The Universal Index of Doctoral Dissertations in Progress is
now available at http://www.phddata.org.
Once established, the site will provide a useful service of informing graduate
students and researchers of current dissertation projects. The goal is to collect
information on ongoing theses and dissertations from throughout the world, in
all languages. Access is free of charge. As is, the site contains only a meager
number of records and is of little use, but it is a resource to keep in mind.
Another useful new project that one may want to check again in a few months
is the index of new manuscripts and incunabula acquisitions by public libraries
throughout the world, recently compiled by the Association paléographique
internationale: culture, écriture, société (Apices)
at: http://www.irht.cnrs.fr/cipl/Acquis/Acquis01.htm
The index comprises lists of acquisitions classified by country and libraries,
a list of new acquisitions by date, and a general index (covering authors and
titles, like scribes, recipients, owners, etc., as available).
Supported by funds from the European Union, the French-German-Luxembourgian
project Stätten grenzüberschreitender Erinnerungen|Lieux de
la mémoire transfrontalière at http://www.memotransfront.uni-saarland.de,
celebrates the Europe of regions, rather than national states. The project was
jointly developed by History departments and institutes at the Université
de Metz, Université Nancy II, Centre universitaire de Luxembourg, and
Universität des Saarlandes, and contains about 200 articles in French or
German and short bibliographies that are organized around nine principal themes:
working class, trade-union and political culture; evolution of the villages;
commemorative places and monuments; industrial architecture; transportation
infrastructure and architecture; cultural architecture; military architecture;
religious architecture; and urbanism.
An important site that is not new, but that deserves renewed highlighting is
Historic Cities at http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/historic_cities.html.
Historic Cities provides scanned historic maps of a large number of cities,
with a focus on Europe, though maps from cities in Africa and Asia are also
available. This is a project of the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library. Not all maps are
scanned locally and some entries are merely links to other sites presenting
online historical maps. Nevertheless, the maps of the some 300+ cities currently
in the project are searchable by region, date, and cartographer and coverage
extends from 1486 to 1720. The site proves useful as a ready reference tool
for students who would like to receive a notion of what London, Paris, or Amsterdam
looked like in the middle ages. For example, one may browse through various
maps of the same city over the centuries to better understand its development,
or use the maps to place literary works into context.
A new collaborative project by George Mason University and the City University
of New York explores the French Revolution at: http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/.
With over 300 transcripts of original documents, over 200 images, a timeline,
a few historical maps, songs, a glossary, and essays, this site is a unique
online resource about the French Revolution. Covering historical events leading
up to July 14th, 1789 as well as the aftermath with political and social implications
of the Revolution, the site provides a thorough introduction and overview that
will be useful for any non-specialist wanting to learn more about this decisive
moment in modern history.
The bibliographical database of the Société des Historiens
Médiévistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur Public
was recently made available online at http://www.medievistes-shmes.net/biblio/
The database contains over 10,000 records corresponding to the bibliography
of publications by its members between 1991 and 2000. The database may be searched
by author or title keywords, or browsed thematically by subject. According to
the site, it is regularly updated with new publications and bibliographic references
previous to 1991 are gradually completed.
Many of you will probably already know the CESAR web site,
which provides detailed information on of the plays, people, and performance
spaces of French theatre during the 17th and 18th Centuries. The aim of the
project is to “cover plays, operas, ballets and incidental theatrical entertainments
[...], whether they were performed or published, or merely described in contemporary
documents.” With detailed information on over 120,000 performances of 25,000
plays and other theatrical entertainments, notices on nearly 2,000
writers and over 800 theatre spaces, the site is an obliged stop for anyone
doing research on French theatre of the 17th and 18th Centuries: http://www.cesar.org.uk
There have been two recent additions to the CESAR project:
Following sites on the French Revolution and French theatre of the 17th and
18th Centuries, is a note that the catalog of the la Bibliothèque
Martial Lapeyre - Fondation Napoléon is now available online.
The library holds over 6,000 works on the “Premier et le Second Empire,” and
the catalog is accessible at: http://www.napoleon.org
under “Reading Room” (or “Salle de lecture” if you chose the French version
of the site) and then “Library for Study and Research” (or “Bibliothèque
d'étude et de recherche”). Includes monthly lists of new acquisitions
and limited subject bibliographies. Of course, if Napoleon.org
itself is not yet known, this wonderful site well deserves our attention and
browsing, with timelines, biographies, bibliographies, images of paintings and
contemporary drawings, online exhibits, and more – all pertaining to the history
of the “petit caporal.”
For amateurs of the arts, http://www.rodin-web.org
is a new site dedicated to Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). It function
as a portal and offers an overview of around 220 museum collections, biographical
data, an image database, an annotated bibliography, an exhibition and conferences
calendar, and useful links to Internet resources for scholars and non-academics.
Though already announced through other WESS channels, I am including a note
on the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d'Alembert Collaborative Translation
Website at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/d/did/
The project is to translate the complete Encyclopédie of 70,000+
articles into English. The signed translations contain complete bibliographical
references. Through the collaboration with the ARTFL Project, every translation
is linked to the French original. Future plans are: to include links to plates
and cross-referenced articles; to link to syllabi and class assignments on a
pedagogy page; and to include a bibliography of works about the Encyclopédie,
as well as biographical information about the authors of articles. Librarians,
graduate students, and faculty are called upon to contribute!
Produced by the Direction du livre et de la lecture and the Institut de
recherche et d'histoire des textes (CNRS), the Enluminures
database provides digital images of manuscript illuminations and decorative
elements of medieval manuscripts preserved in the French public libraries. Enluminures
currently contains over 14,000 searchable images from about one hundred libraries
and is regularly updated with new images and accompanying bibliographic records.
Enluminures may be searched on the manuscripts themselves or on the
illuminations within the manuscripts. Manuscripts are described and may be searched
by author, title, type of text, date of the manuscript, its origin, its owner,
and the typology of decoration. The illuminations index combines information
from the manuscripts with descriptions of the subject, context, and, sometimes,
attribution. The descriptions use a standardized and controlled vocabulary;
the representations are indexed with the iconographic thesaurus of F. Garnier.
The site is accessible at: http://www.enluminures.culture.fr/
Another a major online event (for Germanists) is the free version of the Bibliographie
der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (Eppelsheimer-Köttelwesch).
At this point it only covers 1985-1996 but other years will be added. The database
currently contains about 180,000 records and is available at http://www.bdsl-online.de.
Click on “Suche” to start the search.
The digitization project of the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie
(ADB) by the BSB is now (nearly) completed with 55 of the 56 volumes of the
ADB being available as digital page images and as searchable full text. The
ADB may be browsed at http://mdz.bib-bvb.de/digbib/lexika/adb/
and searched, in conjunction with the Neue Deutsche Biographie at http://mdz2.bib-bvb.de/~ndb/ndbmaske.html
On a completely different note, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
D.C., recently opened a new online exhibit on the Nazi Persecution of
Homosexuals: 1933-1945 at http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/hsx/.
Includes essays with valuable insight into the ideology behind persecutions,
visual materials such as drawings and original documents, an annotated bibliography,
and further online resources and links. This is an important addition to the
already impressive collection on online exhibits documenting the Holocaust at
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/index.utp?content=online/right.htm.
Founded in 1960, the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design opened
its doors online at: http://www.bauhaus.de/english/index.htm.
Next to providing information about the museum, including the collections, the
section on the Bauhaus 1919-1933 includes a helpful introduction into the movement
with brief descriptions of the prehistory of the movement; the manifesto; on
how classes were organized and how instructors like Klee and Kandinsky conducted
their courses; on the workshops; architecture; art; the stage department; and
photography. Also includes a section on the New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 in
Chicago and a helpful chronology providing an historical overview.
Bach fans might be interested in the Bach Digital web site, created by the main
repositories of Bach's compositions, among which the Bach-Archiv in
Leipzig and the University of Leipzig, in conjunction with IBM: http://www.bachdigital.org/.
The site contains a wide variety of materials, including original Bach autographs
(musical manuscripts written by the composer himself); descriptions of and historical
background on musical instruments built during Bach’s lifetime, including sound
samples; as well as links to related materials (such as reviews of historical
performances), and links to a selected number of Bach resources on the web.
Meyers Konversationslexikon is now online at http://susi.e-technik.uni-ulm.de:8080/meyers/servlet/index
The project covers all 16 volumes, or 16,000 pages, of the fourth edition, Leipzig,
1888-1889. The project provides page images of the encyclopedia and the full
text search feature is currently being developed.
The German federal archives started the project of updating and revising Wolfgang
Mommsen’s Die Nachlässe in den deutschen Archiven in 1992. This
guide to the holdings of German archives was first published in two parts (part
I in 1971 and part II in 1981) and contained about 7,000 entries, providing
short descriptions of holdings with location, in addition to short biographies
of depositaries. Mommsen’s publication has now been updated and made available
by the Bundesarchiv’s Zentrale Datenbank Nachlässe at http://www.bundesarchiv.de/bestaende/nachlaesse/einfueh.php
The database holds about 21,000 entries.
The Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch (Bremen, J. Kühtmann,
1875-81) by Karl Schiller (1811-1873) and August Lübben, 1818-1884, also
known as Schiller-Lübben, is now available online at http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~cd2/drw/ta.htm.
Volumes I through VI are available from the Textarchiv des Deutschen Rechtswörterbuchs
(DRW) as facsimile page images.
From Tom Kilton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, via Dick Hacken,
we are informed of new developments with the Digital Emblematica
project at the University of Illinois Library, where the digitization of titles
started in April 2002. The aim of the Digital Emblematica project is
to digitize over 60 German-language Renaissance emblem books, which comprise
approximately 7,000 emblems, at: http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/emblems/.
Tom writes that “[s]ince its inception three years ago, this project has enjoyed
a close partnership relationship with the Herzog-August Bibliothek,
Wolfenbüttel, Germany’s chief repository of sixteenth and seventeenth century
emblem books.” The latter has its own project underway to digitize its emblem
books at: http://www.hab.de/forschung/de/barock-dtd/index.htm.
The project has recently received a major boost, as both libraries were awarded
an Alexander von Humboldt Trans-Coop grant for €45,000 Euros in support of German-American
collaborative research projects.
Tom is heavily involved with the emblem analysis research, which entails the identification of exhaustive vocabulary terms (topoi, themes, and descriptors) for the images and the composition of the descriptions accompanying the images of the emblems, as well as the development of Dublin Core metadata. Illinois is planning to use the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol to harvest both libraries’ metadata, thus enabling the determination of common features among its database and that of the Herzog August Bibliothek. This harvesting will also enable the sharing of records as well as the creation of mirror sites of each other’s records.
We finish this German section of Bits and Bytes with a review by Linwood
DeLong from the University of Winnipeg Library of the new Marcel Reich-Ranicki
web site. “Marcel Reich-Ranicki is variously described as one of the most influential,
most feared and most controversial literary critics in post-war Germany,” writes
Linwood; she continues: “and it is highly desirable that staff at the Institut
für Neuere deutsche Literatur und Medien at the University of
Marburg should create a website devoted to him:
http://www.literaturkritik.de/reich ranicki/all_content.html
The website features several biographical sections, as well as detailed bibliographical sections listing Reich-Ranicki’s publications and publications about him.
The biographical section is noteworthy for its collection of digitized reproductions of 15 photographs, covering the period from Reich-Ranicki’s birth to the present. There is also a textual account of Reich-Ranicki’s life that captures most of the highlights of his career as a literary critic in both the German Democratic Republic and West Germany, although there is hardly any mention of his activities as a critic of the Gruppe 47, one of the most influential literary associations in post-war Germany. There is also a detailed chronology, arranged by year, that lists one or more significant events for almost every year of Reich-Ranicki’s life. The list of biographical sources that follows this chronology is very brief and current, although it omits references to materials about him that are listed in other sources, such as the article in the Literatur Lexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache ed. by Walther Killy.
By contrast, the bibliographical material in the section entitled ‘Bibliographie der Arbeiten über und von Reich-Ranicki’ is more comprehensive and it lists works written by Reich-Ranicki in both Polish and German, as well as printed and audio-visual material about him. According to information in the website, the authors have used one of the most comprehensive printed bibliographies pertaining to Reich-Ranicki, which was published in 1997, and have augmented it with material published since that date. Rather than arrange the individual entries by the author’s surname, the editors of this website have chosen to arrange them in categories (books, chapters in books, articles in journals, interviews, etc.) and to arrange the material in each category by date of first publication. The strength of this bibliographical section appears to be the documentation of Reich-Ranicki’s publications in German and Polish, rather than secondary literature about him. A search on the term ‘Reich-Ranicki’ in the MLA International Bibliography reveals a fair amount of secondary literature about him that is not listed on this website, as well as articles in languages other than German and Polish, that were written by him. There appear to be no English-language publications listed at all. On the other hand, it is pleasing to see that some of the publications by Reich-Ranicki’s wife, Teofila, are also included.
A large section of this
website, entitled ‘Themen,’ deals with Reich-Ranicki’s career as a
literary critic, most recently in a highly successful television series, but
prior to that as a critic for leading German newspapers. There are also sections
dealing with Reich-Ranicki’s autobiography and with his relationship to his
Jewish past. The editors of this website have included a wide variety of comments
(positive and negative) about his career, as well as comments about significant
relationships in his professional career. There is occasionally some repetition
within these sections, but the website as a whole is very informative, liberally
augmented by links to related sites, and very current. Very little information
is provided about the persons responsible for this website and their credentials.
Possible improvements to the site might include a bit more information about
its creators and an inclusion of more secondary material about Reich-Ranicki
in languages other than German or Polish.
Responsibility for some of these albums lies outside of AEIOU.at’s control. For example, the ‘Austrian Designers’ album is merely a link to a project of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. The link did not work. Furthermore, since it is separately administered, it cannot be accessed by the search engine in AEIOU.at. The music album was created by the Institut für Musikwissenschaft (Graz). Here one can search among instruments, composers, genres and styles, and periods. The musical samples provided are too brief to be very useful. The Sigmund Freud Album links directly to the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. There is hardly enough here to warrant being called an ‘album.’ I never was able to find the biographical and bibliographical information there promised by the AEIOU.at homepage.
A video album provides clips of approximately 70 individuals and historical events. The clips are drawn from historical recordings held by the Austrian broadcasting corporation (ORF). The material dates mainly from the 1920's and 1930’s and presents a cross-section of Austrian cultural history. The videos (mpegs) are sometimes silent, usually jerky, and mostly quite brief. The video clip portraying Ringstrassenbauten was quite helpful. One can see footage of Hitler am Heldenplatz as well as scenes from Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann. Felix Salten (author of Bambi) meets Scholom Asch? See the video clip at AEIOU.at.
The site offers a complete depiction of Austrian postage stamps, 1986-1996, searchable by theme. Each image receives about one screen of descriptive narrative.
The Photo Album section (more than 1500 photographs [of] the ‘most beautiful places in Austria’) illustrates an annoying feature of the entire site: extreme layering. To see a picture of Trachtenmusik, you have to click on the phrase, which takes you to a thumbnail. Similarly, viewing the video clips separates them from their titles, so you have to remember what it is you’re looking at from the previous page.
Most of the page is available in both German and English. The translations into English are serviceable. Readers have the option of sending in comments, corrections, and additions. There are relatively few reader-supplied supplements and their quality and length varies greatly.
Google will retrieve items in AEIOU.at and in some cases this might be easier than trying to navigate the site itself. AEIOU.at seems to work equally well in Internet Explorer and Netscape. It does not work well with Mozilla, however.
The catalog of Latin manuscripts of the university library in Salzburg is available
online: http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/sosa/webseite/hsskat.htm.
The Universitätsbibliothek Salzburg holds over 1,100 manuscripts of which
about stem from the 8th Century to 1600. 71 Latin and German manuscripts from
before 1600 are described in the online catalog produced by Anna Jungreithmayr
at http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/sosa/webseite/hsskatdt.htm
and which includes links to page images, though without the descriptions, which
are under copyright. Started in November 2002, the goal of the project is to
digitize all manuscript holdings Also visit the home page of the Special Collections
department or Abteilung für Sondersammlungen at http://www.ubs.sbg.ac.at/sosa/webseite/sosa.htm
for access to incunabula and other resources.
I am also including information on the Italian Women Writers project (IWW) for
those who were not able to make it to the Romance Languages DG at Midwinter:
http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/
The Italian Women Writers project is a new, long-term research endeavor to preserve
and provide access to an extensive corpus of literature written by Italian women
authors. IWW includes authors from the beginning of Italian literature up to
authors born in 1945. The project is currently in its beginning, but will include
a broad selection of works: anthologies, articles and essays, autobiographies,
biographies, children's literature, devotional works, dialogues, diaries, dramas,
epics, hagiographies, histories and chronicles, interviews and conversations,
letters, memoirs, novels, operas, poems, reviews, short stories, and travel
literature. Selections of materials to be digitized are made by the Editorial
Board: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW/board.html.
Contributions of biographical or bibliographical information are highly welcome.
As part of the Global Gateway
to World Culture and Resources, the National Library of Spain, The Biblioteca
Columbina y Capitular of Seville, and the Library of Congress have developed
a new database of primary and secondary materials documenting the Spanish influence
in North America, the Caribbean, and present-day Mexico between 1492-1898: Spain,
The United States, and The American Frontier: Historias Paralelas at http://international.loc.gov/intldl/eshtml/eshome.html.
The site features maps, rare books, manuscripts, prints and photographs, motion
pictures, as well as numerous firsthand accounts. Many of the documents are
available in both English and Spanish. The interface provides for searching
and browsing by Subjects, Titles, and Geographic Locations, and supports the
navigation to maps, rare books, and one book from the United States Congressional
Serial Set. In addition, links are offered to relevant American Memory collections
and exhibitions from the Library of Congress.
Essential Vermeer, http://essentialvermeer.20m.com/index.htm, by Jonathan Janson, describes the life and work of the seventeenth-century Dutch master. The site is not addressed to art historians only; providing a chronology of Vermeer’s life and compositions, the location of the latter, and an introduction to the School of Delft and the Golden Age of Dutch Painting (to name just a few), the web site function as a virtual online museum and provides a breadth of information that will be of interest to the scholars and the novice alike.
This section is listed last as it might be of be of lesser interest to the Western European Studies Section, but the British Isles, despite contrary opinions, are still part of Western Europe.
The Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History is now a free database available at http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/. The online version supersedes the CD-Rom, which only went up to 1995. Updated annually, it includes a number of helpful links, such as to the London's Past Online at: http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/london.asp, a special 25,000-item bibliography for the history of London. The online Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History may be searched through the main catalogue, which gives access to the full range of search criteria but excludes many pre-1946 publications; for latest additions only (material added in January 2003 including publications of 2001 and London's Past Online data), which provides access to the full range of search criteria; or for all titles, but with a more limited set search criteria.
On 4 September 2002 the British Library launched a new scholarly, peer-reviewed
online publication: The Electronic British Library Journal (eBLJ);
ISSN 1478-0259. eBLJ is the electronic successor to The British Library
Journal and it’s purpose is to promote research on holdings and the history
of the British Library’s collections: http://www.bl.uk/eblj.
Free of access the journal welcomes contributions from scholars outside the
British Library.
Dick Hacken informs us of the new Internet portal to Britain’s National
Maritime Museum. He writes: “At first glance, the phrase ‘maritime
history’ seems quite narrow and restricting. After all, don't the great happenings
for us landlubbers occur on dry land – except for your occasional Titanic (Headline
in Onion: ‘World's Largest Metaphor Hits Iceberg’)? The new Internet portal
of Britain's National Maritime Museum, ‘PORT, Maritime Information Gateway,’
at the URL http://www.port.nmm.ac.uk/,
gives us an idea of the extent to which we are tied to the waterways of the
world. The PORT gateway offers relevant online resources internationally, ranging
in subjects from art to emigration, from fishing to finance.
You can browse by historical periods from ancient history to the 21st century.
A database of the museum collections and the online journal, Journal of
Maritime Research, are also available at this URL. Descriptions of each
resource attest to the prodigious care of dedicated civil servants. The National
Maritime Museum is linked administratively and philosophically with the Royal
Observatory next to it in Greenwich (see the URL http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/),
reminding us that the historical search for exact measurements of longitude
at sea (described in space) depended on exact measurements of the movement of
celestial bodies (described in time).”
British Pathé (BP), which calls itself “the world's
first digital news archive,” has recently gone online at: http://www.britishpathe.com/.
The site allows you to preview items from the 3,500 hour British Pathé
Film Archive which covers news, sport, social history and entertainment from
1896 to 1970. You may also license higher resolution copies of the same items
for PowerPoint Presentations and Web Publishing. The roots of BP lie in 1890s
Paris where the founder, Charles Pathé, pioneered the development of
the moving image. British Pathé was established in London in 1902, and
by 1910 was producing bi-weekly newsreel Pathe Gazette. After WWI British
Pathé started producing various Cinemagazines as well. By 1930,
BP was producing the Gazette, the Pathetone Weekly, the Pathe
Pictorial and Eve's Film Review, covering entertainment, culture
and women’s' issues. By 1970, BP had accumulated 3,500 hours of filmed history
amounting to over 90,000 individual items.
Interestingly enough, no one ever seems to wonder whether Ireland is part of
Europe, though also an island and even further from “the Continent.”
One the newest projects at the University of Virginia is the Thomas MacGreevy Archive; a long-term, interdisciplinary research project committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies. Published by The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at University of Virginia, the project is supported by Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, at University of Maryland: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/macgreevy/home.html. So far, the database includes over 300 texts by and about Thomas MacGreevy, who is considered one of Ireland's earliest modernist poets – though he might be more well known for his hundreds of articles, books on contemporary writers and artists, and catalogs of the National Gallery of Ireland's collections.
Though the Scottish Archive Network opened its online doors
in 2000 (http://www.scan.org.uk/), the
Network features a section on Scottish Wills that boasts its
own URL at http://www.ScottishDocuments.com.
The site provides an index to the registers of Scottish wills and testaments
from 1500-1875 free of charge; the digital images of the wills, however, are
only available through purchase. The project is currently working on extending
coverage to the end of 1901; these additional years should become available
later in 2003.
Please continue to submit notifications and/or reviews for inclusion in the upcoming Fall 2003 issue of Europe by Bits & Bytes, as well as any comments to Sebastian Hierl at <hierl@uchicago.edu>.