Useful Links

Cataloging Tools

• ALA-LC Romanization Tables
  Transliteration schemes for non-Roman scripts from the Library of Congress.
• Yale Fraktur Chart
• Rare Book Toolkit: Directory of Web Resources for the Rare Book Cataloger
• RBMS Controlled Vocabularies
  Vocabulary for binding, provenance, printing, genre, and relator terms.
• British Book Trade Index
  An index of the names and brief biographical details and trade details of people who worked in the book trade in England and Wales and who were trading by 1851.

Dictionaries, Thesauri, and Glossaries

• Getty Institute Vocabularies
  The Getty Institute's online vocabularies, including the Art & Architecture Theasaurus (AAT) and the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN).
• CERL Thesaurus (Consortium of European Research Libraries
  Searches places, printers, authors, corporate bodies, and printer's devices from the hand-press (1450-c. 1830) period across Europe.
• Bookbinding: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology
  Don Etherington's dictionary of descriptive book terms.
• Oxford Companion to the Book (2010) (access to U of I users only)
  Covers the book throughout the world from ancient to modern times. It includes traditional subjects such as bibliography, palaeography, the history of printing, editorial theory and practice, textual criticism, book collecting, and libraries.
• Glossary of Printmaking Nomenclature
• Dictionary of Literary Biography (access to U of I users only)

Latin Resources

• Latin—English Dictionary
  "Words" by William Whitaker, Latin-to-English and English-to-Latin translation.
• Glossary of Common Latin Terms Found in Imprints
• Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (Adriano Cappelli)
  An alphabetical guide to help identify paleographic abbreviations.
• Abbreviations Online
  Search common Latin abbreviations
• Orbis Latinus Online
  Latin place names.
• RBMS-BSC Latin Place Names File

Online Catalogs & Bibliographies

• Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC)
  A collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.
• English Short Title Catalogue ESTC)
  English titles published between 1473 and 1800.
• Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC)
  An international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide.
• COPAC
  Searches over 70 UK and Irish academic, national, and specialist library catalogs.
• EDIT 16 (ICCU)
  Catalog of Italian titles published in the 16th century.
• ICCU (Italy or Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico)
  Searches the Italian Union Catalog.
• Biblioteca Nacional (Spain)
  Searches Spain’s national library, including manuscripts and artworks.
• Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK)
  Meta search interface for more than 500 million books and serials in library and book trade catalogs worldwide.
• Short Title Catalog Netherlands (STCN)
  A Dutch retrospective bibliography for the period 1540-1800; also included are concise descriptions of Dutch (post-)incunabula.
• VD 16 (Germany)
  German titles from the 16th century.
• VD 17 (Germany)
  Bibliography of books printed in the German-speaking countries from 1601 to 1700.
• Bibliography of American Literature (access to U of I user only)
  Describes in exhaustive detail the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930

Provenance Tools and Authority Files

• Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)
  VIAF, implemented and hosted by OCLC, is a joint project of several national libraries plus selected regional and trans-national library agencies.
• Penn Provenance Project (Flickr photostream)
  This collection of images is useful for identifying bookplates and other records of ownership.
• Pratt Institute Ex Libris Collection
  The Ex Libris Collection consists of nineteenth- and twentieth-century bookplates from private and institutional libraries.
• Clergy of the Church of England Database
  Makes available and searchable the principal records of clerical careers from over 50 archives in England and Wales with the aim of providing coverage of as many clerical lives as possible from the Reformation to the mid-nineteenth century.
• Guide to Special Collections at the University of Illinois
  Names and descriptions of collectors and collections at the University of Illinois.

Cataloging Projects of Note:

Cambridge University Library
In October 2009, Cambridge University Library launched a cataloging project which will make records for its collection of 4,650 incunables available and searchable online for the first time. The incunabula collection is internationally renowned and includes 134 unique items. The project has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for five years.

Council on Library and Information Resources - Hidden Collections Program
The Council on Library and Information Resources administers this national effort with the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since the program began in 2008, sixty-five grants totalling nearly $16M have been made to a variety of institutions nationwide.

MIT Institute Archives & Special Collections
The MIT Libraries rare and special books cataloging project continues and as of May 2008, 3,000 volumes have been cataloged and are accessible through Barton, the MIT Libraries catalog. The first four in a series of exhibits are available on their website.

Yale University
The Yale University Rare Book Team publishes annual ‘action plans’ online for their rare book cataloging staff. Here is the plan for 2011/2012, which includes cataloging 12,000 monographs and 9,000 serials.