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Purpose of the Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
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The Basic Goal of the Repertorium
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Introductory remarks
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he
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum
Litterariarum
(Inventory of the Oldest Scholarly Societies) of the
Scholarly Societies Project represents
initial work in gathering
society information that
is likely to be of special interest to
historians.
It is concerned especially with societies that contributed to the
scholarly record through their publications, or were in some other way
important in the history of scholarship.
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Problems Encountered in Historical Work on
Scholarly Societies
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Basic information on the Society
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ometimes determining even the
founding date of a society can
be a
daunting task. Establishing when name changes
occurred is
often more difficult, since existing documentation can be hard to find.
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Existing sources for this kind of information
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There do exist good sources for this kind of information for
certain types of scholarly
societies.
One example is Maylender (1926-1930),
which
is a five-volume work covering many hundreds of Italian societies
and academies founded before about 1850.
Another example is
Bibliographie Générale des Travaux Historiques et
Archéologiques, which is a multi-volume work covering
French societies that devoted
at least some of their
resources to historical and archaeological
studies;
it generally contains basic historical information about each society covered.
But there is no reference work
that provides basic
historical information on scholarly societies from all countries for
all subject areas.
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Historical information about journals of the Society
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In addition, it can sometimes be rather difficult to establish the
correct title,
publishing years and
volume numbers for
older journals of scholarly
societies. The problem is exacerbated by frequent changes
in the
society's
name caused by political upheavals, for example, those in France from 1792
to 1870.
An additional problem for historians and librarians is that the
journal-title abbreviations
used in the older literature for
are especially challenging to decipher when society journals are concerned.
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Existing sources for this kind of information
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The most appropriate place to find historical information about journals
of a society is to consult the catalogue of a
library with
rich holdings and
good-quality cataloguing
data.
It should be noted that there is no single
library catalogue
that would suffice to cover all scholarly
societies;
nor are there even as few as a dozen that would suffice to do so.
In practice many must be
consulted.
Most of the online catalogues consulted in the preparation of the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
are listed in
Online Catalogues.
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The Creation of History Pages to Store This Information
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History pages provide historical information that is mainly
restricted to the contribution to the scholarly record
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t was decided to create pages containing this sort of historical data.
The Editor has chosen to call these pages history pages,
although they dwell only infrequently on one of the common
concerns of
historians, namely the history of the actions
of the Society
under consideration (especially political and organizational matters).
The history pages of the Repertorium, by contrast, are
concerned more with the history of the Society
in a more restricted sense:
history as it is revealed in
the scholarly record, in particular, in the sequence of
journals
that the
Society has published.
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First component of the history pages
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The pages consist of two major components.
The first component is about the society itself.
It contains data that is closest to that in conventional histories:
(1) date of founding, (2)
information on name
changes, (3) cessation
date,
if appropriate, (4) time period of
dormancy, if appropriate,
and (5) URL of website, if one
is available.
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Second component of the history pages
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The second (and usually larger) component contains information on the
contribution of the
society to the scholarly record, through their journals, or
other
collected writings of society members.
It consists of a series of records for the journals of the
society,
including the following information:
(1) journal title, (2) the
years and volume
numbers for that run of the
title, (3) notes concerning the availability
of the text in
the volumes at full-text
archives, (4) notes linking the
journal title to titles that continue it or
are continued by it, (5) links to the library catalogues
the supplied the data, and (6) abbreviations used by
contemporaneous
bibliographies for the journal title.
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Access to the history page for a society
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There are currently two ways to find the
history page for a
society (if
one exists).
One may locate the society through the
Search
Engine;
the entry that is retrieved will contain a link to the history page.
Alternatively, if one knows the founding
year, one may
consult the
chronological arrangement known as
Annales de Societatibus Litterariis Conditis =
A Chronicle of the Founding of Scholarly Societies.
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Creation of an Index to the Journal-Title Abbreviations
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Providing access to the information on journal titles
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t was recognized that a user who is interested in a certain journal
may not know which society published the
journal.
Therefore it was necessary to provide some sort of access to the rich
store of information on the society journals in addition to the access
that was already available via the name of the sponsoring society.
For the time being, this extra form of access is via pages
enumerating the journal-title abbreviations with links to
the
appropriate history pages.
The long-term goal, however, is to provide a database including all the
information in each history page.
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Access using journal-title abbreviation
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At present, if the user has an abbreviation from either the
Reuss Repertorium, or the
Royal Society of London Catalogue of Scientific
Papers, the user may search for that in a set of files designated
Sigla ad Titulos Actorum Societatum Litterariarum Adhibenda =
Abbreviations Used for the Journal Titles of Scholarly Societies
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Provision of a database
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The Editor is planning to take a leave of absence beginning in 2005 to
design an appropriate data
structure to represent the
history pages, and
then use that data structure to encode their
data into a database.
Once that has been done, it should be possible to find data
easily that now requires some effort to locate.
An
example of a search that would currently be very
labour-intensive to
perform using the data in the history pages would be to determine
all society journals that were
being
published between 1734 and
1745. It is expected that a
search of
that type would be relatively easy once a database and appropriate search
engine are in place.
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Documentation: Materials and Tools Used
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Introductory remarks
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he section entitled
Elaboratorium Apertum: Materia et Armamenta
(The Elaboratory Laid Open: Materials and Tools)
enumerates the important resources that were used for this
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum, with a
link to a description of each resource.
For online resources, a link to the resource is also given.
This section also includes the working files of this
Repertorium.
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The purposes of this section
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This section serves several purposes.
Firstly, it provides the
Editor with a
handy set of tools to
use in
creating the history pages.
It also serves as a reminder to the
Editor of those societies for which
further investigation is required;
perhaps the best example of this is the area entitled
Journal Title Abbreviations Not in the Repertorium.
Finally this collection of information may also be
of interest to the user
of the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum.
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Published 2004, June 7
Modified 2006, April 15
Jim Parrott, Editor
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
Sending Email to the Project
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