A nice benefit of reference works for rare books in the internet age is that many still used today are quite old. In the early days of the internet, perhaps this would be a problem rather than an asset. But since large-scale digitization projects are beginning to enter (dare I say) their maturity, there is the great opportunity of having “facsimile” copies of great reference works accessible anywhere.

For example, as part of the topic “British Books to 1800,” on Wednesday Silver introduced Dickson and Edmond’s Annals of Scottish Printing: From the Introduction of the Art in 1507 to the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century, (1890) which though overlapping with the coverage of the STC and Wing, has useful narratives of Scottish printers and their works. This work is nicely accessible through the Internet Archive, and the copy can be searched through the “Read Online” link, or downloaded for consultation. This is a simple example.

Of course, most reference works come in multiple volumes in parts. And as others have noted (specifically about Google Books) it can be quite hard to tell exactly what part or volume you have found without paging through. The search results are not at all helpful. For example, on Tuesday, while covering Early Printed Books, we looked at Hain’s Repertorium Bibliographicum, that first great incunabula catalog.  A search for the reasonable Repertorium Bibliographicum in Google Books (full view only) gives us a title list that doesn’t note volumes. Not only that, but the first item listed, though noted as being v.1 pt.1, is actually v.2 pt.1. You can see how this could get very complicated, with even Lowndes’ multiple-volume Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (which we looked at on Wednesday). Sure, there’s this volume one, but there is also all of these (56!) that come up as different editions in full-text. Tough to sort through.

I’m sure some will be thinking that who would actually do this anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just search for what you’re looking for as a keyword? It’s true, sometimes that does work, but often, the OCR of the page images is poor for these early works, and for tracking down a citation might require browsing through the work. In a multiple volume work, even with a citation to the proper volume, it might take a little time to find what you need. Perhaps this is why, even with many of these things already being available online, there is still the market for something like rarebooks.info, which has mostly public domain material available elsewhere.