Ligatus Summer School

Ligatus Summer School 2010
Herzog August Bibliothek
Wolfenbuttel, Germany
2-6, 2010 and 9-13 August 2010.

The 5th Ligatus Summer School, following the success of the courses
in Volos, Patmos and Thessaloniki, is to be held this year in
collaboration with the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbuttel,
near Braunschweig, in northern Germany. This is an exciting new
venture for us, and the opportunity to use books from this
magnificent collection in our courses, will make this year's summer
school a memorable experience.

About the course: The contribution that bindings can make to our
understanding of the history and culture of the book is often
neglected, but they can offer insights into the study of readership,
the booktrade, and the provenance of books which are often not
available elsewhere. In order to realise this potential, it is
important to understand not only the history of the craft but also
to learn how to record what is seen in a consistent and organised
way. Librarians, cataloguers, conservators, book historians and all
scholars who work with early books, need therefore to understand the
structure and materials of the bindings they encounter in order to
be able to record and describe them. Such descriptions of bindings
are not only valuable for the management of library collections,
pursuing academic research and making informed decisions about
conservation, but are also important for digitisation projects as
they can radically enrich the potential of image and text metadata.
It is our belief that bindings should be seen as an integral part of
the book, without which, our understanding of the history and use of
books is often greatly circumscribed.

The purpose of the summer school is to uncover the possibilities
latent in the detailed study of bookbinding and it mainly focuses on
books which have been bound between the fifteenth and the early
nineteenth century. While both courses concentrate in particular on
the structure and materials of bookbindings, each of the two courses
offered in this summer school looks at bindings from different
geographical areas and with a different approach. The first course
looks at the history of bookbinding as it was carried out in Europe
in the period of the hand press (1450-1830), with the opportunity to
look at examples from the collection during the afternoons, while
the second course looks at the development of bookbinding in the
eastern Mediterranean and gives hands-on training in how to observe
and record bindings, again working with examples from the
collection. Part of this course will include the construction of an
XML data structure (schema) for recording bookbindings.

The courses are taught in English and each is open to 12
participants. Although the courses can be attended individually,
participants are encouraged to attend both courses in order to get a
more complete understanding of the issues discussed, through the
comparison of the wide range of bookbindings considered in each
week. Since these are not beginner-level courses, the participants
are expected to be familiar with bookbinding terminology and have a
basic knowledge of the history of book production in the periods
under discussion. A basic understanding of the use of databases is
also desirable for those who will attend the course in the second
week.

Description of courses:

Week 1
European Bookbinding 1450-1830
Tutor: Professor N. Pickwoad

    This course will follow European bookbinding from the end of the
    Middle Ages to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, using
    the bindings themselves to illustrate the aims and intentions of
    the binding trade. A large part of the course will be devoted to
    the identification of both broad and detailed distinctions
    within the larger groups of plain commercial bindings and the
    possibilities of identifying the work of different countries,
    cities, even workshops without reference to finishing tools. The
    identification and significance of the different materials used
    in bookbinding will be examined, as well as the classification
    of bookbindings by structural type, and how these types
    developed through the three centuries covered by the course. The
    development of binding decoration will be touched on, but will
    not form a major part of the discussion.

    The course consists of ten 90-minute sessions with slide-show
    presentations (over 800 images will be shown). Actual examples
    of bindings will be shown in the first four afternoon sessions
    while the final afternoon will look at bookbinding terminology
    and offer the opportunity for the discussion of questions and
    issues raised during the week.

Week 2
Identifying and recording Byzantine bookbinding structures for
    conservation and cataloguing.
Tutors: Dr. G. Boudalis and Dr. A. Velios

    This five-day course will be divided in two interconnected
    sessions. The first session, run by Dr. Georgios Boudalis, will
    focus upon the major structural and decorative features of the
    Byzantine and post-Byzantine bookbindings and their evolution in
    time and space. The relation of these bindings with the early
    bindings of the Coptic and other Eastern Mediterranean cultures
    will be discussed, during lectures, slide-shows and hands-on
    sessions. This session will centre the influences and
    comparisons of these different bookbindings. It will consist of
    eight 90-minute computer presentations supplemented by hands-on
    sessions. The second session will be run by Dr. Athanasios
    Velios and will deal with the data management and storage of
    bookbinding descriptions. Alongside a brief reference to the
    relational databases this session will mainly involve
    discussions on a) the semantic web and XML, b) schemas and
    terminologies for bookbinding descriptions, c) commercial and
    open source software options for XML data and d) methodologies
    and workflows for collection surveys. A large part of this
    session will be devoted to the actual development and use of an
    XML schema for recording binding structures. This session will
    consist of two 90-minutes presentations and eight 90-minutes
    hands-on workshops. Basic knowledge of database use is desirable
    for this course.

The courses are supported by Ligatus and the University of the Arts,
London, with generous help from the Herzog August Bibliothek. We
have therefore been able to reduce the cost of the course for this
year to UKP320 per week, excluding travel, meals and accommodation.
A number of accommodation options will be provided to the
participants. A detailed schedule of the courses can be sent upon
request. Applications, including a short CV can be submitted online

    <URL:http://www.ligatus.org.uk/summerschool/>

For information about registration please email Ewelina Warner
<e.warner<-at->camberwell<.>arts<.>ac<.>uk> and mark the message subject with:
'Ligatus Summer School'. A reading list will be sent to those who
will attend the courses in advance. Deadline for applications is the
11th of June. The participants will be contacted by the end of June.

About the library: Wolfenbuttel is a small town in Lower Saxony,
Germany, located on the Oker river about 13 kilometres south of
Brunswick (Braunschweig), at the edge of the Hartz Mountains. It
became the residence of the dukes of Brunswick in 1432 but the first
known library in Wolfenbuttel was that of the Duke Julius
(1528-1529), the first protestant ruler of the duchy of
Brunswick-Luneburg. This library was transferred in 1618, on the
orders of his grandson, Friedrich Ulrich (1591-1634), to the
university of Helmstedt, founded in 1576. The Herzog August
Bibliothek in its present form started its life as the private
library of the Duke August (1579-1666), and by the time of his
death, the library was one of the greatest collections in Europe,
containing 135,000 painstakingly catalogued printed books and 3000
manuscripts.

The library continued to grow under his immediate descendants in
later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, with both Gottfried
Wilhelm Liebnitz and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing serving as librarians,
and was then housed in a splendid circular building, finished in
1713, built by the Duke Anton Ulrich, which was the first
free-standing secular library building in Europe. In 1810 the
library of the University of Helmstedt was returned to Wolfenbuttel,
and other notable collections, both from later generations of the
ducal family and other aristocratic families, were added to the
Biblioteca Augusta, as the Duke August's own collection is known.

The current library building was opened in 1887, and new reading
rooms, exhibition spaces and other facilities have been added in
nearby buildings in more recent times. In 1983, the library was
established as an independent research centre by the State of Lower
Saxony, with an active programme which allows approximately 150
scholars to work in the library each year and the addition of a
large reference collection to support the study of the early books.
In addition, since that time there has been an active programme of
acquisitions of both printed books and manuscripts of all ages,
building on the strengths of the collection and embarking in new
directions. The library is now designated as the national repository
for printed books of the seventeenth century. It is remarkable in
having maintained its collection virtually intact since the
seventeenth century.

A good introduction to the library and its collections can be found
in A Treasure House of Books: the library of the Duke August of
Brunwick-Wolfenbuttel, Wolfenbuttel, 1998.

Ligatus is a research unit of the University of the Arts London with
particular interest in the history bookbinding, book conservation,
archiving and the application of digital technology to these fields.
Ligatus's main research projects currently include the conservation
of the books in the library of St Catherine's Monastery on Mount
Sinai and the development of a multi-lingual glossary of bookbinding
terms.


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