor to cross‐cutting, for several years the film existed only in the form of a sales catalogue description. No copies of it seemed to exist in the archives. The discovery of two copies in 1950 and 1985 raised many questions among historians, since neither copy matched the alternating editing structure described in the catalogue. This article will examine the historical relevance of these two copies, as well as the ‘reconstructed’ version now available at the National Film and Television Archive in London. The obvious differences between each of these versions, as well as the changes that were made to them, affirm the importance historians and archivists should grant to the integrity of film artefacts. The modifications also display a relatively classical conception of film that is out of place in the context of early cinema.

The Factory Project: digitisation at the Victoria and Albert Museum

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Word and Image Department holds an estimated 750,000 prints, drawings, paintings and photographs. Recent acquisitions have been catalogued using the Museum’s Collections Information System, but the vast majority of earlier acquisitions are still only described in a wide range of card indexes and printed catalogues. The indexes have been scanned, but the Museum now needs to complete the transfer of the catalogue records to its online system. The ‘Factory’ digitisation project was established in November 2007, with the intention of digitising the Department’s entire holdings and making them available online. Some 15,000 objects have been photographed in the first year, and cataloguing is also under way. The digital images and catalogue descriptions will be made available online via the Museum’s website as the project proceeds.

One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Neglected English Play Manuscripts in the British Library (c. 1770–1809), Part II

The 137 play manuscripts (and some further play fragments) comprising British Library Add. MSS 25,906-26,036 were almost all submitted to Richard Brinsley Sheridan for production at Drury Lane in the period 1776-1809. They were presented to the British Museum in 1864 by Coventry Patmore with many gross misattributions and errors perpetrated by his father, Peter George Patmore. Many of these are still preserved in the British Library catalogue. Allardyce Nicoll failed to record 109 of the plays in his Handlists of English Drama. The collection includes both significant performed work by such playwrights as Inchbald and Reynolds and much unproducible work from anonymous and unknown writers. Some manuscripts contain projected cast lists and evidence of managerial editing. The present article attempts to describe the plays, to identify those printed or performed, and to augment and correct the British Library catalogue descriptions.

One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Neglected English Play Manuscripts in the British Library (c. 1770–1809), Part I

The 137 play manuscripts (and some further play fragments) comprising British Library Add. MSS 25,906-26,036 were almost all submitted to Richard Brinsley Sheridan for production at Drury Lane in the period 1776-1809. They were presented to the British Museum in 1864 by Coventry Patmore with many gross misattributions and errors perpetrated by his father, Peter George Patmore. Many of these are still preserved in the British Library catalogue. Allardyce Nicoll failed to record 109 of the plays in his Handlists of English Drama. The collection includes both significant performed work by such playwrights as Inchbald and Reynolds and much unproducible work from anonymous and unknown writers. Some manuscripts contain projected cast lists and evidence of managerial editing. The present article attempts to describe the plays, to identify those printed or performed, and to augment and correct the British Library catalogue descriptions.

The Skeleton Score of Verdi's Una vendetta in domino : Two Surviving Fragments

For many years I have been fascinated by the kind of information to be found in auction and dealer catalogs. Unfortunately, we do not always have direct access to the manuscripts described in these catalogs. Nonetheless, even the descriptions (often with partial reproductions) can prove of great interest. four-page sketch of a duet from Verdi's Giovanna d'Arco, for example, is known only from two auction catalogs, each of which reproduces a different page from the manuscript. (1) This material was enormously valuable as Alberto Rizzuti prepared the critical edition of the opera, which will appear early in 2008 in The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. When I received a grant in support of my research on Italian opera from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2004, I decided to gather as much of this information as possible and to make it more generally available through an online database. young Italian scholar, Daniela Macchione, has assumed primary responsibility for conducting the necessary research. She has described her work in the following terms: The status of sale catalogs still hovers uncomfortably between that of ephemera and that of significant bibliographical tool. (2) The importance, variety, and sometimes uniqueness of the information they contain, however, even if this information is directed primarily to those who aspire to acquire the items, make these catalogs precious resources for scholars, perhaps more precious for the difficulty scholars face in gaining access to them. With the support of the Mellon Foundation and in collaboration with the University of Chicago, I am currently responsible for realizing OperaCat, a database in which are gathered catalog descriptions of thousands of autograph manuscripts sold at auction or in the antiquarian book market over the past 150 years pertaining to the most important Italian opera composers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi, and Giacomo Puccini. It is our intention that OperaCat will be freely available to scholars by the end of 2009. The material included in OperaCat is heterogeneous. Most is reproduced from descriptions (often with quotations and images) of letters, musical manuscripts, and documents. In some cases the material has been published or has ended up in accessible library collections. In many cases, however, these items-the only hint of whose existence is found precisely in these catalogs--have never been described in any other form. (3) This study was made possible thanks to information first gathered in OperaCat. In its catalog of spring 2007, the English antiquarian dealer Otto Haas included as item 118: A new source for Verdi scholarship: hitherto unknown Sketch for 'Un Ballo in Maschera,' referring to it as an Autograph music manuscript, 2 pp. on a large 2/3 folio leaf (34 x 15.4 cm; 1/3 of the leaf is cut off) written on recto and verso with intense corrections. The catalog description of the single leaf is inaccurate in many respects, but fortunately the dealer provided reproductions of both the recto and the verso of the leaf (although, as we shall see, their descriptions were reversed), so it is possible to analyze the source. (4) To clarify the nature of this leaf, however, it is necessary to recount some recent history. For the Verdi Festival in Parma marking the 100th anniversary of the composer's death, Ilaria Narici prepared under my direction a preliminary version of the critical edition of Un ballo in maschera for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, in which the definitive version of Narici's edition will ultimately appear. Her preliminary version was first performed on 31 January 2001 at the Teatro Regio of Parma, under the baton of Valery Gergiyev. In the program accompanying that performance, I published an article in which I attempted to clarify the compositional history of the opera. …

Latin Prayers as a Lesson in Writing and Devotion for a Lady of Standing

Among its late medieval holdings the Bodleian Library preserves a small fifteenth-century Latin devotional prayer book, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lat. liturg. f. 9 (Summary Catalogue 31537), which contains, on the recto of fol. 17, a series of short (or abbreviated) Latin prayers long thought to have been by Catherine of Valois (1401-1437), queen of King Henry V (1387-1422).l The manuscript, on parchment, measures blA x 4lA inches (14 x 10.2 cm.) and now contains 145 leaves. Its capitals are decorated throughout, and it contains as well nine large decorated capitals (fols. 37r, 39r, 41r, 42r, 43r, 44r, 45r, 47r, 53r), and two historiated initials, one showing Christ's Cross suspending a green wreath at the intersection of its crossbar (fol. 60r), the other a blue, orange, and gold floral design (fol. 79r), but any full-page miniatures have been excised from this now imperfect manuscript. Its present binding is of modern purple velvet with a silver cartouche reading Preces Privatie Saec. XV. attached to the center of the top board. Both the binding and the cartouche predate Bodley's acquisition of the manuscript, by private treaty from Miss R. Ryder (fol. lv), on December 7, 1893. As its catalogue description reports, the manuscript may have been for a lady named Catherine, the name whose Latin form appears on fols. 84r, 86r, 90v, and 114r. The Latin calendar (which lacks three leaves) is English, and the tables that follow it cover the years 1406-1462, suggesting a date for the manuscript, or more probably for its exemplar, of about 1406. E. W. B. Nicholson, who catalogued the manuscript in the Summary Catalogue, divided it into three parts: part A: fols. 3r-78v; part B: fols. 79r-122v; and part C: fols. 123r-143v, which ends imperfectly. Nicholson reasonably believed the third part to have been written and illuminated like and like it, copied from a Sarum book of hours. Part A, he confidently believed,

Using Shooting Scripts for Indexing Moving Images

[End Page 27] Introduction This paper reports some of the results of a study that looked at three types of texts we believe are probably the richest sources for automatically deriving shot-level indexing to moving images. The three types of text are closed-captioning for the hearing impaired, audio description (a technology for the vision impaired), and shooting scripts. In this paper we focus on the results related to the text contained in the shooting script broken down for the shoot. For the present part of the study, we needed a script broken down for the shoot so we could compare the terminology used for identification of costumes, props, and so on, with the text of the description we wrote for each shot as we analyzed them from videocassettes. For the other parts of our study, we needed to compare the terminology with the text of the closed-captioning and the text of the audio description. From such comparisons we are able to identify the indexing terms useful for retrieving individual shots and sequences from an information system housing this kind of information. The main objective of the global study was to look at the contribution each of these textual sources makes to the overall indexing picture. The production we used to gather data for this study is titled Cher Olivier, directed by André Melançon, produced for and distributed by Avanti Ciné Vidéo Inc. in 1997. "Based on the life of the great Québec comic Olivier Guimond, this series recounts the highs and lows of his career and personal life" (Québec Audiovisuel 2004). The production was broadcast as a miniseries in five one-hour parts on television in the spring of 1997 and later that year won eight Gémeaux awards (iFrance 2004). Cher Olivier is a French-language production and was the only one for which we were able to gather all the pieces for our study: the text of the closed-captioning, the text of the audio description, and the breakdown of the shooting script. Background Our previous work in studying shot-level indexing to moving images has shown that moving images (and still images other than art images) seem to have characteristics not found in textual documents and other types of information objects (Turner 1994a, 1994b, 1995; Hudon, Turner, and Devin 2000). There is a rather direct correspondence between the information content of images and the words used to describe them, whether these words come from professional indexers, from associated texts such as descriptions in print catalogues or news databases, from descriptors provided by viewers, or from a number of [End Page 28] other sources. People who have the task of describing the content of images name the objects, persons, or events they see in the picture. Although they use a variety of terms to describe the same thing, the top terms emerge rather obviously, are consistent from one context to another, and provide the most obvious subject indexing for the shots because they are the terms named most often. Click for larger view Figure 1 Sonia Vachon (Manda Parent) and Benoît Brière (Olivier Guimond). Photo: Avanti Cine Video Copyright 1997. Photograph by Michel Tremblay. [End Page 29] Results previously obtained thus provide a strong theoretical basis for the notion of using text created in the processes of preproduction, production, and postproduction as source material for automatically deriving shot-level indexing to moving images. There is already substantial use of such texts in existing systems such as those used for news or stockshot databases, and in the context of the ongoing move toward a digital production environment, we can imagine the day when most of the pieces of useful source text will be found in multimodule production databases that will accumulate textual information throughout the entire production cycle. Our research is part of a small corpus that focuses on the general problem of how to exploit such...

Picturing past Politics: French Kingship and History in the "Mirouer historial abregié de France"

This article examines evidence for the meaning and purpose of the iconography in cycles of miniatures for a historical text composed in the fifteenth century, the "Mirouer historial abregié de France" (ca. 1451). It was probably composed by Noël de Fribois, notary and secretary, then counselor, of Charles VII of France (r. 1422-1461), to whom one version of the text is dedicated. Three manuscripts are illustrated. Vatican Library, MS reg. lat. 767 contains only three line drawings (attributable to the Coëtivy Master) and a series of spaces for miniatures, which indicate the scheme of illustration. Catalogue descriptions of a manuscript sold in the Ashburnham sale, 1901, lot 405 (location unknown), which belonged to Antoine de Bourgogne (1421-1504), provide some evidence of the cycle, attributable to a Parisian artist. However, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 968 contains a full cycle of fifteen miniatures, by the Master of Charles (d'Anjou, count) of Maine (to whom the recension of the "Mirouer" found only in this manuscript is dedicated). This text could have been illustrated with a formulaic series of coronations and battle scenes drawing on existing models. It is here proposed, however, that the Oxford manuscript presents a careful pictorial exposition of a particular version of French history, centering on divine protection for the crown, the imperial vocation of French kings, and their role as protectors of the Church. The choice of topic and use of symbolism suggest that Fribois himself may have developed the scheme for this manuscript or advised the artist.

Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93

ABSTRACT John Dygon participated in the copying of at least six manuscripts (and left his annotations in more than a dozen others). But Oxford, Magdalen College MS lat. 93 represents a particularly complicated example of his work. The volume includes contributions by a dozen other scribes and appears to have been compiled over something like two decades. It is thus a particularly challenging example of medieval miscellaneous book production. John Dygon was an Oxford-trained lawyer, secular priest, and from 1435, fifth recluse of Sheen. From a modern perspective he is the most visible donor of books to Magdalen College, Oxford--a total of nineteen surviving volumes. This is far more than survive from larger medieval benefactions, such as the founder William Waynflete's donation on one day of eight hundred books. (1) Not simply donation, the survival of a substantial library largely intact, renders the books interesting. For, unlike many donors, Dygon was actively involved with his books in a variety of functions, including a considerable amount of scribal work. His most protracted effort as a copyist occurs in Magdalen College MS lat. 93, in which he wrote more than two hundred folios. This is a complicated miscellaneous volume, and much of my essay will necessarily include a scaled-down narrativized description. But, given the state of the book, I fear that even this may obfuscate as much as it clarifies. The failure to achieve clarity in discussing this manuscript is not an admission of total failure. MS lat. 93 resists definitive description because it embodies problematic features potentially inherent in a range of miscellaneous books, and the descriptive exercise may be useful because the manuscript documents, in some measure, one root cause of these features, a multiplicity of forms of production and use. The study may potentially stand as a model for other investigations. My preliminary description in the forthcoming catalogue of the medieval books of Magdalen College presents MS lat. 93 as containing thirty-five texts. The volume begins with two large sermon sequences. The first, perhaps of German provenance and derived from ps. -Haymo of Halberstadt's commentary on the Pauline epistles, arranges an exegetical text into a temporale cycle for the epistles read from Advent to Palm Sunday. It is succeeded by the second book of Gregory the Great's homilies on Ezechiel. (2) Following these materials comes a sequence of eight fairly extensive items (items 3-10) that resemble the materials in other Dygon books: Pore caitif tracts 1-2; the ps. -Augustinian 'De fide'; (3) Anselm's Proslogion; (4) the poem 'O homo velox'; (5) shorter texts ascribed to Chrysostom (items 7-8); (6) and two bits specifically associated with Syon and Sheen, 'Meditationes Augustini' (items 9-10). (7) Following a rather scrappy mid-portion, longer texts recur late in the volume: Arnauld of Bonneval's two tracts, on the words from the cross fused with his praise of the Virgin (item 23, which might be taken as two texts); (8) Quodvultdeus of Carthage's lengthy sermon against heresy, another work assigned here to Augustine (item 25); (9) two large devotional works, both imports from the Low Countries, Gerard Zerholt of Zutphen's Ascensiones and Thomas a' Kempis's Imitatio Cristi (the first, so far as I can tell, unique in England; the second, the earliest dated copy produced in England); (10) finally, Alcher of Clairvaux's 'Manuale' and ps. -Origen's popular sermon on Mary Magdalen (items 32-33). (11) Between them, these texts at the head and end of the manuscript--sermons, theological discussions, meditative/devotional tracts--occupy 214 folios, about two-thirds of the book. The middle of the volume (fols 133-212) is decidedly scrappier. Strangely, this is the only portion of MS lat. 93 to have attracted commentary. Siegfried Wenzel, who has provided the most extensive discussions, argues that what Dygon produced should be described as a 'sermon notebook', largely on the basis of his analysis of ten macaronic sermons in this portion. …

Characterizing the Core: What Catalog Descriptions of Mandatory Courses Reveal about LIS Schools and Librarianship

In 1994, Guy A. Marco lamented the Demise of the American Core Curriculum in library and information science (LIS). His examination of 49 American Library Association (ALA)-accredited schools in the United States (U.S.) suggested that six decades of relative consensus on mandatory library science coursework had been demolished, largely as a result of the introduction of computer-related studies into the curriculum. The present study of course descriptions of 45 ALA-accredited programs in the U.S., however, found that only three of the dozen core subjects identified by Marco have lost ground in the LIS curriculum and that most recorded significant gains. Moreover, the size of LIS cores has remained fairly healthy, covering an average 37% of the credits required for the master's degree. A further analysis of the descriptions of 217 required courses in U.S. LIS schools revealed that library educators are not emphasizing computer-related subjects, but rather tend to underscore traditional concepts in librarianship such as service to users, and organization and sources of information.

The VizieR system, a unified interface to astronomical catalogs

We present in this paper some aspects of the VizieR service, as an example of a database connecting to the largest set of astronomical catalogs. We especially emphasize here role of the metadata: how these are acquired from the catalog descriptions, and how they are stored in the system. The specification of relations or links between data are an important part of the metadata, and we use GLU ( Générateur de Liens Uniformes=uniform link generator) expressions to describe the links to external databases or services. The basic principles of the GLU system initiated at CDS, as well as some tools based on the GLU protocol, are briefly described. Finally, the on-going developments, especially related to data mining purposes, are presented.

A Survey of Ethics‐Related Instruction in U.S. Engineering Programs

AbstractEthics as a topic of study is called for by both the present ABET accreditation criteria and the proposed Engineering Criteria 2000. This paper presents the results of a survey of the ethics‐related course requirements of virtually all engineering programs in the U.S. Even with a liberal definition of “ethics‐related topics,” the data reveal that only about one‐fourth of the institutions surveyed require all of their engineering undergraduates to take at least one course in which ethics or ethics‐related topics were listed in the catalog description. Because the institutions with extensive ethics course requirements tended to be small, only about one out of five students who graduated from accredited programs in 1996–97 came from an institution with such a requirement. These data show the relative invisibility of ethics‐related instruction in present course requirements, and also highlight institutions that can serve as examples for others seeking to improve their instructional efforts in this area.

THE REWORKING OF WORK

FOR THE EXHIBITION of his collected works at the Burleigh Gallery in London during the spring of 1865, Ford Madox Brown supplied a lengthy descriptive catalogue which gave highly detailed accounts of many of the paintings on display. Rarely before had a painter offered such an insight into his artistic methods and intentions, and the reviewers of the day were suitably impressed; the Pre-Raphaelite critic William Michael Rossetti even went so far as to remark that if others were to follow Brown’s practice, “it would enable the spectator to know for certain exactly what the artist meant, and what his work means, and would thus cut short a deal of silly and often perverse guess-work” (Rossetti, 1970: 181).The centerpiece of the show was a highly detailed canvas called Work (Figure 8) which had taken the artist over ten years to complete. In his review for Fraser’s Magazine Rossetti commented that the artist’s account of this painting was particularly valuable, since it enabled one “to follow out the whole scheme of thought into its details with certainty instead of by guess,” so that one gradually came to realise that “not a corner of the picture, a figure, or an action, is without its close yet varied relation to the central idea” (1970: 182). And indeed, Brown’s catalogue description did give a remarkably full account of its development, recording its transformation from a comparatively modest genre painting into a large-scale celebration of modern labor: