Scholarly Societies 
Project

Border

Purpose of the Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
The Basic Goal of the Repertorium
Introductory remarks Initial T, Ornate 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.
Problems Encountered in Historical Work on Scholarly Societies
Basic information on the Society Initial S, Ornate 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.
Existing sources for this kind of information 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.
Historical information about journals of the Society 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.
Existing sources for this kind of information 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.
The Creation of History Pages to Store This Information
History pages provide historical information that is mainly restricted to the contribution to the scholarly record Initial I, Ornate 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.
First component of the history pages 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.
Second component of the history pages 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.
Access to the history page for a society 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.
Creation of an Index to the Journal-Title Abbreviations
Providing access to the information on journal titles Initial I, Ornate 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.
Access using journal-title abbreviation 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
Provision of a database 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.
Documentation: Materials and Tools Used
Introductory remarks Initial T, Ornate 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.
The purposes of this section 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.

Border

Published 2004, June 7
Modified 2006, April 15
Jim Parrott, Editor
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
Sending Email to the Project

Home