Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History

The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) is the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects.

The Bibliographical Society of Canada/La Société bibliographique du Canada is a bilingual (English/French) organization that has as its goal the scholarly study of the history, description, and transmission of texts in all media and formats, with a primary emphasis on Canada.

The Centre for Textual Studies (CTS) at De Montfort University is devoted to scholarly research in the fields of textual studies and history of the book, and to the emerging technologies that support them.

The Institut d'histoire du livre offers an interdisciplinary framework for research, not only in book history, but also in the various connected fields involved in the study of graphic communications such as the history of technology, economic history, art history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and information science.

Rare Book School (RBS) is an independent, non-profit and tax-exempt institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects.

The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing was founded to create a global network for book historians working in a broad range of scholarly disciplines. Research addresses the composition, mediation, reception, survival, and transformation of written communication in material forms from marks on stone to new media.

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium is an international organization whose mission is to develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts.

Overview of the Black Bibliography Project which will create authoritative web-based bibliographies of major African American authors and train the next generation of scholars in principles of bibliographic description.

Fragmentarium enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish images of medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them.

The HPB Database (previously called the Hand Press Book Database) is a steadily growing collection of files of catalogue records from major European and North American research libraries covering items of European printing of the hand-press period (c.1455-c.1830) integrated into one file. This makes it possible for information to be retrieved in one single search across all files.

A website designed as part of the research project producing three published volumes on the History of the Book in Canada.

Database of watermark reproductions created by Thomas Gravell from books in a number of repositories, including the Folger Shakespeare Library, Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque de Genève.

FOB is a database with information about vanished publishing concerns, literary agencies, and similar firms.

WATCH is a database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent figures in other creative fields.

A mainstay of bibliographers and book collectors, this work by John Carter is freely available as a PDF from the ILAB website.

This abbreviated glossary covers the most commonly encountered terms.

A searchable database of terminology for the history of the book.