Judaica Librarians' Group (Israel) A study day about Rare Books was held by the Judaica Librarians' Group the beginning of November. Hosting the day was the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem. Over 60 librarians from fifteen institutions attended and the program was chaired by Haim Levy of NLI, Chairman of the Judaica Librarians' Group.
Yitzhak Yudelov, retired director of the Institute for Hebrew Bibliography at NLI, spoke about What Makes an Incunabula an Incunabula. He mentioned among the special characteristics of incunabula, differentiating them from later printed books, that they have no title pages, but include colophons like manuscripts; the pages weren't numbered; printers had a personal "relationships" with the works produced (an example given from a colophon was an apology by the printer for mistakes that crept into the work when he was sick and again when he was away at his daughter's wedding). David Ben-Naim, Curator of the Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Bar Ilan University talked about How to Define a Rare Book. A number of criteria were mentioned, an interesting one being that though when talking about rare books one usually thinks about something old, if only a few copies of a newer edition of a certain work exist it might be rare and the older edition not. Dov haCohen of the Ben Zvi Institute discussed Identifying Unknown Authors of Books in Ladino. One familiar with the entire mileu of an era can find hints to the author's name or can correct previously incorrect information relating to an item. To demonstrate this an example was drawn from a Ladino work published in the Ottoman Empire. The publisher was thought to be S. Salim. Preceeding the "publisher's" name on the title page was a four letter abbreviation which, to those with an extensive knowledge of the period, would know meant approximately: Published during the reign of the Sultan Salim. Closing the day was a panel discussion about Is a Rare Book Collection Important in the Era of Digitization. Panel members were David Ben Naim, Dov haCohen, Prof Elhanan Adler (who holds too many positions in his retirement to mention here) and Orly Simon , Director of Public Services at NLI. Orly Simon opened the discussion by raising the question: which digital "publications" does a library collect? Prof. Adler added the comment that all are "rare" because only one copy of each exists. The discussion raised issues such as the importance of variations in different copies of the same work which are not available from a digitized copy; unclear pages in the original which may be reconstructed by seeing it in the original; the question of watermarks, ruling, etc., all of which can't readily be discerned from a digitized copy. And of course there's the different feeling one gets from holding a printed book, which in itself might be an artistic creation, as opposed to seeing the material on a computer screen or even reading it from a computer generated copy. On the business side, at a meeting of the group's Steering Committee a discussion was held about sponsoring a Rabbinics cataloging course for non-professional librarians who are in charge of the libraries at yeshivot, ulpanot, Beit Ya'akov schools, etc. and at present a canvass of these institutions is being made to determine if there is sufficient demand to justify such a course. Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: hasaf...@osu.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
