Rare Books and Manuscripts

An illustrated and thematic timeline created by scholar Jeremy Norman, containing more than 5,000 illustrated entries covering a diverse range of the history of physical and digital information and media.

A companion website to Sarah Werner's book Studying Early Printed Books 1450-1800: A Practical Guide (Wiley 2019), containing images, pedagogical exercises and templates, and links to additional resources.

Lists Latin place names found in the imprints of books printed before 1801, and their vernacular equivalents.

CERL hosts various resources useful for researching rare books and manuscripts, including place and personal name thesauri as well as the Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) database.

Standard Citation Forms for Rare Materials Cataloging are references to bibliographies and catalogs (printed or electronic) used by rare book catalogers, dealers, collectors, and researchers that can be used to verify or identify a work or provide a detailed physical description. These citations are formatted in such a way as to make it easy to identify and locate a copy of a cited resource.

This directory aims to gather together freely-available online resources to aid in the cataloging of rare and special collections materials. This directory is maintained by the Web Resources for the Rare Materials Cataloger Editorial Group, appointed by the by the Bibliographic Standards Committee, a committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.

The international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide. The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. Information on each item includes authors, short titles, the language of the text, printer, place and date of printing, and format. Locations for copies have been confirmed by libraries all over the world. Many links are provided to online digital facsimiles, and also to major online catalogues of incunabula.

The USTC is the first ever search tool that allows you to search all books published in the first age of print, in England, France, Italy or any other part of the world where printing with moveable type is known. Developed over more than twenty years of research and analysis at the University of St Andrews, the USTC contains information on the location of more than 4 million copies of books printed between 1450 and 1650, along with links to more than 250,000 full digital scans.

The English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) is the most comprehensive guide available to the output of the press in the English-speaking world before 1801. The project is both a bibliography that aims to record every distinct item printed during the “hand-press era” in England and its territories, and a union catalog that lists both copies of those items held by libraries and, more recently, digital reproductions of those copies. Begun in the late 1970s, the database currently contains about 500,000 records and more than 3 million holdings.

Note: The ESTC is normally hosted by the British Library; the main website is still down from the October 2023 cyberattack, so the link above will take you to a temporary search interface.

A cumulative author list representing Library of Congress printed cards and titles reported by other American libraries of books published prior to 1956. The set runs to 754 volumes in print, now available online via HathiTrust.