[InetBib] LIGATUS Summer School in Wolfenbüttel

[Almuth Corbach <corbach@xxxxxx>]

Die 5. Summer School des Forschungsschwerpunktes LIGATUS der University 
of the Arts London wird in diesem Jahr in Verbindung mit der Herzog 
August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel durchgeführt. Kurssprache ist Englisch.

__________________________

Ligatus Summer School 2010
Herzog August Bibliothek
Wolfenbuttel, Germany
2-6, 2010 and 9-13 August 2010.

The 5th Ligatus Summer School, following the success of the courses in 
Volos, Patmos and Thessaloniki, is to be held this year in collaboration 
with the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuettel, near Braunschweig, 
in northern Germany. This is an exciting new venture for us, and the 
opportunity to use books from this magnifi-cent collection in our 
courses, will make this year's summer school a memorable experience.

About the course: The contribution that bindings can make to our 
understanding of the history and culture of the book is often neglected, 
but they can offer insights into the study of readership, the booktrade, 
and the provenance of books which are often not available elsewhere. In 
order to realise this potential, it is important to understand not only 
the history of the craft but also to learn how to record what is seen in 
a consistent and organised way. Librarians, cataloguers, conservators, 
book historians and all scholars who work with early books, need 
therefore to understand the structure and materials of the bindings they 
encounter in order to be able to record and describe them. Such 
descriptions of bindings are not only valuable for the management of 
library collections, pursuing academic research and making informed 
decisions about conservation, but are also important for digitisation 
projects as they can radically enrich the potential of image and text 
metadata. It is our belief that bindings should be seen as an integral 
part of the book, without which, our understanding of the history and 
use of books is often greatly circumscribed.

The purpose of the summer school is to uncover the possibilities latent 
in the detailed study of bookbinding and it mainly focuses on books 
which have been bound between the fifteenth and the early nineteenth 
century. While both courses concentrate in particular on the structure 
and materials of bookbindings, each of the two courses offered in this 
summer school looks at bindings from different geographical areas and 
with a different approach. The first course looks at the history of 
bookbinding as it was carried out in Europe in the period of the hand 
press (1450-1830), with the opportunity to look at examples from the 
collection during the after-noons, while the second course looks at the 
development of bookbinding in the eastern Mediterranean and gives 
hands-on training in how to observe and record bindings, again working 
with examples from the collec-tion. Part of this course will include the 
construction of an XML data structure (schema) for recording book-bindings.

The courses are taught in English and each is open to 12 participants. 
Although the courses can be attended individually, participants are 
encouraged to attend both courses in order to get a more complete 
understanding of the issues discussed, through the comparison of the 
wide range of bookbindings considered in each week. Since these are not 
beginner-level courses, the participants are expected to be familiar 
with bookbinding ter-minology and have a basic knowledge of the history 
of book production in the periods under discussion. A basic 
understanding of the use of databases is also desirable for those who 
will attend the course in the second week.

Description of courses:

Week 1
European Bookbinding 1450-1830
Tutor: Professor N. Pickwoad

This course will follow European bookbinding from the end of the Middle 
Ages to the beginning of the Indus-trial Revolution, using the bindings 
themselves to illustrate the aims and intentions of the binding trade. A 
large part of the course will be devoted to the identification of both 
broad and detailed distinctions within the larger groups of plain 
commercial bindings and the possibilities of identifying the work of 
different countries, cities, even workshops without reference to 
finishing tools. The identification and significance of the different 
materials used in bookbinding will be examined, as well as the 
classification of bookbindings by structural type, and how these types 
developed through the three centuries covered by the course. The 
development of binding decoration will be touched on, but will not form 
a major part of the discussion.

The course consists of ten 90-minute sessions with slide-show 
presentations (over 800 images will be shown). Actual examples of 
bindings will be shown in the first four afternoon sessions while the 
final afternoon will look at bookbinding terminology and offer the 
opportunity for the discussion of questions and issues raised during the 
week.

Week 2
Identifying and recording Byzantine bookbinding structures for 
conservation and cataloguing.
Tutors: Dr. G. Boudalis and Dr. A. Velios

This five-day course will be divided in two interconnected sessions. The 
first session, run by Dr. Georgios Boudalis, will focus upon the major 
structural and decorative features of the Byzantine and post-Byzantine 
bookbindings and their evolution in time and space. The relation of 
these bindings with the early bindings of the Coptic and other Eastern 
Mediterranean cultures will be discussed, during lectures, slide-shows 
and hands-on sessions. This session will centre the influences and 
comparisons of these different bookbindings. It will consist of eight 
90-minute computer presentations supplemented by hands-on sessions. The 
second session will be run by Dr. Athanasios Velios and will deal with 
the data management and storage of bookbinding de-scriptions. Alongside 
a brief reference to the relational databases this session will mainly 
involve discussions on a) the semantic web and XML, b) schemas and 
terminologies for bookbinding descriptions, c) commercial and open 
source software options for XML data and d) methodologies and workflows 
for collection surveys. A large part of this session will be devoted to 
the actual development and use of an XML schema for recording binding 
structures. This session will consist of two 90-minutes presentations 
and eight 90-minutes hands-on workshops. Basic knowledge of database use 
is desirable for this course.

The courses are supported by Ligatus and the University of the Arts, 
London, with generous help from the Herzog August Bibliothek. We have 
therefore been able to reduce the cost of the course for this year to 
UKP320 per week, excluding travel, meals and accommodation. A number of 
accommodation options will be provided to the participants. A detailed 
schedule of the courses can be sent upon request. Applications, 
includ-ing a short CV can be submitted online

<URL:http://www.ligatus.org.uk/summerschool/>

For information about registration please email Ewelina Warner
<e.warner [at] camberwell__arts__ac__uk> and mark the message subject with:
'Ligatus Summer School'. A reading list will be sent to those who will 
attend the courses in advance. Deadline for applications is the 11th of 
June. The participants will be contacted by the end of June.

About the library: Wolfenbuettel is a small town in Lower Saxony, 
Germany, located on the Oker river about 13 kilometres south of 
Brunswick (Braunschweig), at the edge of the Harz Mountains. It became 
the residence of the dukes of Brunswick in 1432 but the first known 
library in Wolfenbuettel was that of the Duke Julius (1528-1529), the 
first protestant ruler of the duchy of Brunswick-Lueneburg. This library 
was transferred in 1618, on the orders of his grandson, Friedrich Ulrich 
(1591-1634), to the university of Helmstedt, founded in 1576. The Herzog 
August Bibliothek in its present form started its life as the private 
library of the Duke Au-gust (1579-1666), and by the time of his death, 
the library was one of the greatest collections in Europe, con-taining 
135,000 painstakingly catalogued printed books and 3000 manuscripts.

The library continued to grow under his immediate descendants in later 
seventeenth and the eighteenth centu-ries, with both Gottfried Wilhelm 
Leibniz and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing serving as librarians, and was then 
housed in a splendid circular building, finished in 1713, built by the 
Duke Anton Ulrich, which was the first free-standing secular library 
building in Europe. In 1810 the library of the University of Helmstedt 
was re-turned to Wolfenbuettel, and other notable collections, both from 
later generations of the ducal family and other aristocratic families, 
were added to the Bibliotheca Augusta, as the Duke August's own 
collection is known.

The current library building was opened in 1887, and new reading rooms, 
exhibition spaces and other facilities have been added in nearby 
buildings in more recent times. In 1983, the library was established as 
an independ-ent research centre by the State of Lower Saxony, with an 
active programme which allows approximately 150 scholars to work in the 
library each year and the addition of a large reference collection to 
support the study of the early books. In addition, since that time there 
has been an active programme of acquisitions of both printed books and 
manuscripts of all ages, building on the strengths of the collection and 
embarking in new directions. The library is now designated as the 
national repository for printed books of the seventeenth century. It is 
re-markable in having maintained its collection virtually intact since 
the seventeenth century.

A good introduction to the library and its collections can be found in A 
Treasure House of Books: the library of the Duke August of 
Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, Wolfenbuttel, 1998.

Ligatus is a research unit of the University of the Arts London with 
particular interest in the history bookbind-ing, book conservation, 
archiving and the application of digital technology to these fields. 
Ligatus's main re-search projects currently include the conservation of 
the books in the library of St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai and 
the development of a multi-lingual glossary of bookbinding terms.


-- 
Almuth Corbach (Leiterin Arbeitsstelle Erhaltung und Restaurierung)
Herzog August Bibliothek - Schlossplatz 5-6 - D-38304 Wolfenbuettel
Tel: +49 (0)5331-808 217 - Fax: -808 173 - E-Mail: corbach@xxxxxx

-- 
http://www.inetbib.de