1 4000 Years of Miniature Books The Lilly Library: The rare books, manuscripts, and special collections library, Indiana University Bloomington http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/miniatures/index.shtml The Lilly Library of rare books, manuscripts, and special collections at Indiana University Bloomington, in collaboration with Ruth E. Adomeit, held a dazzling exhibition in 2001 showcasing miniature books titled 4000 Years of Miniature Books. The Adomeit collection alone represents a near complete history of human recording keeping in miniature form, from a cuneiform tablet (circa 2000 B.C.E.) to contemporary small press and artist books. The online exhibition features only a portion of over 900 items originally displayed in the library s main gallery and recreates the narrative that accompanied the physical exhibition, curated by Stephen Cape - cataloger of rare books and special collections. The subject matter of miniature books is covered in detail beginning with early manuscript collections continuing on to the 19 th century supreme age of the miniature book, and 20 th century Eastern & Western Europe and United States traditions. Special subject areas like Thumb-Bibles, miniature libraries, almanacs & calendars, and Near & Far East collections are also addressed. Surprisingly beside other intrinsic interests of printers, publishers, and bookmakers in producing books in miniature, the exhibition reveals that children s literature also played a significant role in the genre as well. A diverse audience would happily appreciate viewing such a collection. The painstaking attempts to create some of these books would marvel even the most expert professionals involved with the book arts. Librarians, historians, authors, artists, and children are all target
2 audience constituents, for the exhibition reveals areas of interest for each potential audience member. Overall the exposition was a cause for inspiration and creativity and a fine example of the knowledge and skill that has gone into bookmaking over its long course of history. While the academic institution holding the event sought to support and strengthen teaching, learning, and research by providing the collections, services, and environment that leads to intellectual discovery, Indiana University was quite successful. Working collaboratively, the institution brought a world class collection to the attention of the masses. The exhibition was well researched and provided scholarly documentation and significant metadata that would be helpful to scholars and researchers. Overall the intellectual content was organized in a coherent linear fashion, acknowledging special works of interest along the way. The narrative gave a thorough but general understanding of miniature bookmaking - their purposes, processes, and progression over the centuries. While the technical functionally of the virtual exhibition was rather common, it did support the purpose for a general user base. In other words users of all skill levels in digital environments would be able to navigate the site relatively easily. Users could jump to and from varying topics while always being able to navigate back to the home site. Each webpage followed the same two column page layout; to the left small thumbnail images were displayed that were accessible for larger view when clicked, and to the right text was presented. Many of the images were terrific and really captured the exquisite workmanship that went into the miniature book creations. Although only two were found to have some type of scale represented, all images, in my opinion should have had some detail of scale signified to assist the viewer s orientation better. The color scheme used in the overall site was rather dull; in my opinion small
3 changes in the general design of the site would enhance its presence in the digital world, possibly attracting more viewers and overall just bring the site up to date. Thomas Jefferson s Library Library of Congress http://myloc.gov/exhibitions/jeffersonslibrary/pages/default.aspx The Library of Congress, the largest library known in the world, gives credit to Thomas Jefferson being responsible for constructing the foundation of our nation s grandiose library heritage. He is known to have established the largest private book collection in North America and upon the British destroying the capitol and with it the library, in 1814, Jefferson sold his collection to Congress in 1815, consisting of approximately 6,500 titles.
4 In celebration of the library s bicentennial in 2000 and curated by Mark Dimination of the rare books and special collection division, the Library of Congress launched the project of recreating Jefferson s original personal library. While nearly half of the original volumes were lost to fire in 1851, volumes missing have been acquired through copyright deposits, other collections, gifts, and purchase since 2000. The intended audiences are those who hold a general interest in American history as well as library and/or book history. While the exhibition may have an appeal to young adults, scholars, archivists, book historians or collectors, librarians, and historians will have special interests meet by viewing this exhibition. For the Library of Congress (LC) the Jefferson collection is an embodiment of the principles in which the LC was built; that knowledge and free access to it, by both leaders and those governed is essential to democracy. Therefore because the Jefferson collection is so central to the overall development of the LC, the institutional mission is successfully supported by the contributions Jefferson made to not only the library, but the nation as well. Rather than the exhibition focusing on a particular theme or subject matter addressed in the collection and thus commenting on it, the exhibition offers a viewer a glimpse into the cannon of primary sources the Jefferson library consisted of, and lets the viewer discover their own interests. In terms of intellectual content, the exhibition offers a number of works regarding politics, law, history, arts, geography, education, medicine, and military strategy. Particular volumes that have been selected for exhibition are accompanied by scholarly annotations of the work. The abstract s content involves general information that a broad audience would find helpful but also more scholarly information that would assist scholars and researcher, like date ranges, publisher information and complete bibliographical titles.
5 The functionality of the website was rather impressive. Although content resources were somewhat repetitive and navigation was a little copious, overall the graphics and presentation of materials were first-rate. The exhibition was designed to function like a website, with a toolbar of topics used as the navigation map. From the home page a user was presented with a brief overview of historical and biographical information about the collection along with a portrait of Jefferson. As a viewer scrolled down the page, three series were displayed that served as portals to the digitized content. Drawing from Jefferson s original ideas in how he classified his original library - memory, reason, and imagination, were the three themes in which virtual items were organized into. The themes today resemble Library of Congress subject headings: history, philosophy, and fine arts. When a user entered a particular theme they are presented with an inventory of small image thumbnails representing a selection of works chosen for inclusion in the online exhibit. When a viewer selects a specific title the viewer is transported into another portal where the annotation of the work can be read as well as other graphic images of the work can be viewed. Another area of exploration a user could enter were the interactives section, where a featured book that supported the major groundwork of a theme, was partially digitized and displayed like an e-book, about 10-15 pages of content. The quality of images were superb and a user could interact with the book, by turning its pages or taking a closer look using a unique zoom tool that did not require keyboard commands or mouse controls.
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7 Book of the Word: Torah, Bible, & the Koran Bibliothèque Nationale de France http://expositions.bnf.fr/parole/expo_us/index.htm In the final virtual exhibit reviewed, Book of the Word: Torah, Bible, & the Koran was selected from the Bibliothéque Nationale de France (BNF) site, in the gallery of Representations of History. Within book history and its heritage, the relationships between Judaism, Christianity, and Islamic religious texts are marked by an equal respect for the inspired word. The exhibition seeks to provide an overview of not only the evolution of monotheism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also shows the similarities on a number of common figures, episodes, and illustrations within all three sacred texts. These manuscripts are also showcased to inform the viewer of materials and techniques utilized and the progression of text, beginning with the written word to the evolution in structure (scroll to codex), and finally to the emergence of the printing press.
8 The intended audience that was sought after was general at best. Viewers that would be potentially interested in the exhibit would be historians, theologians, religious persons that hold an interest in religious studies, and possibly even book historians. While the mission of the BNF is to constitute collections especially works that are published in France, this exhibition does meet this broad goal, for the exhibition composes a collection of differing works and comments on the their similarities. Viewers would be satisfied with the illustrations that were presented as well as photographs of the original manuscripts under discussion. Although the exhibition did a great job in presenting and displaying the exhibit, the in-depth and scholarly data that was present in past exhibitions viewed - was not there. On the contrary I found this to be refreshing in viewing the exhibition. The subject matter associated with the three major religions of the world is quite involved, and explaining a complete background story in an exhibit would be impossible, and tiring for a viewer to read so much text. I found that the curators of the show did a good job in presenting brief and short experts on the most imperative pieces of information the viewer needed to comprehend what was being discussed, and allowed the viewer to make decisions and/or identify areas that they would like to research more in-depth. Overall the site s exhibition space was similar to a power-point slide presentation. Each slide could be navigated to and from, in a linear fashion and broken up into the sections: openbooks, monotheism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and representations. Each section ranged between 13-16 slides. Most slides were primarily dominated with illustrations, and each one was clickable where a user was transported to a larger screenshot of the image that was accompanied by the proper documentation of the images, including date, material(s), holding institution, and a brief paragraph describing the work s history and or characteristics. Overall the functionality was
9 relatively easy which also supported the institutions mission and their purpose in serving the public. For those who understand French, I suggest taking this route as opposed to the English version, for there is more information available to a user. Although this critique was applied to the English version, the French site was also explored and had more elaborate items of information including a section of resources that could be used for pedagogy purposes, interviews with historians and writers commenting on aspects of the field, a chronology of events in religious manuscripts, a glossary, and a bibliography of resources for reference.