Care & Conservation of Manuscripts 4 - Proceedings of the fourth international seminar held at the University of Copenhagen 13th-14th October 1997

Care & Conservation of Manuscripts, Volume 9 - Proceedings of the Eighth International Seminar Held at the University of Copenhagen, 14th to 15th April 2005

This volume of Care and Conservation of Manuscripts offers: discussions of the history of collection care at the National Library of Iceland * the preservation of medieval parchments at the National Archives of Sweden * the creation of a database for the administration of the manuscript library in the Prague Castle archives * and an optimized work-flow system for a large-scale condition survey of the books in the Library of the St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, Egypt.

"This collection of articles discusses how to preserve and conserve old manuscripts for the future and will be of particular interest to research librarians. Topics include: an investigation of the use of laser in paper conservation; digitization as part of the museum preservation program; the electronic catalogue of the Manuscripts Department in the National Library of Russia: its concept, structure and use for research; and fundamental reflections on thefts and mutilation of maps from university and national libraries in Europe."

Epigraphy and NumismaticsDescriptionVolume IV, Epigraphy and Numismatics: The Volume contains 34 articles in which there are 23 articles on Epigraphy and 11 articles on Numismatics. The epigraphy section covers studies on almost all the dynasties ruled over the Indian sub-continent and through valuable light on Political, social, economic, religious and other aspects of Indian history. The second section of the book covers important aspects of Coinage found from various regions of India right from the pre-Mauryan times to late medieval times. These articles shed light on the coinage on a Pan Indian context right from the Punch marked coins, Satavahana, Roman, Kshatrapa, Pandyas and Sultanate and also symbols on the coins which opens new vistas in the Numismatics study.This volume serves as a valuable source book for the students, research scholars and teachers as well in the fields. This volume also highlights the love and affection of Prof. P. Chenna Reddy enjoys in the intellectual world. The felicitation Volume is brought out in a series of 12 independent books covering a total of 460 articles. Every volume contains two sections. The first section contains the biographical sketch of Prof.P.Chenna Reddy, his achievements and contribution to archaeology, history and Society. The second section of each volume is subject specific.

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition. William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers. Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present. This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.

By surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the difficult conservation-digitization balance, and in fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book demonstrates that a dialogue between the fields of book conservation and digital humanities is not only possible, but in fact desirable and fruitful.