Celebrating 30 years of USTC
Research Spotlight opens the book on one of the University’s longest running research projects, the Universal Short Title Catalogue, which celebrates its 30th birthday this year.
What’s your name and what do you research?
My name is Arthur der Weduwen, and I am a Lecturer in the School of History. I study the history of early modern Europe, and work principally on the history of printing, news, communication and politics.
I have published books, among others, on the first Dutch newspapers; the book trade of the Dutch Golden Age; and a history of libraries and book collecting from ancient Alexandria to the present day.
I also lead a major research project (COMLAWEU, funded by UKRI) on the communication of law in early modern Europe, and I am Co-Director and Project Manager of the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC), one of the longest-running digital humanities projects in the UK.
Tell us about the USTC, and why is it so important?
The USTC is a collective catalogue of all the books and printed matter (from major tomes to short pamphlets, newspapers and forms) published in Europe and its overseas colonies between the invention of printing around 1450 and 1700.
It is entirely free to use. It is the most comprehensive catalogue of early print in the world, and currently lists more than 1.65 million printed editions, located in 7 million copies in more than 10,000 libraries, archives and museums worldwide. It also provides more than 500,000 digital links that allow users to view relevant books themselves.
We also provide analytical features that enable users to select works of interest filtered by, for instance, author, place, country, language and genre of printing.
Ever wanted to know how many early works on rhetoric, or cookery books, appeared in German, or compare these to those printed in French, and in a specific time period? All of that, and much more, is available through a few simple clicks.
How long has this research taken so far?
The USTC is a true St Andrews project, and has always been hosted and developed here, unlike most other bibliographical projects, which tend to be associated with major libraries or research consortia. It was initiated by Professor Andrew Pettegree CBE FBA (who remains Director of the project) thirty years ago, with a much more modest survey of 16th-century books published in France. This involved visits to over 300 libraries throughout Europe and North America.
Since then the project gradually expanded to encompass all of 16th-century Europe, and then the 17th century too. As a result we make much more use of digital catalogues, though visits to collections of interest continue, as many libraries and archives contain rather neglected uncatalogued material that tends to be a goldmine for the discovery of otherwise unknown printed matter.
Given the scope of the work at hand, the USTC has always been a team project (a humanities lab, if you will): it has been developed by multiple project managers, some 20 postdoctoral fellows, more than thirty PhD students and around 50 student interns from St Andrews and further afield.
Why is it important?
The USTC matters firstly because it makes the great mass of early print, from high literature to ballads, Bibles to pamphlets, easily accessible today. It allows scholars and students to build up rapidly a corpus for further investigation; and it makes available a great range of analytical tools to study early modern European culture, religion and politics.
The USTC has also played a major role in advancing and transforming the priorities of the community of book historians. The project has embraced the incorporation of ‘lost books’, that is, books known to have existed in early modern Europe but which are now no longer to be found. This is controversial to some, as bibliographers are by nature people who want to hold books in their hands.
Happily, lost books regularly turn up in previously un-surveyed collections. Their inclusion matters for other reasons too. Most great research libraries have similar collections of imposing, serious scholarly tomes: many of the books listed on the USTC might be found in hundreds of copies worldwide, centuries after their publication. Yet the great majority of early printed matter was not meant to enter libraries, but to be read to pieces, to be posted up on walls, to be recycled. Most of our documented editions survive in only a handful of copies.
By prioritising the discovery of these works we can re-write the history of early literature and culture in a manner that does greater justice to the reality of publishing and reading. Simply put: the books that survive best are those that were least read.
Have you found many surprises?
We find them on a weekly basis as our team of around 15 members makes progress! We have a fortnightly blog (https://ustc.ac.uk/news) where we keep users updated with new discoveries and updates (the first rare book found in a pub; a cache of unique forms found in an Admiralty archive; writing the history of ‘funeral tickets’; and much more).
We have uncovered the existence of previously unknown places of printing, and regularly uncover books that survive only in a library far from their initial place of publication: books travelled far and wide in early modern Europe, and the USTC makes a distinctive contribution by looking for books printed in, say, the Netherlands, that are not to be found in Dutch libraries.
How much is left to do!?
A great deal. We are currently working manually through a corpus of 2.3 million copies of early printed books from hundreds of libraries worldwide. From September onwards we will proceed with a further 3 million copies. Hopefully by 2029 the USTC will list some 10 million copies and in the process will have enriched our understanding of the early world of print further.
At the same time we are making much more of visits to archives, partially in collaboration with my COMLAWEU project (Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500 – 1750), which is uncovering tens of thousands of early printed laws. I am sure that we’ll never run out of interesting collections to investigate!
If you would like to feature in research spotlight, have had a paper accepted or want to talk more broadly about how to engage the wider media with your research, please contact Senior Communications Manager Ruth Sanderson [email protected]
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