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Identifying Societies that Contributed to the Scholarly Record
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Significance of the Reuss Repertorium to the scholarly record
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e must now acknowledge the debt that this
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum owes to
the Reuss Repertorium.
The Reuss Repertorium is a massive index
of
articles in journals published by scholarly societies; it was published in
16 subject volumes between the years 1801 and 1821. It is an extraordinary
work of bibliography that is of signal
importance to
historians of the 17th & 18th
centuries. Its only
drawbacks for the
present-day user are the somewhat cryptic
journal-title abbreviations used, and
the employment of Latin by the
compiler in various critical
places.
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Problems with the Reuss Repertorium
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The Reuss Repertorium was a natural
tool to use in compiling a list
of societies that contributed to the scholarly record. Unfortunately,
bibliographic practice of the early 19th
century did not require the
inclusion of a list of journal
indexed, much less an expansion of the
abbreviations used to denote them. (This may be contrasted with the
situation only a few decades later when the first six volumes of the Royal Society of London Catalogue of Scientific
Papers
were published.)
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Using the Reuss Repertorium to identify societies
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To determine which journals were indexed within this tool, it was
necessary to resort to a laborious technique:
scrutinizing large blocks of
text and transcribing
each journal abbreviation, and noting the first
place in the Reuss Repertorium that it
occurred. The process has
extended, on and off, over a number of years, and is far from complete.
Close to 1000 pages have been processed in this manner; the number of new
journals that are turning up is rather small;
these journals are all associated with minor societies.
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Assessing Comprehensiveness in Covering the Latter
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The problem
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his now brings us to the problem of how comprehensive the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum is
with respect to the first criterion, that is, how comprehensive it is in
including societies that published journals or other collected writings.
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Two kinds of omission
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There are two categories of journals from the Reuss Repertorium
that are
not yet included: (a) journals from societies for which we have been
unable to determine a founding
date, and (b) journals which
have not yet turned up in the
process described above.
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The results
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In order to assess how complete the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum is from the
point of view of someone using the Reuss
Repertorium, several
hundred pages
of the
latter were photocopied and checked against the abbreviations list in the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum. These marked
copies show that, depending on the
subject volume chosen, from 85% to 95% of the
journal articles
indexed are from journals published by societies with entries already in
the Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum. Even though
societies remain to be added, the percentage quoted
is rather high because the most important
societies and academies are
already in the project and they published many
more volumes proportionately than did the remaining, more
minor, societies.
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Identifying Societies that do Not Satisfy Criterion 1
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No systematic technique
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here has been no systematic technique at hand that could be applied as
was the case with Criterion 1.
Instead societies that do not satisfy Criterion 1 have been
identified in the course of doing other
searches for information, for example in reading
historical monographs on societies that do satisfy Criterion 1.
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t should be noted that for the pre-1900 period those guidelines allow the
inclusion of defunct societies,
since many societies of
historical interest are now defunct.
As it happens,there are far too many
societies
that were founded prior to 1800 to apply those guidelines without
restraint. As a simple illustration, one need only consult
