The Universal Short Title Catalogue brings together information on all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century, creating a powerful resource for the study of the book and print culture.
The project has a searchable interface, aggregates data from established national bibliographical projects and new projects undertaken by the project team based at the University of St Andrews, and with partners in University College, Dublin.
The resource provides access to full bibliographic information, locations of surviving copies and, where available, digital full text editions. All told, this information encompasses approximately 350,000 editions and around 1.5 million surviving copies, located in over 5,000 libraries worldwide. Between now and mid-2016 coverage will be extended to 1650, approximately doubling its size.
In addition to the core database, the USTC was recently successful in winning a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a programme entitled Preserving the World’s Rarest Books. This is a new initiative aims to collate data on surviving books in the world’s 6,000 research libraries and archives. The programme will offer to participating libraries and archives data analysing their collections of early printed books in terms of rarity, highlighting items that survive in only a very few copies in other libraries, or are the only known surviving copy. Libraries will then be encouraged to make these items priorities for conservation digitization. Digital copies of these unique or very rare items can then be shared with users through the USTC platform, and thus become generally available to the world’s research community.
With such an ambitious programme, that requires a sophisticated technical architecture, public engagement, and the wide dissemination of the data gathered by the USTC team, the project faces steep challenges in both the design and implementation of a user interface. This paper will focus on such challenges and broadly seek to illustrate how design is a critical component of any successful digital humanities project.