The View From Kalamazoo
Note
I should mention, again, that my boss is a wonderful, wonderful person.
I should mention it daily, however I think that would clutter the blog a bit.
I can’t tell you how much I will miss him when we retires. If you plan to apply for the position, once they actually get around to advertising it, I hope I like you even half as much. (I also hope you get and appreciate my odd references to The Prisioner, whomever you are.)
You knew I wouldn’t keep quiet for long…
Is Google, and not blogging, the real issue at the heart of the Tribble Drivel? (found at Coffee Grounds)
Yes, and no.
If you Google me you’ll run into my blog, sure, and opinion columns I wrote for the school paper lo those many years ago. And papers I had put up, again, a decade ago that have since taken on a life of their own (including my undergraduate thesis. my graduate thesis you’ll have to find at the university library, sorry. not that you really want to..). And references to me in my capacity as the Great Herder of Cats. And archived listserv emails, and who the heck knows what else – I’m all over the place and there would be no eradicating my electronic presence whether or not I blogged under my own name (which I do on principle, if that means anything), whether or not I blogged at all. I would not put my URL on official, application data (I’m still not sure who would put a road map to a personal blog on their materials, frankly), but that didn’t stop a ‘whole department’ from, en masse, becoming readers.
My question is this, for all of you on various and sundry committees who have the habit or practice of Googling applicants: Did you, say 5 years ago, regularly Google your applicants? Regularly run a LexisNexis search on applicants to check for any letters to the editor, perhaps?? Did you, instead, look at the contents of their dossier, the materials submitted expressly for you to consider??!?
At what point did it seem appropriate to cross lines, muddy boundaries, scootch personal ethics to the side? If it wasn’t a practice then, why is it so fashionable now??
And pineapple.
I’ve seen this in far too many blogs to list them all, so here goes:
“If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog.”
Is it too early to put it on your Xmas list?
I just ran accross an announcement for a new publication. and thought many of you would be interested:
A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Alan Coates, Kristian Jensen, Cristina Dondi, Bettina Wagner and Helen Dixon.
6 vols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Price: £600.00 (Hardback)
ISBN 0-19-951373-2
Publication date: 7 July 2005
3088 pages, 276 mm x 219mmmm
Description
INTRODUCTORY OFFER £600
Represents a major contribution to the study of the history of the book
Catalogues the world’s fifth largest collection of fifteenth-century western printed books
Includes a valuable provenance index
Compiled to the highest modern standards
The Bodleian’s incunable catalogue describes the Library’s fifteenth-century western printed books to the same standards expected in the best modern catalogues of medieval manuscripts. It records and identifies all texts contained in each volume, and the detailed analysis of the textual content is an innovative feature. Further information about authors, editors, translators, and dedicatees is given in an extensive index of names, complete with biographical and other information; this index will be of interest to textural scholars from the classical period to the renaissance. The detailed descriptions of the copy-specific features of each book (the binding, hand-decoration and hand-finishing, marginalia, and provenance) form another important contribution to scholarship. The provenance index will be of great value to all those interested in the history of the book from the 1450s to the present day.
Readership: Scholars and students of the history of the book from the 1450s to the present day; textual scholars from the classical period to the renaissance
Contents
R. P. Carr, Director of University Library Services and Bodley’s Librarian: Preface
List of Organisations and Individuals who sponsored cataloguing project
List of Members of the Cataloguing Team
List of Academic Advisers
Acknowledgements
Bibliographical abbreviations
General abbreviations
INTRODUCTIONAlan Coates:
(a) Historical introduction
(i) acquisition of incunubala
(ii) housing of incunabula
(iii) cataloguing of incunabula
(b) The form of the entries in the Catalogue
THE CATALOGUE
(a) Nigel Palmer: Blockbooks
(b) Western incunabula, A-Z
(c) Silke Schaeper: Lisf of Hebraica
INDEXES
(a) Authors, Translators, Editors, Dedicatees
(b) Owners and Donors
(c) Printers and Publishers
APPENDICES
(a) Items recorded by L. A. Sheppard, but not included in the Catalogue
(b) Items included in ISTC, but excluded from the Catalogue
(c) List of items in Schreiber ‘Woodcuts from Books of the XVth Century’
Authors, editors, and contributors
Alan Coates, Assistant Librarian, Rare Books, Dept of Special Collections & Western MSS, & Head of Incunable Cataloguing Project, Bodleian Library, Oxford,
Kristian Jensen, Head of British & Early Printed Collections, The British Library, London,
Cristina Dondi, J. P. R. Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Printed Book, University of Oxford,
Bettina Wagner, Head of Incunable Cataloguing, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany,
Helen Dixon, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, The Warburg Institute, University of London
