Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Personennamen des Mittelalters – Nomina Scriptorum Medii Aevi (PMA): Namensformen für 13 000 Personen gemäss den Regeln für die Alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK). Redaktionelle (Zweite erweiterte Ausgabe)

Citation

Kelly, W.A. (2002), "Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Personennamen des Mittelalters – Nomina Scriptorum Medii Aevi (PMA): Namensformen für 13 000 Personen gemäss den Regeln für die Alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK). Redaktionelle (Zweite erweiterte Ausgabe)", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 308-308. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.6.308.1

The searching for authors from the classical up to the early modern period in the catalogues of large research libraries has been a problem for a long time because of the variety of variant forms of the names themselves and epithets by which they have been known in the manuscript and printed tradition. It is a problem which, far from being alleviated by the availability of catalogues online, is only exacerbated. If the professional staff of large research libraries are to play a significant role in the international support of scholarship, a very useful element in that would be the standardisation of the form of names under which early authors are entered in catalogues. A benefit of such standardisation would be a reduction in the opportunities afforded to some reviewers to score points off the compiler of a published catalogue. Such a situation happened in various reviews of Simoni’s (1990) magisterial Catalogue of Books from the Low Countries, 1601‐1621, in the British Library, but it must have given her enormous satisfaction to find that these reviewers contradicted one another in print.

In order to facilitate this much needed standardisation, the Bavarian State Library has issued this expended version of the form of names of medieval authors, who are defined as having died between 501 and 1500AD, which it uses in its own catalogues. The amount of work which has gone into this edition can be seen in the number of individuals listed. The first, two‐volume edition, published in 1959, contained over 3,550, supplemented in 1992 by a volume containing a further 750. The issue of this dramatically increased edition by the Bavarian State Library is a testimony to its continuing commitment to co‐operation in scholarly projects. If only certain large, allegedly research‐oriented, libraries in Great Britain could raise their collective snouts from the trough of “targets and objectives”, they might gain more respect from scholars inside and outside the profession of librarianship.

The text is laid out in five columns to the page, which sounds inordinately difficult to read, but Saur are to be congratulated on producing page after page of lists of names in a visually comfortable format. The standardised form appears in bold, with variant forms listed below. The extensiveness of some of these variants can be seen in the entry for Boccaccio, Giovanni.

This reviewer’s only criticism, and it is a very minor one, is in the English‐language introduction, where greater care could have ensured that “apostrophe” appeared with the final “e”.