Editzorial 2023/1
Dear friends,
We present to you the summer issue of the Library: a Library Review. The section with reviewed papers comprises four papers.
In the first one, the author from the Music Department of the National Library of the Czech Republic will guide us through the world of four generations of the Strachota family of cantors from Panenský Týnec and their music collections, which have found their home in the National Library‘s music department. It is a collection of more than five hundred music transcripts dated from the last third of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century. The core consists of church music, as well as organ, chamber, and symphonic music. The collection includes works by Austrian, German, and Czech composers, such as František Xaver Brixi, Franz Joseph Öhlschlägel, Jakub Jan Ryba, and others. The study presents the current state of research into the Strachota family and its activities in music.
In the second paper, the author from the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books presents an interesting provenance history of the Masaryk’s Bible, which is now kept by the National Library of the Czech Republic. It describes the journey that this early printed book had to "walk" before it reached Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and then through the Masaryk Museum of Donations to today's repository in the National Library. The long and difficult travels of this book through the hands of people and organisations was investigated on the basis of provenance data as written in the actual copy of the Bible.
The authors from the Moravian Library in Brno pursued the goal to describe metadata processing by the Knihovny.cz portal in their paper. They introduce the process of deduplication, i.e., creation of merged records linking local records from individual metadata sources. We will learn about the pitfalls of deduplication, how to avoid them, and how to evaluate such operations. A table gives an overview of individual deduplication steps and their description.
The last reviewed paper is a case study from the desk of colleagues from the University of Hradec Králové presenting the possibilities of digitizing seals using photogrammetry. Besides the difficulties that can be encountered during digitization, the study describes some solution methods.
We are sharing two interesting papers with you in the non-reviewed section.
The first one concerns the research of bookbinding using digitized materials available to researchers in subject databases. The comparative analysis compares their content and searching options in selected online databases providing access to historical bookbindings: in the German databases Einbanddatenbank (EBDB), Digitale Einbandsammlung (USB Köln), and Einbandsammlung (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek), in the Swedish database ProBok, as well as in the British Database of Bookbindings (British Library) and the Czech NUSK database of blind-embossed embellishments of bookbindings. In conclusion, it offers a comparison of their relevance for the study of bohemical materials.
The second paper deals with the beginnings of the Librarianship Institute of the National Library of the Czech Republic as a methodological centre for Czech librarianship. Its predecessors are remembered: the Scientific and Methodological Cabinet for Scientific Libraries, the Central Scientific and Methodological Cabinet of Library Work, the Central Scientific and Methodological Cabinet of Librarianship, the Sector of Research and Methodology of Librarianship, the Centre for Research and Development of Librarianship, the Department of Librarianship. The Librarianship Institute has been working for Czech (formerly also Slovak) libraries for 70 years. It fulfils its function as a methodological, informational, educational and scientific research centre. The article briefly describes the dates and circumstances or reasons for its establishment and development, the main focus and also some important people involved in the inception of this workplace.
This time we bring you two reviews. P. Rankov reviews a book published by the Moravian-Silesian Research Library in Ostrava titled Compendium of Librarianship I. The second one is a review of a publication entitled Czech Children and Youth as Readers in the Time of Pandemic 2021 published by the Host publishing house in collaboration with the National Library of the Czech Republic.
This issue is traditionally concluded by some recommended titles from the Library of Library Literature and New Library Science Publications.
We wish you all a peaceful summer time, a lot of new experiences, and a break from everyday worries, too.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Renáta Krejčí Salátová
