• Graeme Kemp

University of St Andrews

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.

• Shanti Graheli

University of St Andrews

Preserving the World’s Rarest Books is a new programme developed by the Universal Short Title Catalogue team in St Andrews, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York. While assembling data for their survey of early printed books in Europe, the St Andrews team became increasingly aware of the complex relationship between rarity and value. Some of the most valued early printed books are indeed not particularly rare, such as Shakespeare’s First Folio or Gutenberg’s Bible, whereas many books that do not survive well are not particularly cherished. This new programme puts the information on rarity held by the USTC team at the disposal of participating libraries, with special care for those items that are documented in five or fewer copies worldwide.

This paper introduces the concept of rarity in the book world, whilst defining the material challenges to a comprehensive survey of early printed books in Europe. It presents the rationale behind the concept of Preserving the World’s Rarest Books, its core methodology and first results, as well as showing how these results can be visually displayed. Particular attention is given to the interaction between our data and its two main groups of users: the libraries participating in the programme, and the visitors of the online database. The paper thus takes into consideration some of the new features of the USTC backend, which have been especially designed in order to optimise our contacts and exchanges with partner institutions. It also introduces some of the new features of the USTC database interface, and how the data deriving from this new programme is made available to our users. Both of these efforts support our final aim to use innovative technology in order to raise awareness around the rarity and preservation of early printed books in the twenty-first century.

• Drew Thomas

University of St Andrews

It is well known that the success of Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation was greatly aided by the printing press. Luther wrote numerous short sermons that could be printed quickly and distributed across Europe. This brought great success to the Wittenberg printer Georg Rhau, who was the town’s largest printer during Luther’s lifetime. However, new data, available due to large bibliographic projects such as the Universal Short Title Catalogue, reveals this to be far from true. It was actually Hans Lufft who was the largest printer in Wittenberg, printing more than double the output of Rhau.

This discrepancy is due to the fact that traditional bibliography viewed a printer’s output in terms of the number of editions printed. This results in large editions, such as Bibles, being treated equal to small editions, such as pamphlets. It is far more accurate to analyse a printer’s output in terms of the number of sheets printed. Thus Bibles and larger works, specialties of Hans Lufft, are given their proper weight. This type of analysis is only possible due to recent advancements in large, online bibliographic projects.

While sheet count analysis transforms traditional understandings of local print industries, it can also disrupt assumptions held about the wider German and European industries. Wittenberg went from having no printing press in 1500 to being the largest print centre in the Holy Roman Empire by the end of the century. However, Wittenberg produced large numbers of Bibles and pamphlets, which could either devalue or inflate its place in the larger German industry. Sheet count analysis will help solve this dilemma and provide scholars with a much more accurate depiction of the early modern print world.