Transitions

In less than two weeks, my "summer" will be over. Since it's really the interim between the Spring and Fall semesters, it started in May and will end in August, which doesn't correspond to summer, but we academics tend to think of them as the same thing. I spent my time doing a lot of research in Europe and the US; more details are in the prior blog. Today, because I have to start getting into teaching mode soon, I am posting August's updates.

I was very excited to reach the previous milestone, and am even more so to reach this one: the database now has over 4,000 entries. I've decided to take a little break from entering new titles to catch up with some of the blank data fields. Today, I began working on a more standard method of identifying printers, but not surprisingly that is a big task and I haven't gotten very far. I'll keep at that, and then move on to the next big task, which I've had to put off for some time now for a variety of reasons: comparing this data set against inventories from archives in Belgium and Italy. This will help me understand things like general distribution of authors, titles, subjects, and languages in the various institutions. A long-term goal I have is tying the geographical locations to actual maps, so that we can visualize the impact of specific books or authors.