Ligatus news
Open Lecture by SUSANNE KRAUSE, 2nd November 2011 - Decorated Papers: Where they came from, what they are, and how to look after them
We are pleased to invite you for the lecture of Susanne Krause, a renown paper decorator and author of Buntpapier — ein Bestimmungsbuch / Decorated Paper — A Guide Book / Sierpapier — Een Gids, Hamburg, 2010. The book serves as a tool for the designation and detailed description of European decorated papers.
There will be a reception following the lecture.
Entry is free, but the space is limited, so please book a seat in advance by writing to e.warner@arts.ac.uk
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4 extra places for the Venice summer school
Due to last minute cancellations 4 extra places are available for the second week's course in Venice. Although the applications can no longer be accepted online, you can still email Ewelina Warner (e.warner@camberwell.arts.ac.uk) expressing your interest. The deadline for these applications is the 15th of August.
Please visit: http://www.ligatus.org.uk/summerschool/
Website migration complete
The Ligatus website has now been moved to a new server and we hope that you will notice the dramatic increase of speed. Various details still need sorting but most of the content and functionality should be there. Apologies for yesterday's minor disruption.
Restricted website access
Login to Ligatus's website will be impossible over the weekend and Monday due to planned maintenance. We expect the website to return back to normal operation on Tuesday. In the meantime no content updates will be possible.
Ligatus has moved
Ligatus has moved office. The new address is:
Ligatus Research Centre
CCW Graduate School
University of the Arts London
16 John Islip Street
London
SW1P 4JU
U.K.
The Place of Bindings
The Place of bindings
in book history and bibliography: resources and research
This was a two day conference on bookbindings and the study of the history of the book to take place in Oxford on 9-10 June 2011, organised by Ligatus, the Centre for the Study of the Book and CERL and supported by Saint Catherine Foundation. The first day consisted of a series of short papers describing some of the printed and on-line resources for binding studies currently available and the day will end with an evening lecture by Anthony Hobson. The second day was a day-long series of discussions raised by the study of bindings, involving an invited audience.
The aim of the conference is to try to bridge the gap that exists between the study of bindings and the rest of the bibliographical world, with the result that bindings do not play the interpretative role that they might in the study of the history of the book. They are all too often seen as lying somewhat outside traditional areas of bibliographical research and there are two main reasons for this - firstly, that many people do not fully realise what can be learnt from bindings, both decorated and undecorated, about where, when and by what sort of person a book might have been read, and secondly, even if they are interested, very few people know how to identify and describe what they see in a reliable and consistent manner. While a great deal of work has been done for many years on the description of the tools used to decorate bindings, the recorded tools still form a small minority of those used and structures and materials remain largely unrecorded. Where they have been recorded (e.g. covering materials) this has often been done inconsistently and all too often inaccurately. The conference is designed to address the questions raised by bringing bindings closer to the centre of the study of the book – a proposition made more urgent these days as the study of the history of the book gains ground in academic circles.
The conference goes under the title “The Place of Bindings”, and the discussion is intended to bring together a group of 40-50 people from across Europe and from the U.S.A., all of whom are in some way closely involved in handling early books, whether as academics, binding historians, binders, librarians, rare book cataloguers, library managers or booksellers, to discuss the place of bindings in the wider bibliographical world and what would be needed to integrate them more closely in what might be called mainstream bibliographical studies. There are several things that need to happen to make this possible – firstly a commonly-agreed language and format with which to describe them, a means by which bindings can be identifed and located in collections (which means essentially the inclusion of, or links to, useful descriptions of them in rare-book catalogues) and how the electronic world may make the integration of different catalogues and databases easier to use and more useful.
The discussion amongst the invited delegates was recorded with the aim of producing a short publication summarising the discussions, and listing the conclusions and recommendations.
Both days of the conference were fully booked but it was possible to follow the conference live on twitter (#ligatuspob) 
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The University of Udine Ligatus Summer School 2011 announced
The History of European Bookbinding 1450-1830 and Identifying and recording bookbinding structures for conservation and cataloguing.
Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia, Venice (Italy)
19-23 and 26-30 September 2011
The 2011 Summer School will be run by the Dipartimento di Storia e Tutela dei Beni Culturali of the University of Udine, and will be held this year in collaboration with the Istituto Ellenico di Studi Bizantini e Postbizantini di Venezia. The individual courses will be given by the Ligatus Research Centre as described below. We are delighted to work with the University of Udine in giving these course in the historic city of Venice and particularly in the Istituto Ellenico, which has a distinguished reputation in the field of book studies. This year students will have the opportunity to see bindings in the Museo Correr, the Biblioteca Marciana and the biblioteca di San Francesco della Vigna. With access to these historic collections and the unique environment that the city offers, this year’s summer school will be a unique experience.
For more details and to apply online visit: www.ligatus.org.uk/summerschool
New post: Research Technician
Title: Research Technician, part time
Reference: 300081
Occupation: Technical
College: University of the Arts London
Postion Type: Temporary - Part time
Sector: Ligatus Research Unit
Salary: £26,017 pro rata
Closing Date: 11/03/2011
Job Overview
one year fixed term contract, 20 hours per week
University of the Arts London is a vibrant world centre for innovation, drawing together six Colleges with international reputations in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts and a long involvement in the book arts and book conservation.
Ligatus is one of the University’s research centres that could transform the role of object documentation in digital humanities. It is set to combine traditional bookbinding and archiving knowledge with the latest web technologies in a whole new way, making this role unique in its field.
At the moment, there is no system in place to manage the considerable volume of data Ligatus is accumulating. As part of the team, you will help to design a new system to organise, publish and optimise Ligatus digital collections. You will then manage and maintain the system, administering the digitised data.
Highly IT literate, you can use XML technologies and administer XML data, XML native databases, relational databases and simple type data. You can also deal with image quality issues and design, code, test and correct batch data processing scripts and macro-commands for both text and images.
Articulate, organised and team-focused, you have worked on digital humanities projects before and handled text encoding. Perhaps most importantly, you have an interest in the history of material culture, plus the ideas and enthusiasm needed to get a new research centre off the ground.
This is one of the two positions currently offered by Ligatus, with the second one being a part time Research Assistant.
In return, University of the Arts London offers generous leave, a final salary pension and a commitment to your continuing personal development and training in an environment that encourages excellence, creativity and diversity.
Please download an application pack and then upload your completed application form by clicking here. If you have any queries about this role that are not covered in the documentation available below please contact Ewelina Warner, Ligatus Administrator. Telephone: 020 7514 6432. Email: e.warner@camberwell.arts.ac.uk
University of the Arts London aims to be an equal opportunities employer embracing diversity in all areas of activity.
New post: Research Assistant
Title: 0.5 Research Assistant - Ligatus
Reference: 300079
Occupation: Academic and Research
College: University of the Arts London
Position Type: Temporary - Part time
Sector: Ligatus Research Unit
Salary: £26,017 pro rata
Closing Date: 11/03/2011
Job Overview
one year fixed term contract
University of the Arts London is a vibrant world centre for innovation, drawing together six Colleges with international reputations in art, design, fashion, communication and performing arts and a long involvement in the book arts and book conservation.
This is a rare opportunity to work alongside pioneers in the study of bookbinding and book conservation, gaining experience and knowledge that is not otherwise widely available. You will join a dynamic team of researchers and play a key role in developing a new field of study which combines historic bookbinding with digital tools.
Your chief responsibility will be to work in collaboration with Ligatus team members and a range of experts from Europe and the USA to help compile a glossary of bookbinding terms, and your responsibilities will include digitising, organising and filing extensive collections of slides of historic bookbindings.
Your organisational and communication skills will be needed to help organise workshops and conferences on historic bookbinding. As the first point of contact for online academic discussions on historic bookbinding, you will also manage content on the Ligatus website. Actively joining in with discussions, keeping records and disseminating conclusions will be central to your success.
To excel, you will need research experience in the field of bookbinding, book conservation or book history. We are also looking for an excellent understanding of historical bookbinding structures combined with a good knowledge of current work in the field. You will need to be up-to-date with current terminologies.
As well as your post-graduate or research degree, you will have enthusiasm, self-motivation and openness to new ways of working. An understanding of digital humanities tools is essential.
This is one of the two positions currently offered by Ligatus, with the second one being a part time Research Technician.
In return, University of the Arts London offers generous leave, a final salary pension and a commitment to your continuing personal development and training in an environment that encourages excellence, creativity and diversity.
Please download an application pack and then upload your completed application here. If you have any queries about this role that are not covered in the documentation available below please contact Ewelina Warner, Ligatus Administrator. Telephone: 020 7514 6432, email: e.warner@camberwell.arts.ac.uk
University of the Arts London aims to be an equal opportunities employer embracing diversity in all areas of activity.
Professorial Platform Lecture - Professor Nicholas Pickwoad “Finding Words- The Ligatus Glossary Project”
On Thursday 3rd February 2011 at 6:00 p.m. in the Rootstein Hopkins East Space, London College of Fashion, John Princes Street,
Professor Nicholas Pickwoad will give a lecture “Finding Words- The Ligatus Glossary Project” as a part of the UAL Professorial Platform.
All crafts, trades and disciplines sooner or later develop their own specialist vocabularies to allow their practitioners to communicate quickly, easily and clearly when going about their everyday activities. In the more literate areas of life – medicine and law for instance – these vocabularies have survived and remain, if not in use, at least in older records, but the more artisan trades have often lost their words as techniques have changed and new ways of doing things have evolved. This is certainly the case with bookbinding, where our current, inherited vocabulary has shown itself quite unable to cope with the description of the detailed techniques and structures of books sometimes no more than two hundred years old. Even where terms have survived, the same terms have sometimes been used to mean different things, or different things have been included under the same term. As the study of the history of bookbinding develops, and its value as an essential but hitherto largely disregarded part of the history of the book becomes ever clearer, so the need for a consistent glossary of terms becomes ever more apparent. The Ligatus Glossary project is trying to supply this need, working with the old terms and inventing new ones in equal measure, and delivering the result on-line in a new, hierarchical schema designed around the structure of the book itself, in an attempt to pin down the extraordinary diversity of technique used over two millennia to make the tens of millions of books that fill our libraries
