Ligatus Summer School: Identifying and recording bookbinding structures for conservation and cataloguing.
Thessaloniki (Greece), Aristotle University Library and Museum of Byzantine Culture.
5-9 and 12-16 October 2009
In its 4th year and following the success of the courses in Volos and Patmos, the Ligatus Summer School is organised this year in collaboration with the Aristotle University and the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki. It is taking place mainly in the city of Thessaloniki with visits to the important monastic libraries of Mount Athos, and the monasteries of Ormylia and Meteora.
About the course:
Conservators, librarians, book historians and scholars who work with books, need to understand the structure of their bindings in order to be able to describe them for the needs of cataloguing and historical research as well as for making appropriate decisions on issues relevant to conservation treatment, housing, access, etc. Such descriptions of the bindings are important for digitisation projects as they dramatically enrich the potential of image and text metadata. This is particularly important for collections of manuscripts and early printed books.
The purpose of the course is to uncover the possibilities latent in the detailed study of bookbinding and it mainly focuses on books which have been bound between the 15th and the early 19th century. The two courses offered in this summer school focus upon two different broad categories of bookbindings: a) the Byzantine and post-Byzantine and b) the western European. The technical and decorative details, as well as the way bookbindings evolved through time and space will be discussed during the individual sessions. Part of the school will be dedicated to the construction of an XML data structure (schema) for recording bookbindings.
The courses will consist of both lectures and hands-on sessions using the collections of the Aristotle University Library. A visit to the libraries of the monasteries of Mount Athos will also be included for male participants and to the monasteries of Ormylia and Meteora for female participants.
The language of the courses is English and they are open to 12 individuals from relevant fields per week. 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 major categories of bookbindings considered 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 period under discussion. A basic understanding of database use is also desirable for those who will attend the course on the first week.
