Speaker
Francesca Petricca (ProQuest, part of Clarivate)
Abstract
The invention of printing was one of the turning points that marked the beginning of the modern era in Europe. The newly born book industry had a tremendous impact on political, religious, cultural, and scientific life of the time. A digital survey of all the books published in the first centuries of print, would have been a great effort of heritage preservation and a precious instrument of research . The project that we know today as “Early English Books Online” started out on this ambitious task from the late 1930s. Today its cognate project “Early European Books” is a great scholarly endeavour that contains records on 77,575 editions printed in Europe between 1450 and 1700. It covers the bibliographic data of the Universal Short Title Catalogue at St Andrews University and the early modern collections of five major European national libraries : the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Royal Libraries of Copenhagen and The Hague, the National Central Library in Florence, and the Wellcome Library in London.
This paper examines the role of a private institution in the conservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. I will explore the multiple facets of this ambitious plan: the creation and implementation of metadata to aid discoverability, the legal aspects of the collaboration between libraries, scholars and a private company and the digital technology used to improve visibility and accessibility. I will focus in particular on the discoverability of female voices as authors and printers in “Early European Books”.