Catalogue of 15th century printed books now available to search

Further to work carried out at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services, the TEXT-inc database and an associated TEXT-inc Person Index are now available to search.

The TEXT-inc database is an electronic catalogue of 15th century printed books, otherwise known as incunabula, conceived by the 15C BOOKTRADE Project. The database builds on an electronic version of A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century (project Bod-Inc) and now provides a catalogue of incunabula from collections including the British Library, Venice Libraries, and Oxford Colleges. The TEXT-inc database includes corresponding identifiers in other databases such as ISTC and MEI. The TEXT-inc Person Index describes people related to the incunabula described in the TEXT-inc database.

The public search interface has been implemented using Blacklight, an open-source discovery platform framework. Blacklight is a Ruby on Rails Engine plugin and provides a faceted search interface to a Solr index. The Solr index is updated automatically further to a scheduled query of the Text-Inc relational database that the 15C BOOKTRADE project members use to record details of incunabula.

Blacklight includes useful extensions such as an advanced search form and a date range widget that can be used in the faceted search to limit results by year:

Text Inc date tool

A showcase of how Blacklight has been implemented in other libraries is available on the Blacklight web site.

Further information:

Text-inc database http://textinc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Text-inc Person Index http://textinc-person.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

– Tanya Gray Jones

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